ICT news

• Tech Worker Builds Free AI-Powered Tool For Fighting US Health Insurance Denials

  31-08-2024 23:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The online news site San Francisco Standard profiles an open-source platform "that takes advantage of large language models to help users generate health insurance appeals with AI...
  "A Fight Health Insurance user can scan their insurance denial, and the system will craft several appeal letters to choose from and modify."
  With the slogan "Make your health insurance company cry too," [San Francisco tech worker Holden Karau's site] makes filing appeals faster and easier. A recent study found that
  
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• Oceanographers Mapping Underwater Mountain Find Flying Spaghetti Monster

  31-08-2024 22:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Though the ocean covers about 70% of earth, we humans have only mapped a quarter of its floor to a high resolution, reports CNN.Many of the world's highest mountains aren't visible on land — they rise up thousands of meters from the seafloor. An expedition to the Nazca Ridge, 900 miles off the coast of Chile, has mapped and explored a newly discovered seamount four times taller than the world's tallest building. What's more, the underwater mountain's peaks, crags and ridges are home to cor
  
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• Washington Post Calls Telegram 'a Haven for Free Speech - and Child Predators'

  31-08-2024 21:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Washington Post writes that Telegram's "anything-goes approach" to its 950 million users "has also made it one of the internet's largest havens for child predators, experts say...."
  "Durov's critics say his public idealism masks an opportunistic business model that allows Telegram to profit from the worst the internet has to offer, including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM... "
  [Telegram is] an app of choice for political organizing, including by dissidents under repressive regimes. But
  
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• Inside Boeing's Factory Lapses That Led To the Alaska Air Blowout

  31-08-2024 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Remember when a door-sized panel blew off a Boeing aircraft back in January? The Seattle Times reports that the "door plug" incident "was caused by two distinct manufacturing errors by different crews" in a Boeing assembly plant in Renton, Washington last fall. (And that Boeing's quality control system "failed to catch the faulty work.")
  But the details tell a larger story. The newspaper bases their conclusion on "transcripts of federal investigators' interviews of a dozen Boeing workers, synchr
  
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• Long Covid Knocked a Million Americans Off Their Career Paths

  31-08-2024 19:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The Wall Street Journal reports that long Covid "has pushed around one million Americans out of the labor force, economists estimate."More than 5% of adults in the U.S. have long Covid, and it is most prevalent among Americans in their prime working years. About 3.6 million people reported significantly modifying their activities because of the illness in a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  Long Covid is a chronic condition with symptoms lasting at least three mont
  
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• How Not To Hire a North Korean IT Spy

  31-08-2024 18:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  CSO Online reports that North Korea "is actively infiltrating Western companies using skilled IT workers who use fake identities to pose as remote workers with foreign companies, typically but not exclusively in the U.S."Slashdot reader snydeq shares their report, which urges information security officers "to carry out tighter vetting of new hires to ward off potential 'moles' — who are increasingly finding their way onto company payrolls and into their IT systems."The schemes are part of
  
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• How a Group of Teenagers Pranked 'One Million Checkboxes'

  31-08-2024 17:34 via idle.slashdot.org
  
  After game developer Nolen Royalty launched his short-lived viral site "One Million Checkboxes" in June. (Any visitor could check or uncheck a box in the grid — which would change how it displayed for every other visitor to the site, in near real-time.) "Within days there were half a million people on the site," he says in a new video, "and people checked over 650 million boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online."But he also explains how what happened next was even more amazing:
  
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• Woman Mailed Herself an Apple AirTag To Help Catch Mail Thieves

  31-08-2024 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Several items were stolen from a woman's P.O. box. So she mailed herself a package containing an Apple AirTag, according to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's office:Her mail was again stolen on Monday morning, including the package with the AirTag that she was able to track.
  It is important to note that the victim did not attempt to contact the suspects on her own... The Sheriff's Office would like to commend the victim for her proactive solution, while highlighting that she also exercised appr
  
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• Google Play Store Can Finally Update Multiple Apps At Once

  31-08-2024 12:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Google Play Store is now rolling out support for downloading up to three Android app updates simultaneously, addressing a long-standing limitation where apps could only be downloaded one at a time. 9to5Google reports: We're seeing simultaneous app update downloads working in the Google Play Store today across multiple devices, and a few of our readers are seeing the same behavior this week as well. It's unclear if this is a server-side change on Google's part or an update to the Play Store i
  
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• Scientists Detect Invisible Electric Field Around Earth For First Time

  31-08-2024 09:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Scientists have finally detected and measured the ambipolar field, a weak electric field surrounding Earth that was first theorized over 60 years ago. "Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field," says astronomer Glyn Collinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "Now that we've finally measured it, we can begin learning how it's shaped our planet as well as others over time." ScienceAlert reports: Here's how the ambipolar field was expected to work. Starting at an altitude
  
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• US Government Opens Up 31 Million Acres of Federal Lands For Solar

  31-08-2024 05:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The Biden administration has finalized a plan to expand solar on 31 million acres of federal lands in 11 western states. The proposed updated Western Solar Plan is a roadmap for Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) governance of solar energy proposals and projects on public lands. It bumps up the acreage from the 22 million acres it recommended in January, and this plan adds five additional states -- Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming
  
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• Apple Stands By Decision To Terminate Account Belonging To WWDC Student Winner

  31-08-2024 02:02 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  TechCrunch's Sarah Perez reports: Apple is standing by its decision to terminate the Apple Developer Account of Appstun, a mobile app company created by one of Apple's own Worldwide Developer Conference 2021 student winners. According to an announcement published on Appstun's website, Apple moved to terminate the developer's account after multiple rejections of its app that Apple says violates its App Store guidelines. Apple's decision to shut down the developer's account was recently highlighte
  
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• Wells Fargo Worker Dies At Desk, Nobody Notices For Four Days

  31-08-2024 01:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Denise Prudhomme, a 60-year-old Wells Fargo employee, was found dead at her desk four days after clocking in. Apparently, nobody noticed her body because of the secluded location of her cubicle and the fact that many employees were working remotely. VICE reports: Prudhomme last scanned into her office job in Tempe, Arizona, at 7 AM on Friday, and her body was reportedly discovered at 4:55 PM on Tuesday, August 20. Her coworkers did pick up that something weird was going on. They detected a weird
  
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• City of Columbus Sues Man After He Discloses Severity of Ransomware Attack

  31-08-2024 00:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Dan Goodin: A judge in Ohio has issued a temporary restraining order against a security researcher who presented evidence that a recent ransomware attack on the city of Columbus scooped up reams of sensitive personal information, contradicting claims made by city officials. The order, issued by a judge in Ohio's Franklin County, came after the city of Columbus fell victim to a ransomware attack on July 18 that siphoned 6.5 terabyt
  
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• Brazil Blocks X

  31-08-2024 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  mmell writes: Regular Slashdot users will certainly be aware of the saga unfolding between the country of Brazil and X. Reuters has already reported that what I have to relay here will come as no surprise to Elon Musk, but reporting on CNN confirms that Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes has ordered X to suspend operations in Brazil until X names a representative to appear on X's behalf in Brazilian Courts.
  Is this the end of X or some brilliant Machiavellian ploy on the part of Elon Musk? On
  
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• Malware Infiltrates Pidgin Messenger's Official Plugin Repository

  31-08-2024 00:02 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The Pidgin messaging app removed the ScreenShareOTR plugin from its third-party plugin list after it was found to be used to install keyloggers, information stealers, and malware targeting corporate networks. BleepingComputer reports: The plugin was promoted as a screen-sharing tool for secure Off-The-Record (OTR) protocol and was available for both Windows and Linux versions of Pidgin. According to ESET, the malicious plugin was configured to infect unsuspecting users with DarkGate malware, a p
  
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