ICT news

• OpenAI Finally Brings Humanlike ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode To US Plus, Team Users

  24-09-2024 23:25 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI is rolling out its advanced voice interface for ChatGPT to all Plus and Team subscribers in the U.S., the company said Tuesday. The feature, unveiled four months ago, lets users speak to the AI chatbot instead of typing. Five new voices join the lineup, expanding user options. OpenAI claims improved accent recognition and smoother conversations since initial testing. VentureBeat adds: OpenAI's foray into adding voices into ChatGPT has been controversial at the onset. In its May event anno
  
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• CrowdStrike Overhauls Testing and Rollout Procedures To Avoid System Crashes

  24-09-2024 22:41 via it.slashdot.org
  
  wiredmikey writes: CrowdStrike says it has revamped several testing, validation, and update rollout processes to prevent a repeat of the embarrassing July outage that caused widespread disruption on Windows systems around the world.
  In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, CrowdStrike vice president Adam Meyers outlined a new set of protocols that include carefully controlled rollouts of software updates, better validation of code inputs, and new testing procedures to cover a
  
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• Online Discounts Are Getting Stingier

  24-09-2024 22:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Steep online discounts aren't as sweet as they used to be. From a report: The average discount offered by online retailers in the US is down to 36% so far this year, data from Centric Market Intelligence shows. That's down two percentage points from last year, and down from an average of 42% in 2019 -- a 14% drop in real terms. Finding a bargain is getting tougher for a variety of reasons, according to retail experts who spoke with Sherwood. Sellers are having to pay more for raw materials, and
  
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• Electronic Warfare Spooks Airlines, Pilots and Air-Safety Officials

  24-09-2024 21:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  GPS spoofing attacks are increasingly disrupting commercial flights worldwide, with over 1,100 daily incidents reported in August, up from dozens in February. The false signals, primarily originating from Russia, Ukraine, and Israel, confuse cockpit navigation systems, triggering false alarms and misdirecting flight paths, WSJ reports.
  Pilots report clocks resetting, erroneous warnings, and navigation errors lasting minutes to entire flights. While no major safety incidents have occurred, aviati
  
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• DOJ Sues Visa For Locking Out Rival Payment Platforms

  24-09-2024 20:48 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Visa, alleging that the financial services firm has an illegal monopoly over debit network markets and has attempted to unlawfully crush competitors, including fintech companies like PayPal and Square. From a report: The lawsuit follows a multiyear investigation of Visa which the company disclosed in 2021. "We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive mar
  
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• World's Biggest Banks Pledge Support For Nuclear Power

  24-09-2024 20:10 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Fourteen of the world's biggest banks and financial institutions are pledging to increase their support for nuclear energy [non-paywalled link], a move that governments and the industry hope will unlock finance for a new wave of nuclear power plants. FT: At an event on Monday in New York with White House climate policy adviser John Podesta, institutions including Bank of America, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will say they support a goal first set out at the COP28
  
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• The Quest To Build a Telescope On the Moon

  24-09-2024 19:37 via science.slashdot.org
  
  silverjacket writes: A feature for The New Yorker describes a plan to use robots to mine lunar materials and build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon that will help answer questions about the early universe. An excerpt from the story: he dream of a lunar telescope dates to the nineteen-sixties. The moon has the advantage of being hundreds of thousands of miles away from earthly electronics; on the far side of the moon, in particular, there's virtually no noise from human technology or
  
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• Low-Lying Pacific Islands Pin Hopes on UN Meeting as Sea Rise Threatens Survival

  24-09-2024 18:50 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The Pacific country of Kiribati might be surrounded by water, but on land its population is running dry. The ocean around them is steadily encroaching, contaminating underground wells and leeching salt into the soil. "Our waters have been infected," climate activist and law student Christine Tekanene says. "Those who are affected, they now can't survive with the water that changed after sea level rise." The freshwater crisis is just one of the many threats dr
  
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• Trump Hack Continued Into Last Week

  24-09-2024 18:10 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The alleged Iranian hack of Donald Trump's orbit continued at least until mid-September and may be ongoing, a document the hackers shared with a progressive publication reveals. Iranian authorities have denied any involvement in the efforts to leak internal documents from Trump's campaign, which have reportedly been sent to major US publications including Politico and The New York Times, and to the Biden campaign. But the campaign and outside analysts have bl
  
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• WP Engine Sends Cease-and-Desist Letter To Automattic Over Mullenweg's Comments

  24-09-2024 17:47 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  WordPress hosting service WP Engine on Monday sent a cease-and-desist letter to Automattic after the latter's CEO Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine a "cancer to WordPress" last week. From a report: The notice asks Automattic and Mullenweg to retract their comments and stop making statements against the company. WP Engine, which (like Automattic itself) commercializes the open-source WordPress project, also accused Mullenweg of threatening WP Engine before the WordCamp summit held last week. "Autom
  
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• Google To Update Street View Images Across Dozens of Countries, Deleted Blog Post Says

  24-09-2024 16:15 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is getting ready to show off updated Street View imagery in nearly 80 countries. The Verge: In a now-removed blog post seen by The Verge, Google announced that the new images are coming to countries like Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Japan, the Philippines, Rwanda, Serbia, South Africa, and more. Google is also bringing Street View to a handful of countries where it's never been available, including Bosnia, Namibia, Lichtenstein, and Paraguay. The company said its more portable Street View
  
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• California Passes Law To Ban or Restrict Smartphones in School

  24-09-2024 16:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Speaking of California, its governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law a a bill that requires schools to limit or ban the use of smartphones, amid a growing consensus that excess usage can increase the risk of mental illness and impair learning. From a report: Thirteen other states this year have banned or restricted cellphones in school or recommended local educators do so, after Florida led the way by banning phones in class in 2023, according to Education Week. California, with nearly 5.9 mill
  
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• California Bans All Plastic Bags

  24-09-2024 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Paper or paper? In California, shoppers will have only one bag option at the checkout line starting in 2026. A decade ago, California became the first U.S. state to ban single-use plastic bags, the flimsy sacks that regularly blew into waterways, littered streets and collected in landfills. The prohibition, in the nation's most populous state, was considered a turning point in the effort to reduce plastic waste. But the move backfired
  
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• Deep Blue Aerospace Hop Test Suffers Anomaly Moments Before Landing

  24-09-2024 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  schwit1 shares a report SpaceNews with the caption: "Failures aren't failures if you learn from them." From the report: Chinese commercial rocket firm Deep Blue Aerospace conducted a first-stage rocket hop test Sunday, experiencing a partial failure during the final moments of landing. Deep Blue Aerospace carried out the test at 1:40 a.m. Eastern (0540 UTC) Sept. 22 at the firm's Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia using a Nebula-1 rocket first stage. Footage of the vertical liftoff, vertica
  
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• Tugboat Powered By Ammonia Sails For the First Time

  24-09-2024 09:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  A startup called Amogy has successfully converted a 67-year-old diesel tugboat to run on clean ammonia, marking a significant milestone in the transition to zero-emissions propulsion in the maritime industry. The Associated Press reports: Amogy's system uses ammonia to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, making the tug an electric-powered ship. The International Maritime Organization set a target for international shipping to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by, or close to, 2050. Shipping nee
  
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• California Sues ExxonMobil For Alleged Decades of Deception Around Plastic Recycling

  24-09-2024 05:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil on Monday alleging the company carried out a "decades-long campaign of deception" in which the oil and gas giant misled the public on the merits of plastic recycling. The complaint accuses the company of using slick marketing and misleading public statements for half a century to claim recycling was an effective way to deal with plastic pollution, according to a press release fr
  
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• $1 Billion Solar and Battery Storage Project Breaks Ground In Utah

  24-09-2024 04:10 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  rPlus Energies has broken ground on a $1 billion solar + battery storage project in east-central Utah. Electrek reports: The Green River Energy Center in Emery County, Utah, is a 400-megawatt (MW) solar and 400 MW/1,600-megawatt-hour battery storage project that will supply power to western electric utility PacifiCorp under a power purchase agreement. EliTe Solar is supplying solar panels, and Tesla is providing battery storage. Sundt Construction is the engineering, procurement, and constructio
  
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• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Anticipates Superintelligence In 'a Few Thousand Days'

  24-09-2024 03:30 via slashdot.org
  
  In a rare blog post today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out his vision of the AI-powered future, which he refers to as "The Intelligence Age." Among the most notable claims, Altman said superintelligence might be achieved in "a few thousand days." VentureBeat reports: Specifically, Altman argues that "deep learning works," and can generalize across a range of domains and difficult problem sets based on its training data, allowing people to "solve hard problems," including "fixing the climate, esta
  
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• Steam Breaks Its Record For PC Players Online Once Again

  24-09-2024 02:50 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Steam has broken its record for the most PC players online, with 38,366,479 concurrent gamers. As IGN notes, that figure is a million more than the previous record, set last month. From the report: So, what helped propel Steam to new heights over the weekend? All the usual suspects were in the top 10 most-played games on Valve's platform, including Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Banana (yes, Banana has yet to split), and PUBG, with this year's Black Myth: Wukong, Satisfactory 1.0, Space Marine 2, and
  
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• Startups Are Going 'Fair Source' To Avoid Pitfalls of Open Source Licensing

  24-09-2024 02:10 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: With the perennial tensions between proprietary and open source software (OSS) unlikely to end anytime soon, a $3 billion startup is throwing its weight behind a new licensing paradigm -- one that's designed to bridge the open and proprietary worlds, replete with new definition, terminology, and governance model. Developer software company Sentry recently introduced a new license category dubbed "fair source." Sentry is an initial adopter, as
  
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• 11 Million Devices Infected With Botnet Malware Hosted In Google Play

  24-09-2024 01:30 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports: Five years ago, researchers made a grim discovery -- a legitimate Android app in the Google Play market that was surreptitiously made malicious by a library the developers used to earn advertising revenue. With that, the app was infected with code that caused 100 million infected devices to connect to attacker-controlled servers and download secret payloads. Now, history is repeating itself. Researchers from the same Moscow, Russia-based security firm reported
  
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• Amazon, Tesla, Meta Considered Harmful To Democracy

  24-09-2024 00:50 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon, Meta, and Tesla were named by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) as some of the worst corporate underminers of democracy . These companies were accused of union busting, monopolizing media and technology, violating human rights, contributing to climate change, and fostering political movements that threaten democratic institutions. The full list of "corporate underminers of democracy for 2024" is Amazon, Blackstone Group, ExxonMobil, Glencore, Meta, Tesla and the Vanguard
  
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• Cloudflare's New Marketplace Will Let Websites Charge AI Bots For Scraping

  24-09-2024 00:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Cloudflare announced plans on Monday to launch a marketplace in the next year where website owners can sell AI model providers access to scrape their site's content. The marketplace is the final step of Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's larger plan to give publishers greater control over how and when AI bots scrape their websites. "If you don't compensate creators one way or another, then they stop creating, and that's the bit which has to get s
  
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