ICT news

• US Army Faces 'Wide-Ranging' Issues with Its Boats, Considers Replacing Them with Autonomous Vessels

  19-10-2024 23:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous readed shared this report from CNN:
  [U.S. army boats] are poorly maintained and largely unprepared to meet the military's growing mission in the Pacific, a new government oversight report said this week. The Government Accountability Office released a report on Wednesday that concluded there are "wide-ranging" issues facing Army watercraft, which limit the Army's ability "to meet mission requirements in the Indo-Pacific theater where the need for Army watercraft is most pronounced."
  
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• GNOME Foundation Cuts Budget, Seeks More Volunteers and Donations

  19-10-2024 22:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "The foundation behind the Gnome desktop environment is having to go through some serious belt-tightening..." writes Linux Magazine.
  From an October 7th announcement by The Gnome Foundation:Our plan for the previous financial year was to operate a break-even budget. We raised less than expected last year, due to a very challenging fundraising environment for nonprofits, on top of internal changes such as the departure of our previous Executive Director, Holly Million. The Foundation has a reserv
  
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• MIT Researchers Build Solar-Powered Low-Cost Drinking Water Desalination System

  19-10-2024 21:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  MIT engineers have built a solar-powered desalination system that "ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear."
  While traditional reverse osmosis systems typically require steady power levels, "the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid." And their results were pretty impressive:Th
  
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• Debunking Hype: China Hasn't Broken Military Encryption with Quantum

  19-10-2024 20:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Forbes:
  Recent headlines have proclaimed that Chinese scientists have hacked "military-grade encryption" using quantum computers, sparking concern and speculation about the future of cybersecurity. The claims, largely stemming from a recent South China Morning Post article about a Chinese academic paper published in May, was picked up by many more serious publications.
  However, a closer examination reveals that while Chinese researchers have made incre
  
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• Serious Infections Linked to Dementia Risk, Study Shows

  19-10-2024 19:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Getting sick feels bad in the moment," reports the Washington Post, "and may affect your brain in the longer term."A new study published in Nature Aging adds to growing evidence that severe infections, including flu, herpes and respiratory tract infections, are linked to accelerated brain atrophy and increased risk of dementia years later. It also hints at the biological drivers that may contribute to neurodegenerative disease.
  The current research is a "leap beyond previous studies that had al
  
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• Spectre Flaws Still Haunt Intel, AMD as Researchers Found Fresh Attack Method

  19-10-2024 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "Six years after the Spectre transient execution processor design flaws were disclosed, efforts to patch the problem continue to fall short," writes the Register:Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi of Swiss University ETH Zurich on Friday published details about a cross-process Spectre attack that derandomizes Address Space Layout Randomization and leaks the hash of the root password from the Set User ID (suid) process on recent Intel processors. The researchers claim they successfully conducted su
  
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• Internet Archive Services Resume as They Promise Stronger, More Secure Return

  19-10-2024 17:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  "The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed," announced the Internet Archive Thursday, "as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online."
  Founder Brewster Kahle told The Washington Post it's the first time in its almost 30-year history that it's been down more than a few hours. But their article says the Archive is "fighting back."Kahle and his te
  
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• New US Student Loan Forgiveness Brings Total to $175 Billion for 5 Million People

  19-10-2024 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "Biden forgives more student loans," read Thursday's headline at CNBC.
  While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outsta
  
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• 'NASA's $100 Billion Moon Mission Is Going Nowhere'

  19-10-2024 15:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an op-ed written by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board: There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 bill
  
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• DoNotPay Will Now Call Customer Service Hotlines For You

  19-10-2024 14:01 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: If you dread the thought of calling to change an airline ticket or negotiate your internet bill, a new artificial intelligence tool may provide a solution. DoNotPay, which offers an assortment of consumer-friendly services like tracking subscriptions, generating burner phone numbers, and searching for unclaimed property, now features a bot that will call customer service numbers for users, navigate through phone menus and sit through hold music, then politely
  
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• Diamond Dust Could Cool the Planet At a Cost of Mere Trillions

  19-10-2024 12:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: From dumping iron into the ocean to launching mirrors into space, proposals to cool the planet through 'geoengineering' tend to be controversial -- and sometimes fantastical. A new idea isn't any less far-out, but it may avoid some of the usual pitfalls of strategies to fill the atmosphere with tiny, reflective particles. In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of
  
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• SpaceX Secures New Contracts Worth $733.5 Million For National Security Space Missions

  19-10-2024 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space News: SpaceX has been awarded contracts for eight launches under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program, the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Oct. 18. The contracts worth $733.5 million span seven missions for the Space Development Agency (SDA) and one for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) projected to launch in 2026. These are part of the NSSL Phase 3 procurement of launch services for U.S. defense
  
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• Penguin Random House Underscores Copyright Protection in AI Rebuff

  19-10-2024 07:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The world's biggest trade publisher has changed the wording on its copyright pages to help protect authors' intellectual property from being used to train large language models and other artificial intelligence tools, The Bookseller has reported. From the report: Penguin Random House has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear "in imprint pages across our markets." The new wording states: "No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
  
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• West Virginia Town of Green Bank Has Become a Refuge For Electrosensitive People

  19-10-2024 05:30 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Brandon Barrett arrived here two weeks ago, sick but hopeful, like dozens before him. Just a few years back, he could dead lift 660 pounds. After an injury while training to be a professional dirt-bike rider, he opened a motorcycle shop just north of Buffalo. When he wasn't working, he would cleanse his mind through rigorous meditation. In 2019, he began getting sick. And then sicker. Brain fog. Memory issues. Difficulty focusing. Dep
  
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• Microsoft Says It Lost Weeks of Security Logs For Its Customers' Cloud Products

  19-10-2024 03:30 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has notified customers that it's missing more than two weeks of security logs for some of its cloud products, leaving network defenders without critical data for detecting possible intrusions. From a report: According to a notification sent to affected customers, Microsoft said that "a bug in one of Microsoft's internal monitoring agents resulted in a malfunction in some of the agents when uploading log data to our internal logging platform" between September 2 and September 19.
  The no
  
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• The Analogue 3D Drags the Fondly Remembered N64 Into the 21st Century

  19-10-2024 02:50 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Analogue, a retro gaming company, is releasing a hardware-emulated Nintendo 64 console that can play every N64 game in 4K resolution. TechCrunch reports: Analogue, as is its habit, spent years meticulously re-engineering the N64 in FPGA form -- basically, this means that the new 3D console is, in several important ways, indistinguishable from the original hardware. One hundred percent compatibility with the console's game library is the most obvious one, meaning every single N64 cartridge works
  
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• Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Has Invested Over $24.9M In Open-Source In Two Years

  19-10-2024 02:10 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than $24.9 million into sixty open technologies. This effort backed by the German government has provided nearly $25 million USD in open-source funding over the past two years. In this time there has been more than 500 submissions proposing over 114 million euros in work.This Sovereign Tech F
  
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• FTC Probing John Deere Over Customers' 'Right To Repair' Equipment

  19-10-2024 01:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating farm equipment maker Deere over its repair policies, focusing on whether the company's restrictions on repairs violate customers' "right to repair." Reuters reports: The investigation, authorized on Sept. 2, 2021, focuses on repair restrictions manufacturers place on hardware or software, often referred to by regulators as impeding customers' "right to repair" the goods they purchase. The probe was made public through a filing by data analytics
  
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• US Startup Charging Couples To 'Screen Embryos For IQ'

  19-10-2024 00:50 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement. The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing IVF, according to undercover video footage. The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have h
  
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• Netflix Raises Prices As Password Boost Fades

  19-10-2024 00:10 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Netflix has begun raising prices in several countries, including Japan, parts of Europe, and Africa, as it seeks to sustain growth following its crackdown on password sharing. While its recent financial results show strong revenue growth, the company faces challenges in finding new subscribers and aims to boost future growth through advertising and fresh content. The BBC reports: In its latest results, Netflix announced that it had added 5.1 million subscribers between July and September - ahead
  
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