ICT news

• Arkansas May Have Vast Lithium Reserves, Researchers Say

  21-10-2024 23:22 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Researchers at the United States Geological Survey and the Arkansas government announced on Monday that they had found a trove of lithium, a critical raw material for electric vehicle batteries, in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. From a report: With the help of water testing and machine learning, the researchers determined that there might be five million to 19 million tons of lithium -- more than enough to meet all of the world's demand for the metal -- in a geological area known as
  
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• Tim Cook Knows Apple Isn't First in AI but Says 'It's About Being the Best'

  21-10-2024 22:41 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple CEO Tim Cook has acknowledged the company's late entry into AI, stating, "We weren't the first to do intelligence." Despite this admission, Cook defended Apple's approach, claiming it will be "the best for the customer."
  The tech giant plans to roll out initial AI features on October 28, with more advanced capabilities expected in 2025. However, internal studies suggest Apple's AI lags behind competitors, with Siri reportedly 25% less accurate than ChatGPT. Cook remains optimistic, asserti
  
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• Nicolas Cage Urges Young Actors To Protect Themselves From AI

  21-10-2024 22:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Actor Nicolas Cage warned young performers about the dangers of AI in film production during his speech at the Newport Beach Film Festival on Sunday. Cage urged actors to protect their craft from employment-based digital replica (EBDR) technology, which allows studios to manipulate performances post-filming. "This technology wants to take your instrument," Cage said. He explained that EBDR enables studios to alter actors' faces, voices, and body language after shooting, potentially compromising
  
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• A Calculator's Most Important Button Has Been Removed

  21-10-2024 21:22 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Apple's latest iOS update has removed the "C" button from its Calculator app, replacing it with a backspace function. The change, part of iOS 18, has sparked debate among users accustomed to the traditional clear function. The removal of the "C" button represents a significant departure from decades-old calculator design conventions, The Atlantic writes. From the story: The "C" button's function is vestigial. Back when calculators were commercialized, starting in the mid-1960s, their electronics
  
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• AI 'Bubble' Will Burst 99% of Players, Says Baidu CEO

  21-10-2024 20:42 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Baidu CEO Robin Li has proclaimed that hallucinations produced by large language models are no longer a problem, and predicted a massive wipeout of AI startups when the "bubble" bursts. From a report: "The most significant change we're seeing over the past 18 to 20 months is the accuracy of those answers from the large language models," gushed the CEO at last week's Harvard Business Review Future of Business Conference. "I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved &
  
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• 'Crises at Boeing and Intel Are a National Emergency'

  21-10-2024 20:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Intel and Boeing, once exemplars of American manufacturing prowess, now face existential crises. Their market values have plummeted, jeopardizing not just shareholder wealth but national security. The U.S. is losing its edge in manufacturing high-tech products, crucial in its geopolitical contest with China, a story on WSJ argues.
  Unlike past manufacturing declines, Intel and Boeing's woes stem from internal missteps, prioritizing financial performance over engineering excellence. Their potentia
  
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• Dow Jones and New York Post Sue AI Startup Perplexity, Alleging 'Massive' Copyright Infringement

  21-10-2024 19:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  News Corp's Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post have sued Perplexity, a startup that calls itself an "AI-powered Swiss Army Knife for information discovery and curiosity," alleging copyright infringement. From a report: "Perplexity is a generative artificial intelligence company that claims to provide its users accurate and up-to-date news and information in a platform that, in Perplexity's own words, allows users to 'Skip the Links' to original publi
  
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• Linus Torvalds Growing Frustrated By Buggy Hardware, Theoretical CPU Attacks

  21-10-2024 18:41 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  jd writes: Linus Torvalds is not a happy camper and is condemning hardware vendors for poor security and the plethora of actual and theoretical attacks, especially as some of the new features being added impact the workarounds. These workarounds are now getting very expensive, CPU-wise.
  TFA quotes Linus Torvalds: "Honestly, I'm pretty damn fed up with buggy hardware and completely theoretical attacks that have never actually shown themselves to be used in practice. "So I think this time we push
  
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• 52nd Known Mersenne Prime Found

  21-10-2024 18:01 via science.slashdot.org
  
  chalsall writes: After more than six years of work since the last discovery, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has found the 52nd known Mersenne Prime number. This is also the largest prime number known to humans.
  The number is 2^136,279,841-1, which is 41,024,320 decimal digits long.
  Luke Durant, a researcher from San Jose, CA, found it after contributing a fantastic amount of compute to the GIMPS project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Egypt Declared Malaria-Free After Century of Work To Defeat Disease

  21-10-2024 17:22 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Egypt was declared malaria-free by the World Health Organization, after nearly a century of work to eradicate the disease in the country. From a report: Egypt saw 3 million cases a year in the 1940s, and the Aswan Dam's development in the 1960s created new bodies of standing water for the mosquitoes to breed in, but by 2001 the disease was "firmly under control," according to the WHO. "The disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to [Egypt's] history," the WHO's chief said. It's the 44th countr
  
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• Kurt Vonnegut's Lost Board Game Finally Published

  21-10-2024 16:50 via games.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Fans of literature most likely know Kurt Vonnegut for the novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The staunchly anti-war book first resonated with readers during the Vietnam War era, later becoming a staple in high school curricula the world over. When Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest American novelists of all time. But would you believe that he was also an accomplished game designer?
  In 1956, following the lukewarm r
  
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• Intuit Seeks To Scrub CEO Comments on Tax Lobbying From Tech Podcast

  21-10-2024 16:05 via slashdot.org
  
  Intuit, the maker of TurboTax software, asked technology news outlet The Verge to delete part of a podcast interview with CEO Sasan Goodarzi, The Verge reported on Monday. The request came after Goodarzi was questioned about Intuit's lobbying efforts against free government tax filing options, a topic that has drawn scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers.
  The Verge said it declined to remove the segment, instead choosing to highlight the exchange by playing it at the beginning of the episode. In
  
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• Is the Microsoft-OpenAI 'Bromance' Beginning to Fray?

  21-10-2024 13:34 via slashdot.org
  
  Though Sam Altman once called OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft "the best bromance in tech," now "ties between the companies have started to fray" reports the New York Times — citing interviews with 19 people "familiar with the relationship". [Alternate URL here.]
  Among other things, Satya Nadella "has said privately that Altman's firing in November shocked and concerned him, according to five people with knowledge of his comments. Since then, Microsoft has started to hedge its bet on Op
  
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• Europe Automakers Launch Cheaper Electric Cars to Compete With China

  21-10-2024 09:38 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "Several of Europe's biggest carmakers unveiled low-cost electric vehicles at the Paris Motor Show this week," reports CNBC. The automakers are "seeking to jump-start a demand slump and recapture some of the market share now held by Chinese brands."
  "It feels like Europe is fighting back," Julia Poliscanova, senior director for vehicles and e-mobility supply chains at the Transport & Environment campaign group, told CNBC at the Paris Motor Show. "There are so many new models on show, and wha
  
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• Cuba's Power Grid Collapses Again. And Then a Hurricane Hit

  21-10-2024 06:38 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "Millions of Cubans remained without power for a third day in a row Sunday," reports CNN, "after fresh attempts to restore electricity failed overnight and the power grid collapsed for the fourth time — all before the arrival of Hurricane Oscar."
  A report from Reuters notes it was the fourth power grid failure in 48 hours."On the forecast track, the center of Oscar is expected to continue moving across eastern Cuba tonight and Monday, then emerge off the northern coast of Cuba late Monday
  
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• Special VHS Release for 'Alien: Romulus' Announced by 20th Century Studios

  21-10-2024 04:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from ComicBook.com:On Saturday, 20th Century Studios announced that the latest entry in the Alien sci-fi horror franchise will get a limited-edition VHS release on December 3 — just in time for the holidays.
  The VHS release of Alien: Romulus is the first such release from a major studio since 2006... a major win for fans of physical media. In recent months, there has been a great bit of conversation surrounding the so-called death of physical media wi
  
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• An Alternative to Rewriting Memory-Unsafe Code in Rust: the 'Safe C++ Extensions' Proposal

  21-10-2024 02:03 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  "After two years of being beaten with the memory-safety stick, the C++ community has published a proposal to help developers write less vulnerable code," reports the Register.
  "The Safe C++ Extensions proposal aims to address the vulnerable programming language's Achilles' heel, the challenge of ensuring that code is free of memory safety bugs..."Acknowledging the now deafening chorus of calls to adopt memory safe programming languages, developers Sean Baxter, creator of the Circle compiler, and
  
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• Microsoft's Honeypots Lure Phishers at Scale - to Spy on Them and Waste Their Time

  21-10-2024 00:58 via it.slashdot.org
  
  A principal security software engineer at Microsoft described how they use their Azure cloud platform "to hunt phishers at scale," in a talk at the information security conference BSides Exeter.
  Calling himself Microsoft's "Head of Deception." Ross Bevington described how they'd created a "hybrid high interaction honeypot" on the now retired code.microsoft.com "to collect threat intelligence on actors ranging from both less skilled cybercriminals to nation state groups targeting Microsoft infras
  
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