ICT news

• Amazon Shuts Down Secret Project To Develop Fertility Tracker

  13-11-2024 23:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon has discontinued its secretive "Encore" project to develop an at-home fertility tracker, resulting in layoffs for around 100 employees. The project, part of Amazon's Grand Challenge division, aimed to launch a device and app that would predict fertility through saliva testing but was ultimately terminated to control costs. CNBC reports: The project was born out of the company's 2020 acquisition of Wisconsin-based startup bluDiagnostics, the sources said. BluDiagnostics was founded in 2015
  
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• Meta To Introduce Ads On Threads In Early 2025

  13-11-2024 23:00 via meta.slashdot.org
  
  Meta said it plans to introduce advertisements on Threads starting in early 2025, according to a report by The Information (paywalled). GuruFocus reports: Leading the effort -- which is still in its early phases -- is a team inside Instagram's advertising division. One source said Threads is anticipated to let a small number of marketers produce and post material on the platform in January. Threads had about 275 million monthly active users as late as October. During the company's third-quarter
  
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• OpenAI Nears Launch of AI Agent Tool To Automate Tasks For Users

  13-11-2024 22:25 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: OpenAI is preparing to launch a new artificial intelligence agent codenamed "Operator" that can use a computer to take actions on a person's behalf (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), such as writing code or booking travel [...]. In a staff meeting on Wednesday, OpenAI's leadership announced plans to release the tool in January as a research preview and through the company's application programming interface for developers [
  
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• Microsoft Gaming Handheld Device 'Few Years' Away, Says Xbox Chief

  13-11-2024 21:41 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft's gaming division is developing prototypes for a handheld gaming device that won't launch for "a few years," gaming chief Phil Spencer said Wednesday. In an interview with Bloomberg, Spencer said that while Microsoft is actively working on prototypes, the company will first focus on improving its Xbox app performance on existing portable devices and establishing hardware partnerships.
  The gaming unit wants to be "informed by learning and what's happening now" before introducing its own
  
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• How Italy Became an Unexpected Spyware Hub

  13-11-2024 21:02 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Italy has emerged as a major global spyware hub alongside Israel and India, with at least six major vendors operating in the country with limited oversight, The Record reported this week, citing researchers and Italian experts. Companies like RCS Labs, which has operated since 1992, sell surveillance tools to both domestic law enforcement and foreign governments including Kazakhstan, Syria, and several Asian nations.
  Italian authorities can rent spyware for $160 per day without large acquisition
  
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• AI Systems Solve Just 2% of Advanced Maths Problems in New Benchmark Test

  13-11-2024 20:22 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Leading AI systems are solving less than 2% of problems in a new advanced mathematics benchmark, revealing significant limitations in their reasoning capabilities, research group Epoch AI reported this week.
  The benchmark, called FrontierMath, consists of hundreds of original research-level mathematics problems developed in collaboration with over 60 mathematicians, including Fields Medalists Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers. While top AI models like GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve over 90% accur
  
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• Dutch Publisher's AI Translation Plan Sparks Industry Backlash

  13-11-2024 19:41 via slashdot.org
  
  Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning has announced plans to use AI for translating commercial fiction, drawing sharp criticism from literary professionals despite promises of human oversight and author consent.
  Award-winning translator Michele Hutchison, who won the 2020 International Booker Prize, argues that translation extends beyond word conversion. "We build bridges between cultures, taking into account the target readership every step of the way," she said, noting that translators conv
  
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• Clues To Windows Intelligence Found in Windows 11 Builds

  13-11-2024 19:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft seems set to rebrand the AI-powered features in Windows to "Windows Intelligence" even if some of the more controversial elements, such as Recall, are to remain as they are. The Register: Word of Windows Intelligence has circulated for a while, although Microsoft has yet to issue any official confirmation. In October, Tero Alhonen posted what appeared to be options for apps that use AI services. Over the weekend, X user Albacore turned up a placeholder page in a Windows 24H2 build for
  
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• Cheap Fix Floated For Plane Vapor's Climate Damage

  13-11-2024 18:20 via science.slashdot.org
  
  AmiMoJo writes: The climate-damaging vapors left behind by jet planes could be easily tackled, aviation experts say, with a new study suggesting they could be eliminated for a few pounds per flight. Jet condensation trails, or contrails, have spawned wild conspiracy theories alleging mind control and the spreading of disease, but scientists say the real problem is their warming effect.
  "They create an artificial layer of clouds, which traps the heat from the Earth that's trying to escape to oute
  
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• The Ultimate in Debugging

  13-11-2024 17:41 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Mark Rainey: Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn't been used in over forty years!
  I've had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1.
  Recently they sent a command to
  
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• Secret Service Says You Agreed To Be Tracked With Location Data

  13-11-2024 17:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Officials inside the Secret Service clashed over whether they needed a warrant to use location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones, with some arguing that citizens have agreed to be tracked with such data by accepting app terms of service, despite those apps often not saying their data may end up with the authorities, according to hundreds of pages of internal Secret Service emails obtained by 404 Media.
  The emails provide deeper insigh
  
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• Will We Care About Frameworks in the Future?

  13-11-2024 16:21 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Paul Kinlan, who leads the Chrome and the Open Web Developer Relations team at Google, asks and answers the question (with a no.): Frameworks are abstractions over a platform designed for people and teams to accelerate their teams new work and maintenance while improving the consistency and quality of the projects. They also frequently force a certain type of structure and architecture to your code base. This isn't a bad thing, team productivity is an important aspect of any software.
  I'm of the
  
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• Apple Defends Mac Mini Power Button Relocation

  13-11-2024 15:41 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple executives have defended the relocation of the power button to the bottom of its new M4 Mac mini, citing the computer's significantly reduced size as the driving factor behind the design change.
  In a Bilibili video interview, Apple's Greg Joswiak and John Ternus explained that the Mac mini's form factor, now half the size of its predecessor, necessitated finding a new position for the power button. The executives said that the bottom placement allows for convenient access despite initial u
  
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• AI Companies Hit Development Hurdles in Race for Advanced Models

  13-11-2024 15:01 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI's latest large language model, known internally as Orion, has fallen short of performance targets, marking a broader slowdown in AI advancement across the industry's leading companies, according to Bloomberg, corroborating similar media stories in recent days. The model, which completed initial training in September, showed particular weakness in novel coding tasks and failed to demonstrate the same magnitude of improvement over its predecessor as GPT-4 achieved over GPT-3.5, the publicat
  
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• Canada Passes New Right To Repair Rules With the Same Old Problem

  13-11-2024 14:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners
  
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• Palo Alto Networks Emphasizes Hardening Guidance

  13-11-2024 13:00 via cisa.gov
  Palo Alto Networks (PAN) has released an important informational bulletin on securing management interfaces after becoming aware of claims of an unverified remote code execution vulnerability via the PAN-OS management interface.
  CISA urges users and administrators to review the following for more information, follow PAN’s guidance for hardening network devices, review PAN’s instruction for accessing organization’s scan results for internet-facing management interfaces, and
  
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• New Study On Moons of Uranus Raises Chance of Life

  13-11-2024 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  A new analysis of data from NASA's Voyager 2 mission reveals that the planet Uranus and its five largest moons might harbor subsurface oceans and potential conditions for life. The BBC reports: Much of what we know about them was gathered by Nasa's Voyager 2 spacecraft which visited nearly 40 years ago. But a new analysis shows that Voyager's visit coincided with a powerful solar storm, which led to a misleading idea of what the Uranian system is really like. [...] So, for 40 years we have had a
  
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• Congress To Hold Another UFO/UAP Hearing

  13-11-2024 08:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader thephydes writes: The hearing will go ahead on November 13 at 11:30 ET (16:30 GMT). Apparently, it will "further pull back the curtain on secret UAP research programs conducted by the U.S. government, and undisclosed findings they have yielded," according to a House statement. It's driven by two republicans, Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), who say: "Americans deserve to understand what the government has learned about UAP sightings, and the nature of any
  
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• Discord Leaker Sentenced To 15 Years In Prison

  13-11-2024 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Former Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years for stealing classified information from the Pentagon and sharing it online, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts announced. Teixeira received the sentence before Judge Indira Talwani in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. In March, the national guardsman pleaded guilty to six counts of willful retention and transmission of national d
  
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• New Thermal Material Provides 72% Better Cooling Than Conventional Paste

  13-11-2024 02:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "Researchers at the University of Texas have unveiled a new thermal interface material that could revolutionize cooling, outperforming top liquid metal solutions by up to 72% in heat dissipation," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "This breakthrough not only improves energy efficiency but also enables higher-density data center setups, cutting cooling costs and energy usage significantly." TechSpot reports: Thanks to a mechanochemically engineered combination of the liquid metal alloy Galinstan an
  
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• Spotify's Car Thing, Due For Bricking, Is Getting an Open Source Second Life

  13-11-2024 01:50 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson).
  
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• VMware Makes Workstation and Fusion Free For Everyone

  13-11-2024 01:10 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: VMware has announced that its VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation desktop hypervisors are now free to everyone for commercial, educational, and personal use. In May, the company also made VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro free for personal use, allowing students and home users to set up virtualized test labs and experiment with other OSs by running virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. Starti
  
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• Microsoft Edge Is Trying To Forcefully Get Your Chrome Tabs Again

  13-11-2024 00:30 via slashdot.org
  
  A new update is rolling out that automatically starts Microsoft's Edge browser and prompts users to import their Chrome tabs -- a move that has sparked criticism over its invasive tactics to encourage Edge adoption. The Verge's Tom Warren reports: My colleague Richard Lawler noticed that Edge started automatically on his PC last week at boot and offered up a new prompt to "enhance your browsing experience." The pop-up has a "bring over your data from other browsers regularly" option ticked by de
  
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