ICT news

• HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors' Work to AI Company

  18-11-2024 23:40 via slashdot.org
  
  HarperCollins has partnered with an AI technology company to allow limited use of select nonfiction backlist titles for training AI models, offering authors the choice to opt in for a $2,500 non-negotiable fee. 404 Media reports: On Friday, author Daniel Kibblesmith, who wrote the children's book Santa's Husband and published it with HarperCollins, posted screenshots on Bluesky of an email he received, seemingly from his agent, informing him that the agency was approached by the publisher about
  
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• Google Is Turning Chrome OS Into Android To Compete With the iPad

  18-11-2024 23:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is reportedly working on a multi-year project to migrate Chrome OS into Android, aiming to unify its operating systems and better compete with the iPad. This transition involves incorporating Chrome OS features like extensions and Linux app support into Android, with upcoming updates focused on improving desktop functionality and device compatibility. Android Authority reports: To better compete with the iPad as well as manage engineering resources more effectively, Google wants to unify
  
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• Explicit Deepfake Scandal Shuts Down Pennsylvania School

  18-11-2024 22:25 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An AI-generated nude photo scandal has shut down a Pennsylvania private school. On Monday, classes were canceled after parents forced leaders to either resign or face a lawsuit potentially seeking criminal penalties and accusing the school of skipping mandatory reporting of the harmful images. The outcry erupted after a single student created sexually explicit AI images of nearly 50 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School, Lancaste
  
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• India Orders Meta To Curb WhatsApp Data Sharing

  18-11-2024 20:56 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  India's competition watchdog has ordered WhatsApp to stop sharing user data with other Meta units for advertising purposes for five years and also levied a fine of $25.4 million for antitrust violations related to WhatsApp's controversial 2021 privacy policy. From a report: The Competition Commission of India, which began the investigation in 2021, found that WhatsApp's "take-it-or-leave-it" privacy update constituted an abuse of Meta's dominant position by forcing users to accept expanded data
  
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• Weekends Were a Mistake, Says Infosys Co-founder Narayana Murthy

  18-11-2024 19:15 via slashdot.org
  
  Infosys founder Narayana Murthy has tripled down on his previous statements that 70-hour work weeks are what's needed in India and revealed he also thinks weekends were a mistake. From a report: Speaking on Indian TV channel CNBC-TV18 at the Global Leadership Summit in Mumbai last week Murthy once again declared he did not "believe in work-life balance." "I have not changed my view; I will take this with me to my grave," he asserted .
  The argument from Murthy, and like-minded colleagues he quote
  
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• China Population Set for 51 Million Drop as Pro-Birth Moves Fail

  18-11-2024 18:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: China's population is expected to shrink by 51 million -- more than the size of California -- over the next decade as policymakers struggle to reverse the country's falling birth rate, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. By 2035, the population is expected to drop to 1.36 billion, levels not seen since 2012, down from a peak of 1.41 billion in 2021, BI senior industry analyst Ada Li estimates.
  There could be a temporary spike in births in 2024 as the Year of
  
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• Belgian Region Trials Web Founder's Data Privacy System

  18-11-2024 17:54 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The Belgian region of Flanders is rolling out personal data "pods" to 7 million citizens in a trial of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's vision for user-controlled data privacy.
  Five Belgian hospitals have begun storing patient visit information in the data pods, developed by Berners-Lee's startup Inrupt over the past five years. The system aims to help compliance with European privacy regulations by giving citizens control over their personal information, from medical records to social
  
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• World of Warcraft Turns 20

  18-11-2024 17:24 via games.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Blizzard Entertainment first released World of Warcraft in November 2004, so The New York Times celebrated the anniversary by outlining the many ways we can still see the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game's influence's 20 years later.
  For one thing, while multiplayer games and early social networks such as MySpace already existed, WoW provided a real preview of a future where everyone would connect to friends and strangers online. For another, the
  
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• Apple Appears Set To Discontinue Lightning-to-Headphone Adapter

  18-11-2024 16:25 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has stopped selling its Lightning-to-3.5mm headphone jack adapter in the U.S. and most countries, with limited stock remaining only in select European markets. The $9 accessory, introduced with iPhone 7 in 2016 (after the "courageous" move to stop including the headphone jack in iPhones), allowed users to connect traditional headphones to Lightning port iPhones. The discontinuation comes as Apple transitions to USB-C ports across its iPhone lineup.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Trump Picks Carr To Head FCC With Pledge To Fight 'Censorship Cartel'

  18-11-2024 15:45 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Donald Trump has named FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to chair the U.S. communications regulator when he takes office in January 2025, citing Carr's stance against what Trump called "regulatory lawfare." Carr, a lawyer and longtime Republican who has served at the FCC under both Trump and Biden administrations, has emerged as a vocal critic of major social media companies' content moderation practices.
  "Humbled and honored" by the appointment, Carr pledged on X to "dismantle the censorship cartel
  
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• AI Investments Are Booming, but Venture-Firm Profits Are at a Historic Low

  18-11-2024 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are having an easy time finding promising startups to back. The hard part is cashing out. From a report: Last year, U.S. venture firms returned $26 billion worth of shares back to their investors, the lowest amount since 2011, according to the data provider PitchBook. Startup investors say 2024 has continued the trend, with high levels of investment and few acquisition deals or initial public offerings. "We've raised a lot of money, and we've given very lit
  
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• The Rust Foundation Wants to Improve Rust and C++ Interoperability

  18-11-2024 13:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  The goal? "Make C++ and Rust interoperability easily accessible and approachable to the widest possible audience." And the Rust Foundation's "Interop Initiative" is specifically focused on the goal of interoperability "within the same executable," through either inline embedding that allows "integrated compilation", or foreign function interfaces.To that end, a statement addressing "the challenges and opportunities in C++ and Rust interoperability" was announced this week by the Rust Foundation.
  
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• ChatGPT-4 Beat Doctors at Diagnosing Illness, Study Finds

  18-11-2024 10:04 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Dr. Adam Rodman, a Boston-based internal medicine expert, helped design a study testing 50 licensed physicians to see whether ChatGPT improved their diagnoses, reports the New York TImes. The results? "Doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot.
  "And, to the researchers' surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors."[ChatGPT-4] scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition f
  
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• On 15th Anniversary, Go Programming Languages Rises in Popularity

  18-11-2024 07:19 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  The Tiobe index tries to track the popularity of programming languages by counting the number of search results for the language's name followed by the word "programming" (on 25 different search engines). And this month there were some surprises...
  By TIOBE's reckoning, compared to a year ago PHP has now fallen from #7 to #12, while Delphi/Object Pascal shot up five spots from #16 to #11. In that same year, Fortran jumped from #12 to #8 — while both Visual Basic and SQL dropped down a sing
  
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• New Dune Prequel 'Dune: Prophecy' Premieres on HBO and Max

  18-11-2024 03:47 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  A new six-episode Dune series premiers tonight on HBO and Max — a prequel to the Denis Villeneuve-directed Dune movies set 10,000 years before the birth f Paul Atreides. The Hollywood Reporter writes that it "draws on source material from the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, the origin of the Dune universe."
  Cord-cutters can stream Dune: Prophecy online without cable on Max, with subscriptions starting at $9.99 per m
  
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• Linux Kernel 6.12 Has Been Released

  18-11-2024 02:45 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot unixbhaskar writes: Linus has released a fresh Linux kernel for public consumption. Please give it a try and report any glitches to the maintainers for improvement. Also, please do not forget to express your appreciation to those tireless folks who did all the hard work for you.
  The blog OMG Ubuntu calls it "one of the most biggest kernel releases for a while," joking that it's a "really real-time kernel."The headline feature in Linux 6.12 is mainline support for PREEMPT_RT. This patch
  
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• Google, Microsoft Are Spending Massively on AI, Quarterly Earnings Show

  18-11-2024 01:26 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  This week Alphabet CEO Sundar Picahi assured investors that their long-term AI focus and investment (and a "commitment to innovation") "are paying off," reports the Associated Press. Alphabet's stock has already soared 20% this year, and it's "still thriving" as the company "navigates through a pivotal shift to AI and battles regulators..."Alphabet earned $26.3 billion, or $2.12 per share during the most recent quarter, a 34% increase from a year ago. Revenue rose 15% from the same time last yea
  
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