ICT news

• Database Tables of Student, Teacher Info Stolen From PowerSchool In Cyberattack

  10-01-2025 23:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A leading education software maker has admitted its IT environment was compromised in a cyberattack, with students and teachers' personal data -- including some Social Security Numbers and medical info -- stolen. PowerSchool says its cloud-based student information system is used by 18,000 customers around the globe, including the US and Canada, to handle grading, attendance records, and personal information of more than 60 million K-12 stud
  
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• Media Companies Scrap Venu Sports Before It Ever Launches

  10-01-2025 23:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery announced today that it will not launch the Venu live sports streaming service. "After careful consideration, we have collectively agreed to discontinue the Venu Sports joint venture and not launch the streaming service," the companies said in a joint statement. "In an ever-changing marketplace, we determined that it was best to meet the evolving demands of sports fans by focusing on existing products and distribution channels. We are proud of the work that
  
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• Canadian 'Super Scooper' Plane Grounded After Hitting Civilian Drone Over LA Wildfires

  10-01-2025 22:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Los Angeles authorities have vowed to prosecute illegal drone operators after a civilian drone collided with a Canadian CL-415 firefighting plane combating the Palisades Fire, causing damage that grounded the aircraft and temporarily halted all aerial firefighting operations. CNN reports: The specifically designed CL-415 firefighting planes are used to scoop up more than 1,500 gallons of ocean water to drop on active fires. The plane in question, Quebec 1, "sustained wing damage and remains grou
  
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• JPMorgan Chase Requires All Workers To Return To Office Five Days a Week

  10-01-2025 21:40 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: JPMorgan Chase is summoning all staff back to the office, becoming the latest corporate giant to call time on era of remote and hybrid working sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. The US's largest bank, which has some 316,000 employees worldwide, announced on Friday that all workers on hybrid work schedules will be required to return to the office five days a week from March. [...] Few top executives have been more vocal in making the case for
  
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• YouTubers Are Selling Their Unused Video Footage To AI Companies

  10-01-2025 20:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTubers and other digital content creators are selling their unused video footage to AI companies seeking exclusive videos to better train their AI algorithms, oftentimes netting thousands of dollars per deal. OpenAI, Alphabet's Google, AI media company Moonvalley and several other AI companies are collectively paying hundreds of content creators for access to their unpublished videos, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
  That content, which
  
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• Automattic Slashes WordPress.org Support in Battle With WP Engine

  10-01-2025 19:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic's handling of a disputed plugin.
  The company, which runs WordPress.com, blamed the cutback on legal costs from its battle with WP Engine, which CEO Matt Mullenweg previously called a "cancer" to the community. Automattic said remain
  
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• Meta Kills DEI Programs

  10-01-2025 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is terminating major DEI programs, effective immediately -- including for hiring, training and picking suppliers. Axios: Meta said it was changing course because the "legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing," per a memo by Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• StackOverflow Usage Plummets as AI Chatbots Rise

  10-01-2025 18:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Developer Q&A platform StackOverflow appears to be facing an existential crisis as volume of new questions on the site has plunged 75% from the 2017 peak and 60% year-on-year in December 2024, according to StackExchange Data Explorer figures.
  The decline accelerated after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, with questions falling 76% since then. Despite banning AI-generated answers two years ago, StackOverflow has embraced AI partnerships, striking deals with Google, OpenAI and GitHub.Read mo
  
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• US Unveils El Capitan, World's Fastest Supercomputer, For Classified Tasks

  10-01-2025 17:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The world's most powerful supercomputer, capable of 2.79 quintillion calculations per second, has been unveiled at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, designed primarily to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and run other classified simulations. The $600 million system, named El Capitan, consists of 87 computer racks weighing 1.3 million pounds and draws 30 megawatts of power.
  Built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise using AMD chips, it operates alongside a smaller system c
  
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• Japan EV Sales Plummet 33% in 2024, First Decline in Four Years

  10-01-2025 17:14 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Sales of electric vehicles in Japan fell 33% year-on-year to 59,736 cars in 2024, the first decline in four years, according to data from car dealers and importers compiled by Nikkei on Thursday. From the report: EVs' share of all vehicle sales fell below 2% in Japan, the lowest among major advanced economies. While global EV sales are still growing, albeit more slowly, Japan's reluctance to adopt EVs is becoming increasingly apparent.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Early 'Forever Chemicals' Exposure Could Impact Economic Success in Adulthood, Study Says

  10-01-2025 16:22 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Early life exposure to toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" could impact economic success in adulthood, new first-of-its-kind research [PDF] suggests. From a report: The Iowa State University and US Census Bureau working paper compared the earnings, college graduation rates, and birth weights of two groups of children -- those raised around military installations that had firefighting training areas, and those who lived near bases with no fire training site.
  The military began using PFAS-laden firefig
  
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• Rational or Not? This Basic Math Question Took Decades To Answer.

  10-01-2025 15:45 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Three mathematicians have developed a breakthrough method for proving whether numbers can be written as fractions, solving a problem that has puzzled researchers for decades. Frank Calegari, Vesselin Dimitrov and Yunqing Tang proved the irrationality of an infinite collection of numbers related to the Riemann zeta function, building on Roger Apery's landmark 1978 proof about a single such number.
  The new approach, which relies on 19th-century mathematical techniques, has already helped settle a
  
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• India's Payments Push is Cutting Out Visa and Mastercard

  10-01-2025 15:07 via news.slashdot.org
  
  India's homegrown digital payments ecosystem, anchored by two systems, is challenging Visa and Mastercard's dominance in the world's most populous nation. The backbone is UPI, a nine-year-old bank-to-bank payment network that processes over 13 billion monthly transactions through QR codes and phone numbers, accounting for 71% of all transactions and 36% of consumer spending, according to Bernstein.
  RuPay, India's domestic card network, has leveraged its exclusive right to process credit card tra
  
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• DOJ Cleared To Sell $6.5 Billion In Bitcoin Seized From Silk Road

  10-01-2025 14:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Crypto Briefing: The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been authorized to sell approximately 69,370 Bitcoin seized in connection with the Silk Road darknet marketplace, a haul currently valued at around $6.5 billion, DB News reported Wednesday. The decision is set to end a years-long legal dispute over the BTC stash's ownership. On December 30, a federal judge ruled in favor of the DOJ's request to liquidate the crypto assets, the report said. Battle Bor
  
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• CISA Releases the Cybersecurity Performance Goals Adoption Report

  10-01-2025 13:00 via cisa.gov
  Today, CISA released the Cybersecurity Performance Goals Adoption Report to highlight how adoption of Cybersecurity Performance Goals (CPGs) benefits our nation’s critical infrastructure sectors. Originally released in October 2022, CISA’s CPGs are voluntary practices that critical infrastructure owners can take to protect themselves against cyber threats. 
  This report is based on analysis of 7,791 critical infrastructure organizations enrolled in CISA’s Vulnerability Scan
  
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• Judge Rejects Man From Retrieving $750 Million of Bitcoin From Landfill

  10-01-2025 11:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An IT engineer from Wales lost a decade-long legal battle to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins from a Newport landfill. The hard drive, accidentally thrown away in 2013, is now valued between $700-750 million. crypto.news reports: However, Judge Keyser KC ruled there were no "reasonable grounds" for the claim, citing environmental concerns and the council's ownership of the landfill contents. The landfill reportedly holds 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but Howells claims to have pinpo
  
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• 2024 Was the First Year Above 1.5C of Global Warming, Scientists Say

  10-01-2025 08:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Scientists said the world just reached a grim milestone: the first full year where global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial times. Reuters reports: The milestone was confirmed by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which said climate change is pushing the planet's temperature to levels never before experienced by modern humans. "The trajectory is just incredible," C3S director Carlo Buontempo told Reuters, describing how every month in 2024 was the warmest
  
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• See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked To Spy On Your Location

  10-01-2025 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Some of the world's most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement. The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games likeCandy Crushand dating a
  
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• Ants Best Humans At Test of Collective Intelligence

  10-01-2025 02:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Christie Wilcox reports via Science.org: Both longhorn crazy ants (Paratrechina longicornis) and humans can figure out how to work together to move an unwieldy object through a series of obstacles. So scientists pitted the two against each other. They had individuals and groups of different sizes of both species maneuver a T-shaped object through holes in walls (as seen in the video above), both of which were scaled to the body size of the participants. This kind of puzzle is hard for ants becau
  
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• Biden To Further Limit AI Chip Exports In Final Push

  10-01-2025 02:01 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The Biden administration plans one additional round of restrictions on the export of AI chips before leaving office, "a final push in his effort to keep advanced technologies out of the hands of China and Russia," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The US wants to curb the sale of AI chips used in data centers on both a country and company basis, with the goal of concentrating AI development in friendly nations and getting businesses around the world to align with American standards, according
  
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• Nvidia CEO: Quantum Computers Won't Be Very Useful for Another 20 Years

  10-01-2025 01:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said quantum computers won't be very useful for another 20 years, causing stocks in this emerging sector to plunge more than 40% for a total market value loss of over $8 billion. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that'd probably be on the early side. If you said 30, is probably on the late side. But if you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it," Huang said during a Q&A with analysts. PCMag reports: The field of quantum
  
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• Wall Street Job Losses May Top 200,000 As AI Replaces Roles

  10-01-2025 00:40 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Global banks will cut as many as 200,000 jobs in the next three to five years as artificial intelligence encroaches on tasks currently carried out by human workers, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Chief information and technology officers surveyed for BI indicated that on average they expect a net 3% of their workforce to be cut, according to a report published Thursday. Back office, middle office and operations are likely to be most at ri
  
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• OpenAI Cuts Off Engineer Who Created ChatGPT-Powered Robotic Sentry Rifle

  10-01-2025 00:00 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI has shut down the developer behind a viral device that could respond to ChatGPT queries to aim and fire an automated rifle. Futurism reports: The contraption, as seen in a video that's been making its rounds on social media, sparked a frenzied debate over our undying attempts to turn dystopian tech yanked straight out of the "Terminator" franchise into a reality. STS 3D's invention also apparently caught the attention of OpenAI, who says it swiftly shut him down for violating its policies
  
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