ICT news

• 'Snowball Earth' Evolution Hypothesis Gains New Momentum

  12-01-2025 23:03 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The University of Colorado Boulder's magazine recently wrote:
  What happened during the "Snowball Earth" period is perplexing: Just as the planet endured about 100 million years of deep freeze, with a thick layer of ice covering most of Earth and with low levels of atmospheric oxygen, forms of multicellular life emerged. Why? The prevailing scientific view is that such frigid temperatures would slow rather than speed evolution. But fossil records from 720 to 635 million years ago show an evolutio
  
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• New LLM Jailbreak Uses Models' Evaluation Skills Against Them

  12-01-2025 21:13 via it.slashdot.org
  
  SC Media reports on a new jailbreak method for large language models (LLMs) that "takes advantage of models' ability to identify and score harmful content in order to trick the models into generating content related to malware, illegal activity, harassment and more.
  "The 'Bad Likert Judge' multi-step jailbreak technique was developed and tested by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, and was found to increase the success rate of jailbreak attempts by more than 60% when compared with direct single-turn at
  
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• Three New Superconductive Materials Were Discovered in 2024

  12-01-2025 19:56 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "This year, superconductivity — the flow of electric current with zero resistance — was discovered in three distinct materials," reports Quanta magazine. "Two instances stretch the textbook understanding of the phenomenon. The third shreds it completely...."
  After four years of reserch a team at Columbia assembled a "two-sheet device, cooled it down, and watched it superconduct..." A lab at Cornell found "a species of superconductivity that no one had seen coming." And then "Over the
  
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• California's Wildfires Still Burn. Prison Inmates Join the Fight

  12-01-2025 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  As an ecological disaster devastated two coastal California cities, more than 7,500 firefighters pushed back against the wildfires. 900 of them are inmates, reports NPR. That's about 12%:California is one of more than a dozen states that operates conservation camps, commonly known as fire camps, for incarcerated people to train to fight fires and respond to other disasters... There are now 35 such camps in California, all of which are minimum-security facilities... When they are not fighting fir
  
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• Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way to Transfer Legacy PHP Code to a Modern Framework?

  12-01-2025 17:34 via ask.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader rzack writes:
  Since 1999, I've written a huge amount of PHP code, for dozens of applications and websites. Most of it has been continually updated, and remains active and in-production, in one form or another.
  Here's the thing. It's all hand-written using vi, even to this day.
  Is there any benefit to migrating this codebase to a more modern PHP framework, like Laravel? And is there an easy and minimally intrusive way this can be done en-masse, across dozens of applications and we
  
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• TikTok, Facing a US Ban, Is Also Waging Legal Battles Around the World

  12-01-2025 16:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times:Russia fined TikTok for not removing prohibited content. The results of a presidential election in Romania were thrown out over concerns the app had been used to spread foreign influence. Albania banned TikTok for a year following the stabbing death of a teenager by another one after the two quarreled online... That was all in just the last month...
  TikTok has confronted legal and political scrutiny around the world in recent years,
  
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• Ford's EV Sales Spiked 34.8% in 2024. Electric 'Mustang Mach-E' Outsells Gas-Powered Mustangs

  12-01-2025 13:27 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "Every Ford EV model set a new sales record in 2024 with double-digit growth," reports Electrek, with Ford's total U.S. electric vehicle sales jumping to 97,865, an increase of 34.8% from 2023.And in the last three months of 2024 Ford sold 30,176 EVs — which is also a new record.The Mustang Mach-E had its best sales quarter since launching in late 2020, with 16,119 models sold in Q4. With 51,745 Mach-Es sold last year, it was the second-best-selling electric SUV in the US, behind the Tesla
  
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• Google Wants to Track Your Digital Fingerprints Again

  12-01-2025 10:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is reintroducing "digital fingerprinting" in five weeks, reports Mashable, describing it as "a data collection process that ingests all of your online signals (from IP address to complex browser information) and pinpoints unique users or devices." Or, to put it another way, Google "is tracking your online behavior in the name of advertising."
  The UK's Information Commissioner's Office called Google's decision "irresponsible":
  it is likely to reduce people's choice and control over how the
  
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• Futurist Predicts AI-Powered 'Digital Superpowers' by 2030

  12-01-2025 07:07 via slashdot.org
  
  Unanimous AI's founder Louis Rosenberg predicts a "wave" of new superhuman abilities is coming soon that we experience profoundly "as self-embodied skills that we carry around with us throughout our lives"...
  "[B]y 2030, a majority of us will live our lives with context-aware AI agents bringing digital superpowers into our daily experiences."
  They will be unleashed by context-aware AI agents that are loaded into body-worn devices that see what we see, hear what we hear, experience what we experi
  
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• JPMorgan Chase Disables Employee Comments After Return-to-Office Backlash

  12-01-2025 04:07 via it.slashdot.org
  
  "JPMorgan Chase shut down comments on an internal webpage announcing the bank's return-to-office policy," reports the Wall Street Journal, "after dozens of them criticized the move and at least one suggested that affected employees should unionize, according to people familiar with the matter."The bank's senior executives announced in an internal memo Friday that JPMorgan Chase would require all of its roughly 300,000 employees to work full time from the office starting in March, with only a lim
  
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• Enron.com Announces Pre-Orders for Egg-Shaped Home Nuclear Reactor

  12-01-2025 01:12 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  "Nuclear you can trust," reads the web page promoting "The Egg, an at home nuclear reactor."Yes, Enron.com is now announcing "a micro-nuclear reactor made to power your home." (A quick reminder from CNN in December. "A company that makes T-shirts bought the Enron trademark and appears to be trying to sell some merch on behalf of the guy behind the satirical conspiracy theory "Birds Aren't Real....")
  Does that explain how we got a product reveal for "the world's first micro-nuclear reactor for re
  
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