ICT news

• Apple Enlists Veteran Software Executive To Help Fix AI and Siri

  24-01-2025 23:50 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple executive Kim Vorrath, a company veteran known for fixing troubled products and bringing major projects to market, has a new job: whipping artificial intelligence and Siri into shape. Vorrath, a vice president in charge of program management, was moved to Apple's artificial intelligence and machine learning division this week, according to people with knowledge of the matter. She'll be a top deputy to AI chief John Giannandrea, said the p
  
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• Ask Slashdot: What Matters When Buying a New Smartphone?

  24-01-2025 23:10 via ask.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader shanen writes: What matters to you when buying a new smartphone? How can we make the recurring topic relevant without more SCREAMS about "dupe"? I do have a bit of recent research I could share -- quite a bit of fresh data since my latest search started a couple of months ago. Or perhaps I could start with a summary of the useful bits from an ancient Ask Slashdot discussion about batteries?Seems funny to ask about relevant books, even though two come to mind already. One
  
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• Netflix's Cloud Plans Include Co-Op and Party Games

  24-01-2025 22:30 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Netflix plans to expand its cloud gaming offerings to include couch co-op and party games, according to co-CEO Greg Peters. The company will also continue developing narrative games based on its IP, despite recent leadership changes and the closure of its AAA game studio. The Verge reports: In the blog post, Netflix notes that it's a "limited" beta test, so it seems like this won't be available to too many people to start. (Netflix used that same "limited" language with the initial launch in Can
  
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• Complexity Physics Finds Crucial Tipping Points In Chess Games

  24-01-2025 21:50 via games.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy, a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies. Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishi
  
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• FBI: North Korean IT Workers Steal Source Code To Extort Employers

  24-01-2025 19:50 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The FBI warned this week that North Korean IT workers are abusing their access to steal source code and extort U.S. companies that have been tricked into hiring them. From a report: The security service alerted public and private sector organizations in the United States and worldwide that North Korea's IT army will facilitate cyber-criminal activities and demand ransoms not to leak online exfiltrated sensitive data stolen from their employers' networks. "North Korean IT workers have copied comp
  
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• Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It's Now a $200 Million Fiasco

  24-01-2025 19:12 via slashdot.org
  
  Walgreens Boots Alliance has ended a $200 million digital display venture with startup Cooler Screens after widespread technical failures and poor revenue, removing thousands of smart screens from its store freezer doors [non-paywalled link]. The screens, which displayed product information and ads, frequently crashed, showed incorrect inventory, and occasionally caught fire, Bloomberg reports.
  Cooler Screens CEO Arsen Avakian cut data feeds to over 100 Chicago-area stores in December 2023 durin
  
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• Electric Cars in UK Last as Long as Petrol and Diesel Vehicles, Study Finds

  24-01-2025 18:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Battery cars on Britain's roads are lasting as long as petrol and diesel cars, according to a study that has found a rapid improvement in electric vehicle reliability. From a report: An international team of researchers has estimated that an electric car will have a lifespan of 18.4 years, compared with 18.7 years for petrol cars and 16.8 years for diesels, according to a peer-reviewed study published on Friday in the journal Nature Energy. The findings were based on 300m records from compulsory
  
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• Sony To End Blu-ray Media Production After 18 Years

  24-01-2025 17:49 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Sony will cease production of recordable Blu-ray discs at its last factory in February, ending an 18-year manufacturing run amid declining demand for physical media. The Japanese electronics giant will also halt production of MiniDiscs and MiniDV cassettes. The company had already stopped making consumer recordable Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, maintaining production only for business clients.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Meta To Spend Up To $65 Billion This Year To Power AI Goals

  24-01-2025 17:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion this year to build out AI infrastructure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday, joining a wave of Big Tech firms unveiling hefty investments to capitalize on the technology. From a report: As part of the investment, Meta will build a more than 2-gigawatt data center that would be large enough to cover a significant part of Manhattan. The company -- one of the largest customers of Nvidia's coveted artificial intelligence chips -- plans to end
  
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• Pioneering CERN Scheme Will Pay Publishers More If They Hit Open-Science Targets

  24-01-2025 16:20 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Leaders at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, will introduce financial incentives for academic publishers to adopt open science policies as part of the organization's collective agreement with 11 particle-physics journals. From a report: The current scheme sees those journals publish work from the field openly and at no cost to authors, in exchange for bulk payments. Under the newly launched initiative, CERN will pay more to publishers that adopt polices such as u
  
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• Google Agrees To Crack Down on Fake Reviews for UK Businesses

  24-01-2025 15:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google will take firmer action against British businesses that use fake reviews to boost their star ratings on the search giant's reviews platform. From a report: The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that Google has agreed to improve its processes for detecting and removing fake reviews, and will take action against the businesses and reviewers that post them.
  This includes deactivating the ability to add new reviews for businesses found to be using fake reviews,
  
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• Private Equity Firm HongShan Acquires Rock Icon Marshall For $1.15 Billion

  24-01-2025 14:31 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Chinese venture capital and private equity firm HongShan, formerly part of Sequoia, said on Friday it has struck a deal to acquire a majority stake in Marshall in a deal valuing the audio equipment maker at $1.15 billion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Backdoor Infecting VPNs Used 'Magic Packets' For Stealth and Security

  24-01-2025 14:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can't be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what's known in the business as a "magic packet." On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise
  
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• Scale AI CEO Says China Has Quickly Caught the US With DeepSeek

  24-01-2025 13:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. may have led China in the AI race for the past decade, according to Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, but on Christmas Day, everything changed. From a report: Wang, whose company provides training data to key AI players including OpenAI, Google and Meta , said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that DeepSeek, the leading Chinese AI lab, released an "earth-shattering model" on Christmas Day, then followed it up with a powerful reasoning-focused AI model, DeepSeek-R
  
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• Chinese Fusion Reactor Maintains Steady State For Almost 18 Minutes

  24-01-2025 11:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot readers smooth wombat and AmiMoJo shares a fusion energy breakthrough from China. Charming Science reports: China's "artificial sun," officially known as the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), has achieved a groundbreaking milestone in fusion energy research. According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), EAST recently sustained high-confinement plasma operation for an unprecedented 1,066 seconds, shattering the previous world record of 403 seconds, also
  
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• Trump Signs Executive Order on Developing AI 'Free From Ideological Bias'

  24-01-2025 08:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  President Donald Trump signed an executive order on AI Thursday that will revoke past government policies his order says "act as barriers to American AI innovation." From a report: To maintain global leadership in AI technology, "we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas," Trump's order says. The new order doesn't name which existing policies are hindering AI development but sets out to track down and review "all policies, directives, regulations
  
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• Dumb New Electrical Code Could Doom Most Common EV Charging

  24-01-2025 06:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from MotorTrend: A coming ground-fault circuit-interrupter revision could make slow-charging your car nearly impossible. The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) publishes a new National Electric Code every three years, and we almost never notice or care. But the next one, NFPA 70 2026, has the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) electric-vehicle charging subcommittee, OEMs, and companies in the EV Supply Equipment (EVSE, or charger) biz might
  
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• Bill Gates' TerraPower Signs Agreement For Nuclear To Power Data Centers

  24-01-2025 04:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup founded by Bill Gates, struck a deal this week with one of the largest data center developers in the US to deploy advanced nuclear reactors. TerraPower and Sabey Data Centers (SDC) are working together on a plan to run existing and future facilities on nuclear energy from small reactors. A memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies establishes a "strategic collaboration" that'll initially look i
  
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• Misinformation and Cyberespionage Top WEF's Global Risks Report 2025

  24-01-2025 02:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2025 (PDF) highlights misinformation as the top global risk due to generative AI tools and state-sponsored campaigns undermining democratic systems, while cyberespionage ranks as a persistent threat with inadequate cyber resilience, especially among small organizations. From a report: The manipulation of information through gen AI and state-sponsored campaigns is disrupting democratic systems and undermining public trust in critical institutions. Ef
  
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• Epic Games To Cover Developer iOS Fees

  24-01-2025 02:00 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Epic Games is expanding its mobile app store to include nearly 20 third-party games on Android and EU iOS, launching a free games program, and temporarily covering Apple's Core Technology Fee for participating developers to counter platform restrictions. "Our aim here isn't just to launch a bunch of different stores in different places, but to build a single, cross-platform store in which, within the era of multi-platform games, if you buy a game or digital items in one place, you have the abili
  
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• Linux 6.14 Adds Support For The Microsoft Copilot Key Found On New Laptops

  24-01-2025 01:20 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  The Linux 6.14 kernel now maps out support for Microsoft's "Copilot" key "so that user-space software can determine the behavior for handling that key's action on the Linux desktop," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. From the report: A change made to the atkbd keyboard driver on Linux now maps the F23 key to support the default copilot shortcut action. The patch authored by Lenovo engineer Mark Pearson explains [...]. Now it's up to the Linux desktop environments for determining what to do if t
  
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• Scammers Use Venmo To 'Deceive and Defraud Customers' On Flights

  24-01-2025 00:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: The same morning that JetBlue Airways announced that it was the first airline partnering with Venmo to begin accepting payments for booking flights, an account on the popular payment platform was already raking in money. A Venmo user named Owen Miller paid the JetBlue Checkpoint Store for a drink on Wednesday morning, which is a typical transaction between a traveler and airline, except for the fact that JetBlue doesn't operate that account. "At t
  
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• Intel Pitches Modular PC Designs To Make Repairs Less Painful

  24-01-2025 00:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Intel is advocating for modular PC designs to improve repairability, reduce e-waste, and align with the right-to-repair movement. A trio of executives makes their case for such designs in a recent blog post. The Register reports: Intel's approach to the problem is to draft three proposals targeting different market segments, saying that a one-size-fits-all approach would not be able to address the nuanced demands of these varied segments. Those three segments comprise "Premium Modular PC" (actua
  
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