ICT news

• Bad Week for Unoccupied Waymo Cars: One Hit in Fatal Collision, One Vandalized by Mob

  26-01-2025 22:52 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  For the first time in America, an empty self-driving car has been involved in a fatal collision. But it was "hit from behind by a speeding car that was going about 98 miles per hour," a local news site reports, citing comments from Waymo. ("Two other victims were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. A dog also died in the crash, according to the San Francisco Fire Department.")
  Waymo's self-driving car "is not being blamed," notes NBC Bay Area. Instead the Waymo car was one of s
  
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• Cory Doctorow Asks: Can Interoperability End 'Enshittification' and Fix Social Media?

  26-01-2025 21:46 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints."
  If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monst
  
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• California's Battery Plant Fire Sparks Call for Investigation, New Regulations

  26-01-2025 19:43 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Earlier this month a major fire erupted at a California battery plant. But several factors contributed to its rapid spread, the fire district's chief told the Los Angeles Times:
  A fire suppression system that is part of every battery rack at the plant failed and led to a chain reaction of batteries catching on fire, he said at a news conference last week. Then, a broken camera system in the plant and superheated gases made it challenging for firefighters to intervene. Once the fire began spreadi
  
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• New Michigan Law Requires High Schools to Offer CS Classes

  26-01-2025 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The state of Michigan will now require each public high school in the state to offer at least one computer science course to its students. "This bill aligns Michigan with a majority of the country," according to the state's announcement, which says the bill "advances technological literacy" and ensures their students "are well-equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary for success in the workforce."Slashdot reader theodp writes:From the Michigan House Fiscal Agency Analysis: "Supporter
  
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• Linux 6.14 Brings Some Systems Faster Suspend and Resume

  26-01-2025 17:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Amid the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel development cycle, Phoronix spotted a pull request for ACPI updates which "will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems."
  Wikipedia defines ACPI as "an open standard that operating systems can use to discover and configure computer hardware components" for things like power management and putting unused hardware components to sleep. Phoronix reports:The ACPI change worth highlighting for Linux 6.14 is switching from msleep() to usleep_range()
  
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• Europe Made More Electricity from Solar Than Coal In 2024

  26-01-2025 16:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian:
  More electricity was made from sunshine than coal in the EU last year, a report has found, in what analysts called a "milestone" for the clean energy transition. Solar panels generated 11% of the EU's electricity in 2024, while coal-burning power plants generated 10%, according to data from climate thinktank Ember...
  Coal-burning in the EU power sector peaked in 2003 and has fallen by 68% since then. At the same time, clean
  
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• New CIA Director Touts 'Low Confidence' Assessment About Covid Lab Leak Theory

  26-01-2025 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: "Every US intelligence agency still unanimously maintains that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon," CNN reported today.
  But what about the possibility of an accidental leak (rather than Covid-19 originating from wild animal meat traded the Wuhan Market)? "The agency has for years said it did not have enough information to determine which origin theory was more likely."
  CNN notes there's suddenly been a new announcement "just days" after the CIA's
  
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• FSF: Meta's License for Its Llama 3.1 AI Model 'is Not a Free Software License'

  26-01-2025 09:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  July saw the news that Meta had launched a powerful open-source AI model, Llama 3.1.
  But the Free Software Foundation evaluated Llama 3.1's license agreement, and announced this week that "this is not a free software license and you should not use it, nor any software released under it."
  Not only does it deny users their freedom, but it also purports to hand over powers to the licensors that should only be exercised through lawmaking by democratically-elected governments.
  Moreover, it has been a
  
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• Bill Gates Began the Altair BASIC Code in His Head While Hiking as a Teenager

  26-01-2025 06:04 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Friday Bill Gates shared an excerpt from his upcoming memoir Source Code: My Beginnings. Published in the Wall Street Journal, the excerpt includes pictures of young Bill Gates when he was 12 (dressed for a hike) and 14 (studying a teletype machine).
  Gates remembers forming "a sort of splinter group" from the Boy Scouts when he was 13 with a group of boys who "wanted more freedom and more risk" and took long hikes around Seattle, travelling hundreds of miles together on hikes as long as "seven d
  
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• Oracle and US Investors (Including Microsoft) Discuss Taking Control of TikTok in the US

  26-01-2025 03:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  A plan to keep TikTok available in the U.S. "involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors," reports NPR, "to effectively take control of the app's global operations, according to two people with direct knowledge of the talks..."
  "[P]otential investors who are engaged in the talks include Microsoft."Under the deal now being negotiated by the White House, TikTok's China-based owner ByteDance would retain a minority stake in the company, but the app's algorithm, data co
  
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• Could New Linux Code Cut Data Center Energy Use By 30%?

  26-01-2025 00:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics.
  It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article:The team tested their solution's effectiveness and submitted it to Linux for consideration, and the code was published this month as part
  
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