ICT news

• 2025 Will Likely Be Another Brutal Year of Failed Startups, Data Suggests

  27-01-2025 23:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: TechCrunch gathered data from several sources and found similar trends. In 2024, 966 startups shut down, compared to 769 in 2023, according to Carta. That's a 25.6% increase. One note on methodology: Those numbers are for U.S.-based companies that were Carta customers and left Carta due to bankruptcy or dissolution. There are likely other shutdowns that wouldn't be accounted for through Carta, estimates Peter Walker, Carta's head of insights.
  
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• Dangerous Temperatures Could Kill 50% More Europeans By 2100, Study Finds

  27-01-2025 22:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Dangerous temperatures could kill 50% more people in Europe by the end of the century, a study has found, with the lives lost to stronger heat projected to outnumber those saved from milder cold. From a report: The researchers estimated an extra 8,000 people would die each year as a result of "suboptimal temperatures" even under the most optimistic scenario for cutting planet-heating pollution. The hottest plausible scenario they considered showed a net increase of 80,000 temperature-related dea
  
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• Google Has Open-Sourced the Pebble Smartwatch OS

  27-01-2025 22:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Google has open-sourced the PebbleOS, with the original founder, Eric Migicovsky, starting a company to continue where he left off in 2016. "This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016," said Google in a blog post. The Verge reports: The company -- which can't be named Pebble because Google still owns that -- doesn't have a name yet. For now, Migic
  
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• Microsoft Takes on MongoDB with PostgreSQL-Based Document Database

  27-01-2025 21:22 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has launched an open-source document database platform built on PostgreSQL, partnering with FerretDB as a front-end interface. The solution includes two PostgreSQL extensions: pg_documentdb_core for BSON optimization and pg_documentdb_api for data operations.
  FerretDB CEO Peter Farkas said the integration with Microsoft's DocumentDB extension has improved performance twentyfold for certain workloads in FerretDB 2.0. The platform carries no commercial licensing fees or usage restriction
  
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• Nvidia Dismisses China AI Threat, Says DeepSeek Still Needs Its Chips

  27-01-2025 20:34 via slashdot.org
  
  Nvidia has responded to the market panic over Chinese AI group DeepSeek, arguing that the startup's breakthrough still requires "significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs" for its operation. The US chipmaker, which saw more than $600 billion wiped from its market value on Monday, characterized DeepSeek's advancement as "excellent" but asserted that the technology remains dependent on its hardware.
  "DeepSeek's work illustrates how new models can be created using [test time scaling], leveraging widely-av
  
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• DeepSeek Piles Pressure on AI Rivals With New Image Model Release

  27-01-2025 20:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has launched Janus Pro, a new family of open-source multimodal models that it claims outperforms OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion's offering on key benchmarks. The models, ranging from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters, are available on Hugging Face under an MIT license for commercial use.
  The largest model, Janus Pro 7B, surpasses DALL-E 3 and other image generators on GenEval and DPG-Bench tests, despite being limited to 384 x 384 pixel images.Read more of thi
  
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• Meta's AI Chatbot Taps User Data With No Opt-Out Option

  27-01-2025 19:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Meta's AI chatbot will now use personal data from users' Facebook and Instagram accounts for personalized responses in the United States and Canada, the company said in a blog post. The upgraded Meta AI can remember user preferences from previous conversations across Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, such as dietary choices and interests. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the feature helps create personalized content like bedtime stories based on his children's interests. Users cannot opt out of the dat
  
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• JD Vance Says Big Tech Has 'Too Much Power'

  27-01-2025 18:42 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Vice President JD Vance said Saturday that "we believe fundamentally that big tech does have too much power," despite the prominent positioning of tech CEOs at President Trump's inauguration earlier this month. From a report: "They can either respect America's constitutional rights, they can stop engaging in censorship, and if they don't, you can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump's leadership is not going to look too kindly on them," Vance said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."
  The
  
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• Meta Sets Up War Rooms To Analyze DeepSeek's Tech

  27-01-2025 17:48 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta has set up four war rooms to analyze DeepSeek's technology, including two focusing on how High-Flyer reduced training costs, and one on what data High-Flyer may have used, The Information's Kalley Huang and Stephanie Palazzolo report. China's DeepSeek is a large-language open source model that claims to rival offerings from OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta Platforms, while using a much smaller budgets.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• DeepSeek Says Service Degraded Due To 'Large-Scale Malicious Attack'

  27-01-2025 17:15 via it.slashdot.org
  Chinese AI firm DeepSeek said Monday it had degraded the service, only accepting registration of new users with China-code phones numbers, amid a "large-scale malicious attack."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• The Cancer That Doctors Don't Want to Call Cancer

  27-01-2025 16:21 via science.slashdot.org
  
  A growing number of doctors are advocating to rename low-grade prostate cancer to reduce unnecessary aggressive treatments that can lead to debilitating side effects. About one-quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer have the lowest-risk form, yet studies show 40% opt for surgery or radiation despite recommendations for active surveillance.
  The push comes amid mounting evidence that careful monitoring is effective in managing low-grade cases. A U.K. study of 1,600 men found similar 15-year
  
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• Two Hundred UK Companies Sign Up For Permanent Four-day Working Week

  27-01-2025 15:44 via news.slashdot.org
  
  AmiMoJo shares a report: Two hundred UK companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all their employees with no loss of pay, in the latest landmark in the campaign to reinvent Britain's working week. Together the companies employ more than 5,000 people, with charities, marketing and technology firms among the best-represented, according to the latest update from the 4 Day Week Foundation. Proponents of the four-day week say that the five-day pattern is a hangover from an e
  
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• DeepSeek Rattles Wall Street With Claims of Cheaper AI Breakthroughs

  27-01-2025 15:02 via slashdot.org
  
  Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is challenging U.S. tech giants with claims it can deliver performance comparable to leading AI models at a fraction of the cost, sparking debate among Wall Street analysts about the industry's massive spending plans. While Jefferies warns that DeepSeek's efficient approach "punctures some of the capex euphoria" following Meta and Microsoft's $60 billion commitments this year, Citi questions whether such results were achieved without advanced GPUs.
  Goldman Sachs sugge
  
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• Bill Gates Thanks Parents in New Memoir, Acknowledges 'Lucky Timing' and Possible Autism

  27-01-2025 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  In Friday's excerpt from Bill Gates' upcoming memoir, the Microsoft co-founder acknowledges that "It's impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. To be born in the rich U.S. is a big part of a winning birth-lottery ticket... Add to that my lucky timing..."
  The biggest part of my good fortune was being born to Bill and Mary Gates — parents who struggled with their complicated son but ultimately seemed to intuitively understand how to guide him. If I were growing up today, I p
  
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• Internet-Connected 'Smart' Products for Babies Suddenly Start Charging Subscription Fees

  27-01-2025 09:34 via slashdot.org
  
  The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...)
  But today the Washington Post reported on a $1,700 bassinet that surprised the mother of a one-month-old when it "abruptly demanded money for a feature she relied on to soothe her baby to sleep."The internet-con
  
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• Should Big Tech Plug Its Data Centers Directly Into Power Plants?

  27-01-2025 06:56 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly," reports the Associated Press, "avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else." (It can take up to four years to connect a data center to the grid, one data center trade group says in the article — years longer than it takes to build a new data center.
  
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• The 'Super Bowl for Nerds': Scenes from the Microsoft Excel World Championship

  27-01-2025 04:58 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  At December's "Microsoft Excel World Championship" in Las Vegas, "finance professionals fluent in spreadsheets were treated like minor celebrities," writes the New York Times, "as they gathered to solve devilishly complex Excel puzzles in front of an audience of about 400 people, and more watching an ESPN3 livestream."
  The Times notes that "many fans find out about the Excel championship through ESPN's annual obscure sports showcase, where it is sandwiched between competitions like speed chess a
  
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• Another Undersea Cable Damaged in Baltic Sea. Criminal Sabotage Investigation Launched

  27-01-2025 02:47 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "An underwater data cable between Sweden and Latvia was damaged early on Sunday," reports the Financial Times, "in at least the fourth episode of potential sabotage in the Baltic Sea that has caused concern in Nato about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure..." Criminal investigations have started in Latvia and Sweden, and a ship has been seized as part of the probes, according to Swedish prosecutors, who did not identify the vessel. Previous incidents have been linked to Russian and Chi
  
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• A New Bid for TikTok from Perplexity AI Would Give the US Government a 50% Stake

  27-01-2025 01:04 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:Perplexity AI has presented a new proposal to TikTok's parent company that would allow the U.S. government to own up to 50% of a new entity that merges Perplexity with TikTok's U.S. business, according to a person familiar with the matter... The new proposal would allow the U.S. government to own up to half of that new structure once it makes an initial public offering of at least $300 billion, said the person, who was not authoriz
  
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• Biometrics, Windmills, and VHS tapes: The Winners of 'Rest of World' International Tech Photo Contest

  27-01-2025 00:04 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Since launching in 2020, the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org has been covering tech news from 100 countries. And they've just announced the winners in their 2024 international photography contest.
  "From Cape Verde to Bhutan, we received 227 entries from over 45 countries around the world, featuring everything from sprawling mines to biometric facial scans."Like last year, the majority of the entries in our 2024 photography contest captured on-the-ground realities of how technology is transforming
  
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