ICT news

• Apple Chips Can Be Hacked To Leak Secrets From Gmail, ICloud, and More

  28-01-2025 23:25 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple-designed chips powering Macs, iPhones, and iPads contain two newly discovered vulnerabilities that leak credit card information, locations, and other sensitive data from the Chrome and Safari browsers as they visit sites such as iCloud Calendar, Google Maps, and Proton Mail. The vulnerabilities, affecting the CPUs in later generations of Apple A- and M-series chip sets, open them to side channel attacks, a class of exploit that infers
  
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• Hugging Face Researchers Are Trying To Build a More Open Version of DeepSeek's AI 'Reasoning' Model

  28-01-2025 22:45 via slashdot.org
  
  Hugging Face researchers are attempting to recreate DeepSeek's R1 artificial intelligence model in an open-source format, just days after the Chinese AI lab's release sent markets soaring. The project, called Open-R1, aims to replicate R1's reasoning capabilities while making its training data and code publicly available. DeepSeek's R1 model, which matches or surpasses OpenAI's o1 on several benchmarks, was released with a permissive license but keeps its underlying architecture private. Hugging
  
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• FCC Will Drop Biden Plan To Ban Bulk Broadband Billing For Tenants

  28-01-2025 22:05 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Federal Communications Commission will abandon a proposal that would have banned mandatory internet service charges for apartment and condominium residents. FCC Chair Brendan Carr halted the Biden-era plan that sought to prevent landlords from requiring tenants to pay for specific broadband providers. Housing industry groups said they welcomed the decision, arguing bulk billing arrangements help secure discounted rates. They claim these agreements can reduce internet costs by up to 50%. Howe
  
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• Pay Raises Are Shrinking in 2025, CFOs Say

  28-01-2025 21:25 via slashdot.org
  
  Companies are planning smaller raises this year, according to a new survey of chief financial officers from Gartner. From a report: It's become harder to find a job, particularly in the white-collar world. So employers are far less worried about people quitting and don't need to do as much to get workers to stick around. "Nobody is talking about the Great Resignation anymore," says Randeep Rathindran, a vice president in the finance practice at Gartner. The vast majority of employers, 94%, are s
  
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• LinkedIn Removes Accounts of AI 'Co-Workers' Looking for Jobs

  28-01-2025 20:49 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI "co-workers" whose profile images said they were "#OpenToWork." "I don't need coffee breaks, I don't miss deadlines, and I'll outperform any social media team you've ever worked with -- Guaranteed," the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. "Tired of human 'experts' making excuses? I deliver, period." The #OpenToWork flair on profile pictures is a feature on LinkedIn tha
  
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• Atomic Scientists Adjust 'Doomsday Clock' Closer Than Ever To Midnight

  28-01-2025 19:10 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight on Tuesday, the closest to catastrophe in the timepiece's 78-year history. The Chicago-based group cited Russia's nuclear threats during its Ukraine invasion, growing tensions in the Middle East, China's military pressure near Taiwan, and the rapid advancement of AI as key factors. The symbolic clock, created in 1947 by scientists including Albert Einstein, moved one second closer than last year's setting.
  
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• UK Considers Making Netflix Users Pay License Fee to Fund BBC

  28-01-2025 18:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The UK is considering making households who only use streaming services such as Netflix and Disney pay the BBC license fee, as part of plans to modernize the way it funds the public-service broadcaster. Bloomberg: Extending the fee to streaming applications is on a menu of options being discussed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office, the Treasury and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing internal governme
  
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• Garmin Users Say Their Watches Are Bricked With a 'Blue Triangle of Death'

  28-01-2025 17:41 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Garmin smartwatches are freezing in boot loops, users are reporting globally, with devices displaying a "blue triangle of death" when attempting GPS activities, affecting models across the Epix, Venu, Forerunner, Descent, and Fenix lines.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Google To Cut Off Chrome Sync for Older Browser Versions

  28-01-2025 17:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google says it will end Chrome Sync support for browser versions more than four years old starting in early 2025. Users running outdated Chrome versions will see error messages prompting them to update their browsers to maintain access to synced data across devices. Those unable to update to newer versions will permanently lose the syncing feature, according to the firm.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Cloud Services Market Is 'Not Working,' Says UK Regulator

  28-01-2025 16:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The UK's competition watchdog has found that its $11.2 billion cloud services market "is not working," with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft each controlling up to 40% of the market. In provisional findings released Tuesday, the Competition and Markets Authority said the lack of competition likely leads to higher costs and reduced innovation for UK businesses. The regulator has recommended designating both companies with "strategic market status," which would allow closer scrutiny of their prac
  
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• Bookshop Takes On Amazon With E-book Platform For Independent Stores

  28-01-2025 15:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Bookshop.org has launched an e-book platform and mobile app that allows independent bookstores to sell digital books, marking its latest effort to compete with Amazon in the online book market. The platform enables bookstores to sell e-books directly through their websites, with stores receiving all profits from direct sales. When customers buy e-books through Bookshop.org without selecting a specific store, 30% of profits will be shared among member bookstores.
  The move comes as most independen
  
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• DeepSeek Has Spent Over $500 Million on Nvidia Chips Despite Low-Cost AI Claims, SemiAnalysis Says

  28-01-2025 15:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Nvidia shares plunged 17% on Monday, wiping nearly $600 billion from its market value, after Chinese AI firm DeepSeek's breakthrough, but analysts are questioning the cost narrative. DeepSeek said to have trained its December V3 model for $5.6 million, but chip consultancy SemiAnalysis suggested this figure doesn't reflect total investments. "DeepSeek has spent well over $500 million on GPUs over the history of the company," Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis said. "While their training run was very ef
  
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• New FPGA-Powered Retro Console Re-Creates the PlayStation

  28-01-2025 14:00 via games.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [A] company called Retro Remake is reigniting the console wars of the 1990s with its SuperStation one, a new-old game console designed to play original Sony PlayStation games and work with original accessories like controllers and memory cards. Currently available as a $180 pre-order, Retro Remake expects the consoles to ship no later than Q4 of 2025. The base console is modeled on the redesigned PSOne console from mid-2000, released late in
  
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• HomePod With Screen 'Most Significant New Apple Product' of 2025, Says Gurman

  28-01-2025 11:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  In his latest Power On! newsletter, Apple analyst Mark Gurman called the company's new smart device "Apple's most significant release of the year because it's the first step toward a bigger role in the smart home." The device in question is rumored to be a new smart hub that could look like a HomePod with a seven-inch screen. Digital Trends reports: Gurman calls the new smart device a "smaller and cheaper iPad that lets users control appliances, conduct FaceTime chats and handle other tasks." It
  
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• Peeing Is Socially Contagious In Chimps

  28-01-2025 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  After observing 20 chimpanzees for over 600 hours, researchers in Japan found that chimps are more likely to urinate after witnessing others do so. "[T]he team meticulously recorded the number and timing of 'urination events' along with the relative distances between 'the urinator and potential followers,'" writes 404 Media's Becky Ferreira. "The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watch
  
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• 'AI Is Too Unpredictable To Behave According To Human Goals'

  28-01-2025 04:30 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a Scientific American opinion piece by Marcus Arvan, a philosophy professor at the University of Tampa, specializing in moral cognition, rational decision-making, and political behavior: In late 2022 large-language-model AI arrived in public, and within months they began misbehaving. Most famously, Microsoft's "Sydney" chatbot threatened to kill an Australian philosophy professor, unleash a deadly virus and steal nuclear codes. AI developers, including Microsoft and Op
  
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• US Solar Boom Continues, But It's Offset By Rising Power Use

  28-01-2025 02:40 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  In the first 11 months of 2024, solar energy generation in the US grew by 30%, enabling wind and solar combined to surpass coal for the first time. However, as Ars Technica's John Timmer reports, "U.S. energy demand saw an increase of nearly 3 percent, which is roughly double the amount of additional solar generation." He continues: "Should electric use continue to grow at a similar pace, renewable production will have to continue to grow dramatically for a few years before it can simply cover t
  
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• Software Flaw Exposes Millions of Subarus, Rivers of Driver Data

  28-01-2025 02:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  chicksdaddy share a report from the Security Ledger: Vulnerabilities in Subaru's STARLINK telematics software enabled two, independent security researchers to gain unrestricted access to millions of Subaru vehicles deployed in the U.S., Canada and Japan. In a report published Thursday researchers Sam Curry and Shubham Shah revealed a now-patched flaw in Subaru's STARLINK connected vehicle service that allowed them to remotely control Subarus and access vehicle location information and driver dat
  
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• UK Council Sells Assets To Fund Ballooning $50 Million Oracle Project

  28-01-2025 01:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  West Sussex County Council is using up to $31 million from the sale of capital assets to fund an Oracle-based transformation project, originally budgeted at $3.2 million but now expected to cost nearly $50 million due to delays and cost overruns. The project, intended to replace a 20-year-old SAP system with a SaaS-based HR and finance system, has faced multiple setbacks, renegotiated contracts, and a new systems integrator, with completion now pushed to December 2025. The Register reports: West
  
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• Anthropic Builds RAG Directly Into Claude Models With New Citations API

  28-01-2025 00:40 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, Anthropic announced Citations, a new API feature that helps Claude models avoid confabulations (also called hallucinations) by linking their responses directly to source documents. The feature lets developers add documents to Claude's context window, enabling the model to automatically cite specific passages it uses to generate answers. "When Citations is enabled, the API processes user-provided source documents (PDF documents a
  
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• Facebook Flags Linux Topics As 'Cybersecurity Threats'

  28-01-2025 00:00 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Facebook has banned posts mentioning Linux-related topics, with the popular Linux news and discussion site, DistroWatch, at the center of the controversy. Tom's Hardware reports: A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards. DistroWatch sa
  
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