ICT news

• Europe on Alert Over Suspected Sabotage of Undersea Cables

  05-03-2025 23:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  European nations have heightened security after a series of suspected sabotage attacks on submarine infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, with officials increasingly pointing to Russia as the likely culprit.
  Finnish authorities detained the tanker Eagle S in December after it allegedly damaged three undersea fiber-optic connections with Estonia and one with Germany. The vessel, carrying Russian oil as part of a "shadow fleet" evading sanctions, made suspicious course changes while crossing cable rou
  
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• Nintendo Says Latest Legal Win Against Piracy 'Significant' For 'Entire Games Industry'

  05-03-2025 22:00 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Nintendo has trumpeted its latest legal success in the company's ongoing fight against pirated games as "significant" not only for itself, "but for the entire games industry." From a report: The Mario maker today confirmed it had won a final victory over French file-sharing company Dstorage, which operates the website 1fichier.com, following years of legal wrangling and repeated appeals. Nintendo's victory means European file-sharing companies must now remove illegal copies of games when asked t
  
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• Could New Clocks Keep Airplanes Safe From GPS Jamming?

  05-03-2025 21:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Geoffrey.landis writes: Over the last three months of 2024, more than 800 cases of GPS interference were recorded in Lithuanian airspace. Estonia and Finland have also raised concerns, accusing Russia of deploying technology to jam satellite navigation signals near Nato's eastern flank.
  A group of British scientists -- dubbed the "Time Lords" -- are working on a solution: to develop portable atomic clocks. By carrying a group of atoms cooled to -273C on the plane itself, rather than relying on a
  
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• Half of World's CO2 Emissions Come From 36 Fossil Fuel Firms, Study Shows

  05-03-2025 20:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Half of the world's climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed. From a report: The researchers said the 2023 data strengthened the case for holding fossil fuel companies to account for their contribution to global heating. Previous versions of the annual report have been used in legal cases against companies and investors.
  The report found that the 36 major fossil fuel companies, including Saudi Aramco, Coal India, ExxonMobil,
  
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• Microsoft Warns of Chinese Hackers Spying on Cloud Technology

  05-03-2025 19:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft warned that an advanced Chinese hacking group is waging a campaign of supply-chain attacks. From a report: The company's threat intelligence division said in a blog post Wednesday that the group, known as Silk Typhoon, was targeting remote management tools and cloud applications in order to spy on a range of companies and organizations in the US and abroad.
  Microsoft said it observed in late 2024 that hackers were targeting cloud storage services, from which they would steal keys that
  
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• OpenAI Plots Charging $20,000 a Month For PhD-Level Agents

  05-03-2025 18:00 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI is preparing to launch a tiered pricing structure for its AI agent products, with high-end research assistants potentially costing $20,000 per month, [alternative source] according to The Information. The AI startup, which already generates approximately $4 billion in annualized revenue from ChatGPT, plans three service levels: $2,000 monthly agents for "high-income knowledge workers," $10,000 monthly agents for software development, and $20,000 monthly PhD-level research agents. OpenAI h
  
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• Apple Refreshes MacBook Air With M4 Chip, Lower Pricing

  05-03-2025 17:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has refreshed its MacBook Air lineup with the M4 processor, adding a new sky blue color option and reducing prices across the board. The 13-inch model now starts at $999, while the 15-inch begins at $1,199. Both models are available to order immediately and will ship on March 12.
  The updated MacBook Airs feature the same thin design as previous generations but now include the 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam found in current MacBook Pro models. Both variants come with the M4 chip, aligning
  
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• Google Urges DOJ To Reverse Course on Breaking Up Company

  05-03-2025 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is urging officials at President Donald Trump's Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the discussions. From the report: Representatives for the Alphabet unit asked the government in a meeting last week to take a less aggressive stance as the US looks to end what a judge ruled to be an illegal online search monopoly, said the people, who asked not to be
  
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• Turing Award Winners Sound Alarm on Hasty AI Deployment

  05-03-2025 15:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have warned against the unsafe deployment of AI systems [alternative source] after winning computing's prestigious $1 million Turing Award Wednesday. "Releasing software to millions of people without safeguards is not good engineering practice," said Barto, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, comparing it to testing a bridge by having people use it.
  Barto and Sutton developed reinforcement learning in the 1980s, i
  
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• NASA Uses GPS On the Moon For the First Time

  05-03-2025 14:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: On March 2, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost made history, becoming the first commercial lunar lander to successfully touchdown on the moon's surface. The groundbreaking lander is wasting no time in getting to work. According to NASA, the joint public-private mission has already successfully demonstrated the ability to use Earth-based GPS signals on the lunar surface, marking a major step ahead of future Artemis missions. Accurate and relia
  
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• World's First 'Synthetic Biological Intelligence' Runs On Living Human Cells

  05-03-2025 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Australian company Cortical Labs has launched the CL1, the world's first commercial "biological computer" that merges human brain cells with silicon hardware to form adaptable, energy-efficient neural networks. New Atlas reports: Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are ess
  
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• Users Report Emotional Bonds With Startlingly Realistic AI Voice Demo

  05-03-2025 04:30 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved. "I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested th
  
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• Cult Text-Based Zombie MMO 'Urban Dead' Is Shutting Down After 20 Years

  05-03-2025 03:20 via games.slashdot.org
  
  The long-running text-based zombie MMO Urban Dead is shutting down on March 14, 2025, after nearly 20 years. The reason: compliance concerns with the UK's Online Safety Act. Games Radar+ reports: "The Online Safety Act comes into force later this month, applying to all social and gaming websites where users interact, and especially those without strong age restrictions," [writes Kevan Davis, the solo British developer behind the game]. "With the possibility of heavy corporate-sized fines even fo
  
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• TCL Overtakes LG To Become Second-largest Premium TV Brand

  05-03-2025 02:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  "TCL has emerged as a dominant force in the premium TV market, surpassing LG in global shipments and solidifying its position as a key competitor to Samsung," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "According to Counterpoint Research, TCL's premium TV shipments more than doubled year-on-year in Q4 2024, capturing 20% of the market, while LG's share fell to 19%." TechSpot reports: The two companies' shipment figures have gone in opposite directions since Q4 2023, when LG held a 26% share and TCL was on
  
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• Firefox 136 Released With Vertical Tabs, Official ARM64 Linux Binaries

  05-03-2025 02:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Linux: Mozilla published today the final build of the Firefox 136 open-source web browser for all supported platforms ahead of the March 4th, 2025, official release date, so it's time to take a look at the new features and changes. Highlights of Firefox 136 include official Linux binary packages for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, hardware video decoding for AMD GPUs on Linux systems, a new HTTPS-First behavior for upgrading page loads to HTTPS, and
  
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• YouTube Warns Creators an AI-Generated Video of Its CEO is Being Used For Phishing Scams

  05-03-2025 01:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTube is warning creators about a new phishing scam that attempts to lure victims using an AI-generated video of its CEO Neal Mohan. The fake video has been shared privately with users and claims YouTube is making changes to its monetization policy in an attempt to steal their credentials, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
  "YouTube and its employees will never attempt to contact you or share information through a private video," YouTube says. "If a v
  
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• Opera Adds an Automated AI Agent To Its Browser

  05-03-2025 00:40 via slashdot.org
  
  king*jojo shares a report from The Register: The Opera web browser now boasts "agentic AI," meaning users can ask an onboard AI model to perform tasks that require a series of in-browser actions. The AI agent, referred to as the Browser Operator, can, for example, find 12 pairs of men's size 10 Nike socks that you can buy. This is demonstrated in an Opera-made video of the process, running intermittently at 6x time, which shows the user has to type out the request for the undergarments rather th
  
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• Brother Accused of Locking Down Third-Party Printer Ink Cartridges Via Forced Firmware Updates

  05-03-2025 00:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Fabled RepairTuber and right-to-repair crusader Louis Rossmann accuses Brother of implementing forced firmware updates that block third-party ink cartridges and remove older firmware versions from support portals. These updates also prevent color calibration with aftermarket ink, rendering cheaper cartridges unusable. Tom's Hardware reports: As mentioned in the intro, Rossmann has seen two big issues emerge for Brother printer users with recent firmware updates. Firstly, models that used to work
  
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