ICT news

• PCI Express 7.0's Blazing Speeds Are Nearly Here, But PCIe 6 is Still Vapor

  19-03-2025 22:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: PCI Express 7 is nearing completion, the PCI Special Interest Group said, and the final specification should be released later this year. PCI Express 7, the backbone of the modern motherboard, is at the stage 0.9, which the PCI-SIG characterizes as the "final draft" of the specification. The technology was at version 0.5 a year ago, almost to the day, and originally authored in 2022.
  The situation remains the same, however. While modern PC motherboards are st
  
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• Plex Raises Premium Subscription Prices for First Time in Decade

  19-03-2025 21:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Streaming service provider Plex announced Wednesday its first price increase in a decade for its premium Plex Pass subscription, raising monthly rates to $6.99 from $4.99, yearly subscriptions to $69.99 from $39.99, and lifetime access to $249.99 from $119.99, effective April 29. The company is also making remote playback of personal media a paid feature, introducing a Remote Watch Pass subscription at $1.99 monthly or $19.99 annually for users who don't need full Plex Pass features, and removin
  
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• EU Orders Apple To Open Ecosystem To Rivals

  19-03-2025 19:58 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  EU antitrust regulators ordered Apple on Wednesday to open its closed ecosystem to competitors, detailing how the company must comply with the bloc's Digital Markets Act or face potential fines. The European Commission's decision comes six months after initiating proceedings against the tech giant.
  The first order requires Apple to grant rival smartphone, headphone and VR headset manufacturers access to its technology for seamless connectivity with Apple devices. A second order establishes speci
  
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• AI Crawlers Haven't Learned To Play Nice With Websites

  19-03-2025 18:25 via slashdot.org
  
  SourceHut, an open-source-friendly git-hosting service, says web crawlers for AI companies are slowing down services through their excessive demands for data. From a report: "SourceHut continues to face disruptions due to aggressive LLM crawlers," the biz reported Monday on its status page. "We are continuously working to deploy mitigations. We have deployed a number of mitigations which are keeping the problem contained for now. However, some of our mitigations may impact end-users."
  SourceHut
  
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• More Than 150 'Unprecedented' Climate Disasters Struck World in 2024, Says UN

  19-03-2025 18:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The devastating impacts of the climate crisis reached new heights in 2024, with scores of unprecedented heatwaves, floods and storms across the globe, according to the UN's World Meteorological Organization. From a report: The WMO's report on 2024, the hottest year on record, sets out a trail of destruction from extreme weather that took lives, demolished buildings and ravaged vital crops. More than 800,000 people were displaced and made homeless, the highest yearly number since records began in
  
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• FedEx Data Scraping and Telecom Insider Bribes Powered Nationwide iPhone Theft Operation

  19-03-2025 17:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Federal authorities have broken up an international crime ring that stole thousands of iPhones from porches nationwide [non-paywalled link], arresting 13 people last month after a sophisticated operation that combined high-tech tools with old-fashioned bribery.
  The thieves created software to scrape FedEx tracking numbers and paid AT&T store employees to provide customer order details and delivery addresses, according to WSJ, which cites prosecutors. Armed with this information, runners inte
  
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• Microsoft Quantum Computing Claim Still Lacks Evidence

  19-03-2025 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Nature: A Microsoft researcher [this week] presented results behind the company's controversial claim last month to have created the first 'topological' qubits -- a long-sought goal of quantum computing. In front of a packed room at a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), Chetan Nayak, a theoretical physicist leading Microsoft's quantum computing effort in Redmond, Washington, explained how the company is developing topological qubits, which would be the building blocks for a noise-res
  
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• Sony Unveils RGB LED Backlight Tech That Outperforms Traditional Mini LED

  19-03-2025 15:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Sony has developed a new TV display technology combining individual red, green, and blue LEDs for backlighting, potentially offering a middle ground between existing Mini LED and OLED panels. Dubbed "General RGB LED Backlight Technology," the system enables precise color control without sacrificing brightness, reaching 4000 cd/m2 -- matching Sony's professional reference monitors.
  Unlike conventional Mini LED TVs that use arrays of blue LEDs, Sony's RGB implementation delivers significantly impr
  
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• Five Charged In European Parliament Huawei Bribery Probe

  19-03-2025 14:00 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Belgian prosecutor's office said on Tuesday that it has charged five people in connection with a bribery investigation in the European Parliament allegedly linked to China's Huawei. The five were detained last week. Four have now been arrested and charged with active corruption and involvement in a criminal organization, while a fifth faces money laundering charges and has been released conditionally. The prosecutor's officer did not disclose
  
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• The Effect of Application Fees on Entry into Patenting

  19-03-2025 11:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: Ensuring broad access to the patent system is crucial for fostering innovation and promoting economic growth. To support this goal, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office offers reduced fees for small and micro entities. This paper investigates whether fee rates affect the filing of applications by small and micro entities. Exploiting recent fee reforms, the study evaluates the relationship between fee changes and the numbe
  
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• Nvidia Says 'the Age of Generalist Robotics Is Here'

  19-03-2025 08:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  During the company's GTC 2025 keynote today, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced Isaac GR00T N1 -- the company's first open-source, pre-trained yet customizable foundation model designed to accelerate the development and capabilities of humanoid robots. "The age of generalist robotics is here," said Huang. "With Nvidia Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI." The Verge reports: Hu
  
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• Researchers Engineer Bacteria To Produce Plastics

  19-03-2025 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: [A] team of Korean researchers [describe] how they've engineered a bacterial strain that can make a useful polymer starting with nothing but glucose as fuel. The system they developed is based on an enzyme that the bacteria use when they're facing unusual nutritional conditions, and it can be tweaked to make a wide range of polymers. The researchers focused on the system bacterial cells use for producing polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). These c
  
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• Italian Newspaper Says It Has Published World's First AI-Generated Edition

  19-03-2025 03:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Italian newspaper Il Foglio claims to have published the world's first entirely AI-generated edition as part of a month-long experiment to explore AI's impact on journalism. The special four-page supplement, available in print and online, features AI-written articles, headlines, and reader letters. The only thing the human journalists provided were prompts. The Guardian reports: The front page of the first edition of Il Foglio AI carries a story referring to the US president, Donald Trump, descr
  
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• Microsoft Isn't Fixing 8-Year-Old Shortcut Exploit Abused For Spying

  19-03-2025 02:25 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Trend Micro uncovered an eight-year-long spying campaign exploiting a Windows vulnerability involving malicious .LNK shortcut files, which attackers padded with whitespace to conceal commands. Despite being reported to Microsoft in 2023, the company considers it a UI issue rather than a security risk and has not prioritized a fix. The Register reports: The attack method is low-tech but effective, relying on malicious .LNK shortcut files rigged with commands to download malware. While appearing t
  
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• Gavin Newsom Is Reportedly Sending Burner Phones To Tech CEOs

  19-03-2025 01:45 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  According to Politico, Gov. Gavin Newsom has distributed prepaid burner phones to around 100 California business leaders, giving them direct access to him and reinforcing his pro-business stance. "If you ever need anything, I'm a phone call away," read one of the notes. From the report: It was Newsom's idea, a representative said, and has already yielded some "valuable interactions." That arrangement surprised some people POLITICO spoke with, largely because Newsom is already known as an inveter
  
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• US Music Streaming Tops 100 Million Subscribers; Vinyl Outsells CDs For Third Year

  19-03-2025 01:01 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  U.S. music streaming services surpassed 100 million subscribers in 2024 [PDF] while industry revenue hit a record $14.9 billion, up 4% from the previous year, according to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA).
  Physical media sales outpaced digital growth, with vinyl records increasing 7% to $1.4 billion, outselling CDs ($541 million) for the third consecutive year. Digital downloads plummeted 14.9%, now representing just 2% of industry revenue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Starliner Astronauts Return To Earth After More Than 9 Months In Space

  19-03-2025 00:20 via science.slashdot.org
  
  NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 has returned to Earth safely after a stay of more than nine months aboard the International Space Station. The crew remained in space longer than expected due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule, which was originally scheduled to bring them home sooner.While the mission has been politically fraught, the astronauts said in a rare space-to-earth interview last month that they were neither stranded nor abandoned. "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from d
  
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