ICT news

• China Explores Limiting Its EVs and Battery Exports For US Tariff Negotiations

  22-03-2025 23:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government."
  Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher import duties. A similar move from Beijing, especially in sectors of key concern to Washin
  
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• China Explores Limiting Its EV and Battery Exports For US Tariff Negotiations

  22-03-2025 23:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government."
  Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher import duties. A similar move from Beijing, especially in sectors of key concern to Washin
  
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• America's College Board Launches AP Cybersecurity Course For Non-College-Bound Students

  22-03-2025 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Besides administering standardized pre-college tests, America's nonprofit College Board designs college-level classes that high school students can take. But now they're also crafting courses "not just with higher education at the table, but industry partners such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the technology giant IBM," reports Education Week.
  "The organization hopes the effort will make high school content more meaningful to students by connecting it to in-demand job skills."It believes t
  
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• Six Countries Named as 'Likely' Purchasers of Paragon's Cellphone Spyware

  22-03-2025 21:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  The governments of Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore "are likely customers of Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions," reports TechCrunch, "according to a new technical report by a renowned digital security lab."On Wednesday, The Citizen Lab, a group of academics and security researchers housed at the University of Toronto that has investigated the spyware industry for more than a decade, published a report about the Israeli-founded surveillance startup, identifying the
  
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• Rebooting A Retro PDP-11 Workstation - and Its Classic 'Venix' UNIX

  22-03-2025 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  This week the "Old Vintage Computing Research" blog published a 21,000-word exploration of the DEC PDP-11, the 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corporation. Slashdot reader AndrewZX calls the blog post "an excellent deep dive" into the machine's history and capabilities "and the classic Venix UNIX that it ran." The blogger still owns a working 1984 DEC Professional 380, "a tank of a machine, a reasonably powerful workstation, and the most practical PDP-adjacent thing you can actuall
  
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• Was Undersea Cable Sabotage Part of a Larger Pattern?

  22-03-2025 19:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Was the cutting of undersea cables part of a larger pattern? Russia and its proxies are accused by western officials of "staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since the invasion of Ukraine three years ago," reports the Associated Press.
  That includes cyberattacks and committing acts of sabotage/vandalism/arson, as well as spreading propaganda and even plotting killings, according to the article. ("Western intelligence agencies uncovered what they said was a Russian plot to
  
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• Surprisingly, Some Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds Can Be Stable

  22-03-2025 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader Required Snark shared this article from Phys.org:
  In the realm of science fiction, [sun-energy capturing] Dyson spheres and ringworlds have been staples for decades. But it is well known that the simplest designs are unstable against gravitational forces and would thus be torn apart. Now a scientist from Scotland, UK has shown that certain configurations of these objects near a two-mass system can be stable against such fractures...[A] rigid ring around a star or planet, as in La
  
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• US Release of Unredacted JFK Files 'Doxxed' Officials, Including Social Security Numbers

  22-03-2025 17:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "I intend to sue the National Archives," said Joseph diGenova, an 80-year-old former Trump campaign lawyer (and a U.S. Attorney from 1983 to 1988). While releasing 63,000 unredacted pages about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, the U.S. government erroneously "made public the Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information of potentially hundreds of former congressional staffers and other people," reports USA Today. ("It is virtually impossible to tell the scope of th
  
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• Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End

  22-03-2025 16:34 via slashdot.org
  
  Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of AI is an international scientific society. Recently 25 of its AI researchers surveyed 475 respondents in the AAAI community about "the trajectory of AI research" — and their results were surprising.
  Futurism calls the results "a resounding rebuff to the tech industry's long-preferred method of achieving AI gains" — namely, adding more hardware:
  You can only throw so much money at a problem. This, more or less, is the line being
  
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• 'Unaware and Uncertain': Report Finds Widespread Unfamiliarity With 2027's EU Cyber Resilience Requirements

  22-03-2025 15:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Two "groundbreaking research reports" on open source security were announced this week by the Linux Foundation in partnership with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation Europe. The reports specifically address the EU's Cyber Resilience Act (or CRA) and "highlight knowledge gaps and best practices for CRA compliance."
  "Unaware and Uncertain: The Stark Realities of CRA-Readiness in Open Source" includes a survey which found that when it comes to CRA requirements, 62% o
  
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• US Programming Jobs Plunge 27.5% in Two Years

  22-03-2025 14:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Computer programming jobs in the US have declined by more than a quarter over the past two years, placing the profession among the 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and potentially signaling the first concrete evidence of artificial intelligence replacing workers.
  The timing coincides with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Anthropic researchers found people use AI to perform programming tasks more than those of any other job, though 57
  
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• New iOS Update Re-Enables Apple Intelligence For Users Who Had Turned It Off

  22-03-2025 12:30 via slashdot.org
  
  Apple's latest iOS 18.3.2 update is automatically re-enabling its Apple Intelligence feature even for users who previously disabled it, adding to mounting concerns about the company's AI strategy.
  The update presents a splash screen with no option except to tap "Continue," which activates the feature. Users must then manually disable it through settings, with the AI consuming up to 7GB of storage space. This forced activation comes amid broader troubles with Apple's AI initiatives.Read more of t
  
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• France Rejects Backdoor Mandate

  22-03-2025 10:30 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The French National Assembly has rejected a controversial provision that would have forced messaging platforms like Signal and WhatsApp to allow government access to encrypted private conversations, lawmakers voted Thursday night. The measure, embedded within anti-drug trafficking legislation, would have implemented a "ghost participant model" allowing law enforcement to silently join encrypted chats without users' knowledge.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• How an Electrical Fire Shut Down Heathrow and Upended Global Air Travel

  22-03-2025 08:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  London's Heathrow Airport resumed operations late Friday after an electrical fire at a nearby substation forced a full-day closure, causing global travel chaos with hundreds of canceled flights and thousands of stranded passengers. The explosion at a Hayes substation 1.5 miles from the airport knocked out power early Thursday, requiring 70 firefighters to battle a blaze in a transformer containing 25,000 liters of cooling oil.
  Despite backup generators, Europe's busiest airport couldn't maintain
  
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• Cloudflare Turns AI Against Itself With Endless Maze of Irrelevant Facts

  22-03-2025 05:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Web infrastructure provider Cloudflare unveiled "AI Labyrinth" this week, a feature designed to thwart unauthorized AI data scraping by feeding bots realistic but irrelevant content instead of blocking them outright. The system lures crawlers into a "maze" of AI-generated pages containing neutral scientific information, deliberately wasting computing resources of those attempting to collect training data for language models without permission.
  "When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than b
  
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• Amazon CEO Criticizes Manager Fiefdoms and Stresses the Need For 'Meritocracy'

  22-03-2025 02:45 via slashdot.org
  
  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is pushing to cut bureaucracy by reducing management layers, according to a recording of a recent internal all-hands meeting obtained by Business Insider. Amazon plans to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by March-end, a process the company says is now complete and affected a "relatively small subset of employees."
  "The way to get ahead at Amazon is not to go accumulate a giant team and fiefdom," Jassy told employees, stressing that successful
  
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• Director Charged With Netflix Fraud After Splurging on Crypto Instead of Finishing Sci-fi Series

  22-03-2025 02:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Hollywood filmmaker Carl Erik Rinsch has been charged with defrauding Netflix of $11 million after allegedly misusing funds intended for an unfinished science fiction series, federal prosecutors said.
  Rinsch, 47, was arrested in West Hollywood this week on charges of wire fraud, money laundering and unlawful monetary transactions that could result in decades of imprisonment if convicted. The FBI and Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York allege Rinsch diverted funds meant for
  
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• Apple Sued For False Advertising Over Apple Intelligence

  22-03-2025 00:45 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has been hit with a federal lawsuit claiming that the company's promotion of now-delayed Apple Intelligence features constituted false advertising and unfair competition. From a report: The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices. "Apple's advertisements saturated the internet, television, and other airwaves to cultivate a clear
  
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