ICT news

• 'China's Engineer Dividend Is Paying Off Big Time'

  24-03-2025 23:20 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg column: Worries over China's "3D" problem -- that deflation, debt and demographics are structurally hampering growth -- are melting away. Instead, investors are talking about how the world's second-largest economy can take on the US and challenge its technological dominance. There is the prevailing sense that China's "engineer dividend" is finally paying off. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of engineers has ballooned from 5.2 million to 17.7 million, acco
  
  Read more

• FaunaDB Shuts Down But Hints At Open Source Future

  24-03-2025 22:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database. However, last week, FaunaDB announced that
  
  Read more

• DNA of 15 Million People For Sale In 23andMe Bankruptcy

  24-03-2025 22:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Sunday, leaving the fate of millions of people's genetic information up in the air as the company deals with the legal and financial fallout of not properly protecting that genetic information in the first place. The filing shows how dangerous it is to provide your DNA directly to a large, for-profit commercial genetic database; 23andMe is now looking for a buyer to pull it out of bankruptcy. 23andMe said
  
  Read more

• 'What CERN Does Next Matters For Science and For International Cooperation'

  24-03-2025 21:20 via science.slashdot.org
  
  CERN faces a pivotal decision about its future as the Large Hadron Collider approaches the end of its usefulness by the early 2040s. Management proposes building the Future Circular Collider (FCC), a machine with a 90-kilometer circumference that would smash particles at eight times the energy of the LHC. This hugely consequential plan faces significant challenges. Much of the required technology doesn't exist yet, including superconducting magnets strong enough to bend high-energy particle beam
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• How a Nephew's CD Burner Inspired Early Valve To Embrace DRM

  24-03-2025 20:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Valve's early anti-piracy efforts, which eventually led to the Steam platform, were sparked by co-founder Monica Harrington's nephew using her money to buy a CD burner for copying games, she revealed at last week's Game Developers Conference. Harrington said her nephew's "lovely thank you note" about sharing games with friends represented a "generational shift" in piracy attitudes that could "put our entire business model at risk."
  Half-Life subsequently launched with CD key verification in 1998
  
  Read more

• Researchers Search For More Precise Ways To Measure Pain

  24-03-2025 20:04 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Scientists are developing biomarkers to objectively measure pain, addressing a fundamental medical challenge that has contributed to the opioid crisis and led to consistent underestimation of pain in women and minorities.
  Four research teams funded by the Department of Health and Human Services are developing technologies to quantify pain like other vital signs. Their approaches include a blood test for endometriosis pain, a device measuring nerve response through pupil dilation, microneedle pat
  
  Read more

• Pentagon Axes HR System After 780% Budget Overrun

  24-03-2025 19:25 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System after years of delays and budget overruns, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget. "We're not doing that anymore," Hegseth said in a video announcing the cancellation. Officials have 60 days to develop a new plan to modernize DoD's civilian HR
  
  Read more

• Google Says It Might Have Deleted Your Maps Timeline Data

  24-03-2025 18:49 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google has confirmed that a technical issue has permanently deleted location history data for numerous users of its Maps application, with no recovery possible for most affected customers. The problem emerged after Google transitioned its Timeline feature from cloud to on-device storage in 2024 to enhance privacy protections. Users began reporting missing historical location data on support forums and social media platforms in recent weeks. "This is the result of a technical issue and not user e
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• China Unveils a Powerful Deep-sea Cable Cutter That Could Reset the World Order

  24-03-2025 17:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  schwit1 writes: A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China -- and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics.The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks. The tool, which is able to cut lines at depths of up to 4,000 metres (13,123 feet) -- twice the maximum operational rang
  
  Read more

• China Bans Compulsory Facial Recognition and Its Use in Private Spaces Like Hotel Rooms

  24-03-2025 17:16 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent. From a report: The two orgs last Friday published new rules on facial recognition and an explainer that spell out how orgs that want to use facial recognition must first conduct a "personal information protection impact assessment" that considers whether using the tech is necessary, impacts on individuals' privacy, and risks of data leakage. Organizations that decide to
  
  Read more

• AI Will Impact GDP of Every Country By Double Digits, Says Mistral CEO

  24-03-2025 16:26 via slashdot.org
  
  Countries must develop their own artificial intelligence infrastructure or risk significant economic losses as the technology transforms global economies, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said last week.
  "It will have an impact on GDP of every country in the double digits in the coming years," Mensch told the A16z podcast, warning that nations without domestic AI systems would see capital flow elsewhere. The French startup executive compared AI to electricity adoption a century ago. "If you weren't bui
  
  Read more

• Linux Kernel 6.14 Officially Released

  24-03-2025 15:48 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  prisoninmate shares a report: Highlights of Linux 6.14 include Btrfs RAID1 read balancing support, a new ntsync subsystem for Win NT synchronization primitives to boost game emulation with Wine, uncached buffered I/O support, and a new accelerator driver for the AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPUs (Neural Processing Units).
  Also new is DRM panic support for the AMDGPU driver, reflink and reverse-mapping support for the XFS real-time device, Intel Clearwater Forest server support, support for SELinux extended
  
  Read more

• DNA-Testing Firm 23andMe Files for Bankruptcy

  24-03-2025 15:00 via slashdot.org
  
  DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection [non-paywalled source] in Missouri and announced CEO Anne Wojcicki's immediate resignation, weeks after rejecting her proposal to buy back the business she co-founded. The bankruptcy filing represents "the best path forward to maximize the value of the business," said Mark Jensen, board member and special committee chair.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
  Read more

• Why the Internet Archive is More Relevant Than Ever

  24-03-2025 12:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data."
  They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever."Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Most of that ends up in the Wayback Machine, while the rest is digitized analog media
  
  Read more

• Another Large Black Hole In 'Our' Galaxy

  24-03-2025 08:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes:A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.
  Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrica
  
  Read more

• 'Fish Doorbell' Enters Fifth Year with Millions of Fans

  24-03-2025 04:44 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader invisik reminds us that the "fish doorbell" is still going strong, according to the Associated Press."Now in its fifth year, the site has attracted millions of viewers from around the world with its quirky mix of slow TV and ecological activism."The central Dutch city of Utrecht installed a "fish doorbell" on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds.
  
  Read more

• If Bird Flu Jumped to Humans, Could Past Flu Infections Offer Some Protection?

  24-03-2025 02:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  NPR reports on research "into whether our defenses built up from past flu seasons can offer any protection against H5N1 bird flu."So far, the findings offer some reassurance. Antibodies and other players in the immune system may buffer the worst consequences of bird flu, at least to some degree. "There's certainly preexisting immunity," says Florian Krammer, a virologist at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine who is involved in some of the new studies. "That's very likely not going to protect
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!