ICT news

• OpenAI Plans To Release a New 'Open' AI Language Model In the Coming Months

  31-03-2025 23:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI plans to release a new open-weight language model -- its first since GPT-2 -- in the coming months and is seeking community feedback to shape its development. "That's according to a feedback form the company published on its website Monday," reports TechCrunch. "The form, which OpenAI is inviting 'developers, researchers, and [members of] the broader community' to fill out, includes questions like 'What would you like to see in an open-weight model from OpenAI?' and 'What open models have
  
  Read more

• Google To Pay $100 Million To Settle 14-Year-Old Advertising Lawsuit

  31-03-2025 23:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has agreed to pay $100 million in cash to settle a long-running lawsuit claiming it overcharged advertisers by failing to provide promised discounts and charged for clicks on ads outside the geographic areas the advertisers targeted. A preliminary settlement of the 14-year-old class action, which began in March 2011, was filed late Thursday in the San Jose, California, federal court, and requires a judge's approval.Advertisers who particip
  
  Read more

• Honey Lost 4 Million Chrome Users After Shady Tactics Were Revealed

  31-03-2025 22:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Chrome extension Honey has lost over 4 million users after a viral video exposed it for hijacking affiliate codes and misleading users about finding the best coupon deals. 9to5Google reports: As we reported in early January, Honey had lost around 3 million users immediately after the video went viral, but ended up gaining back around 1 million later on. Now, as of March 2025, Honey is down to 16 million users on Chrome, down from its peak of 20 million.This drop comes after new Chrome policy
  
  Read more

• ChatGPT 'Added One Million Users In the Last Hour'

  31-03-2025 22:00 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI is having another viral moment after releasing Images for ChatGPT last week, with millions of people creating Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art. In a post on X today, CEO Sam Altman said the company has "added one million users in the last hour" alone. A few days prior he begged users to stop generating images because he said "our GPUs are melting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Open Source Genetic Database Shuts Down To Protect Users From 'Authoritarian Governments'

  31-03-2025 21:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The creator of an open source genetic database is shutting it down and deleting all of its data because he has come to believe that its existence is dangerous with "a rise in far-right and other authoritarian governments" in the United States and elsewhere. "The largest use case for DTC genetic data was not biomedical research or research in big pharma," Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, the founder of OpenSNP, wrote in a blog post. "Instead, the tran
  
  Read more

• Netflix CEO Says Movie Theaters Are Dead

  31-03-2025 20:56 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The post-Covid rebound of live events is all the more evidence that movie theaters are never coming back, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Semafor in an interview at the Paley Center for Media Friday.
  "Nearly every live thing has come back screaming," Sarandos said. "Broadway's breaking records right now, sporting events, concerts, all those things that we couldn't do during COVID are all back and bigger than ever. The theatrical box office is down 40 to 50%
  
  Read more

• Micron Hikes Memory Prices Amid Surging AI Demand

  31-03-2025 20:12 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Micron will raise prices for DRAM and NAND flash memory chips through 2026 as AI and data center demand strains supply chains, the U.S. chipmaker confirmed Monday. The move follows a market rebound from previous oversupply, with memory prices steadily climbing as producers cut output while AI and high-performance computing workloads grow.
  Rivals Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are expected to implement similar increases. Micron cited "un-forecasted demand across various business segments" in co
  
  Read more

• Microsoft Shutters AI Lab in Shanghai, Signalling a Broader Pullback From China

  31-03-2025 19:25 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has closed its IoT & AI Insider Lab in Shanghai's Zhangjiang hi-tech zone, marking the latest sign of the US tech giant's retreat from China amid rising geopolitical tensions.
  The Shanghai lab, meant to help with domestic development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, closed earlier this year, according to people who work in the Zhangjiang AI Island area. Opened in May 2019, Microsoft's IoT & AI In
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• 'No Longer Think You Should Learn To Code,' Says CEO of AI Coding Startup

  31-03-2025 18:40 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Learning to code has become sort of become pointless as AI increasingly dominates programming tasks, said Replit founder and chief executive Amjad Masad. "I no longer think you should learn to code," Masad wrote on X.
  The statement comes as major tech executives report significant AI inroads into software development. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently revealed that 25% of new code at the tech giant is AI-generated, though still reviewed by engineers. Furthermore, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predi
  
  Read more

• Publishers Trial Paying Peer Reviewers - What Did They Find?

  31-03-2025 18:02 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Two scientific journals that experimented with paying peer reviewers found the practice sped up the review process without compromising quality, according to findings published this month.
  Critical Care Medicine offered $250 to half of 715 invited reviewers, with 53% accepting compared to 48% of unpaid reviewers. Paid reviews were completed one day faster on average. In a more dramatic result, Biology Open saw reviews completed in 4.6 business days when paying reviewers $284 per review, versus 3
  
  Read more

• Apple Fined $162 Million for App Privacy System That Harms Developers

  31-03-2025 17:30 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  France's competition authority has fined Apple 150 million euros ($162 million) for abusing its market dominance through its App Tracking Transparency system, ruling the privacy initiative unfairly disadvantages app developers. The watchdog determined that requiring third-party developers to use two pop-ups for tracking permissions while Apple's own apps need just one tap creates an "excessively complex" process that particularly harms smaller publishers lacking sufficient proprietary data for a
  
  Read more

• Microsoft is Redesigning the Windows BSOD And It Might Change To Black

  31-03-2025 16:44 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has announced that it's overhauling its Blue Screen of Death error message in Windows 11. From a report: The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified screen that looks a lot more like the black screen you see when Windows is performing an update. It's not immediately clear if this new BSOD will remain as a black screen once Microsoft ships the final version of this update.
  "We're previewing a new, more streamlined UI for unexpecte
  
  Read more

• FBI Raids Home of Prominent Computer Scientist Who Has Gone Incommunicado

  31-03-2025 16:09 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.
  Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing
  
  Read more

• California Has 48% More EV Chargers Than Gas Nozzles

  31-03-2025 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  California has 11.3% of America's population — but bought 30% of America's new zero-emission vehicles. That's according to figures from the California Air Resources Board, which also reports 1 in 4 Californians have chosen a zero-emission car over a gas-powered one... for the last two years in a row.
  But what about chargers? It turns out that California now has 48% more public and "shared" private EV chargers than the number of gasoline nozzles. (California has 178,000 public and "shared"
  
  Read more

• HTTPS Certificate Industry Adopts New Security Requirements

  31-03-2025 09:54 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The Certification Authority/Browser Forum "is a cross-industry group that works together to develop minimum requirements for TLS certificates," writes Google's Security blog. And earlier this month two proposals from Google's forward-looking roadmap "became required practices in the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements," improving the security and agility of TLS connections...
  Multi-Perspective Issuance CorroborationBefore issuing a certificate to a website, a Certification Authority (CA) must
  
  Read more

• Linus Torvalds Gently Criticizes Build-Slowing Testing Code Left in Linux 6.15-rc1

  31-03-2025 06:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  "The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged," writes Phoronix, "but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't particularly happy with the pull request."The new "hdrtest" code is for the Intel Xe kernel driver and is around trying to help ensure the Direct Rendering Manager header files are self-contained and pass kernel-doc tests — basic maintenance checks on the included DRM header files to ensure they are all in good shape.
  But Torvalds accused the code o
  
  Read more

• As Microsoft Turns 50, Four Employees Remember Its Early Days

  31-03-2025 03:34 via slashdot.org
  
  "Microsoft built things. It broke things."That's how the Seattle Times kicks off a series of articles celebrating Microsoft's 50th anniversary — adding that Microsoft also gave some people "a lucrative retirement early in their lives, and their own stories to tell."
  What did they remember from Microsoft's earliest days?Scott Oki joined Microsoft as employee no. 121. The company was small; Gates was hands-on, and hard to please. "One of his favorite phrases was 'that's the stupidest thing I
  
  Read more

• Copilot Can't Beat a 2013 'TouchDevelop' Code Generation Demo for Windows Phone

  31-03-2025 02:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  What happens when you ask Copilot to "write a program that can be run on an iPhone 16 to select 15 random photos from the phone, tint them to random colors, and display the photos on the phone"?
  That's what TouchDevelop did for the long-discontinued Windows Phone in a 2013 Microsoft Research 'SmartSynth' natural language code generation demo. ("Write scripts by tapping on the screen.")
  Long-time Slashdot reader theodp reports on what happens when, 14 years later, you pose the same question to Co
  
  Read more

• China is Already Testing AI-Powered Humanoid Robots in Factories

  31-03-2025 01:11 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. and China "are racing to build a truly useful humanoid worker," the Wall Street Journal wrote Saturday, adding that "Whoever wins could gain a huge edge in countless industries."
  "The time has come for robots," Nvidia's chief executive said at a conference in March, adding "This could very well be the largest industry of all."China's government has said it wants the country to be a world leader in humanoid robots by 2027. "Embodied" AI is listed as a priority of a new $138 billion state
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!