ICT news

• 'Landrun': Lightweight Linux Sandboxing With Landlock, No Root Required

  05-04-2025 23:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Over on Reddit's "selfhosted" subreddit for alternatives to popular services, long-time Slashdot reader Zoup described a pain point:
  - Landlock is a Linux Security Module (LSM) that lets unprivileged processes restrict themselves.
  - It's been in the kernel since 5.13, but the API is awkward to use directly.
  - It always annoyed the hell out of me to run random binaries from the internet without any real control over what they can access.
  So they've rolled their own solution, according to Thursday
  
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• Ian Fleming Published the James Bond Novel 'Moonraker' 70 Years Ago Today

  05-04-2025 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "The third James Bond novel was published on this day in 1955," writes long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger.Film buff Christian Petrozza shares some history:
  In 1979, the market was hot amid the studios to make the next big space opera. Star Wars blew up the box office in 1977 with Alien soon following and while audiences eagerly awaited the next installment of George Lucas' The Empire Strikes Back, Hollywood was buzzing with spacesuits, lasers, and ships that cruised the stars. Politically, the
  
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• NASA Seeks Proposals for Two More Private Astronaut Space Station Visits

  05-04-2025 21:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  This week NASA "issued a solicitation for the next two private astronaut missions to the International Space Station," reports Space News. Scheduled after May of 2026 and then mid-2027, "These will be the fifth and sixth such missions to the ISS, part of a broader low Earth orbit commercialization effort by NASA with the ultimate goal of replacing the International Space Station with one or more commercial stations."
  NASA's Space Station program manager calls the missions "a key part" of helping
  
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• Microsoft Uses AI To Find Flaws In GRUB2, U-Boot, Barebox Bootloaders

  05-04-2025 20:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader zlives shared this report from BleepingComputer:
  Microsoft used its AI-powered Security Copilot to discover 20 previously unknown vulnerabilities in the GRUB2, U-Boot, and Barebox open-source bootloaders.
  GRUB2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) is the default boot loader for most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, while U-Boot and Barebox are commonly used in embedded and IoT devices. Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in fil
  
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• Open Source Coalition Announces 'Model-Signing' with Sigstore to Strengthen the ML Supply Chain

  05-04-2025 19:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The advent of LLMs and machine learning-based applications "opened the door to a new wave of security threats," argues Google's security blog. (Including model and data poisoning, prompt injection, prompt leaking and prompt evasion.)
  So as part of the Linux Foundation's nonprofit Open Source Security Foundation, and in partnership with NVIDIA and HiddenLayer, Google's Open Source Security Team on Friday announced the first stable model-signing library (hosted at PyPI.org), with digital signature
  
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• Python's PyPI Finally Gets Closer to Adding 'Organization Accounts' and SBOMs

  05-04-2025 18:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Back in 2023 Python's infrastructure director called it "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI" while giving users "one of our most requested features: organization accounts." (That is, "self-managed teams with their own exclusive branded web addresses" to make their massive Python Package Index repository "easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.")Nearly two y
  
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• Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut

  05-04-2025 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."
  But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly."Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating buff
  
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• Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taht

  05-04-2025 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."
  But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly."Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating buff
  
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• OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss Copyright Claims Rejected by Judge

  05-04-2025 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Is OpenAI's ChatGPT violating copyrights? The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023. But Ars Technica summarizes OpenAI's response. The New York Times (or NYT) "should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles... partly because of the newspaper's own reporting..."
  OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet.
  But on Friday, U.S. district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's moti
  
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• A Busy Hurricane Season is Expected. Here's How It Will Be Different From the Last

  05-04-2025 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Yet another busy hurricane season is likely across the Atlantic this year -- but some of the conditions that supercharged storms like Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 have waned, according to a key forecast issued Thursday.
  A warm -- yet no longer record-hot -- strip of waters across the Atlantic Ocean is forecast to help fuel development of 17 named tropical cyclones during the season that runs from June 1 through Nov. 30, according to Colorado State Uni
  
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• Bonobos May Combine Words In Ways Previously Thought Unique To Humans

  05-04-2025 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  A new study shows bonobos can combine vocal calls in ways that mirror human language, producing phrases with meanings beyond the sum of individual sounds. "Human language is not as unique as we thought," said Dr Melissa Berthet, the first author of the research from the University of Zurich. Another author, Dr Simon Townsend, said: "The cognitive building blocks that facilitate this capacity is at least 7m years old. And I think that is a really cool finding."
  The Guardian reports: Writing in th
  
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• Fram2 Crew Returns To Earth After Polar Orbit Mission

  05-04-2025 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  SpaceX's Fram2 mission returned safely after becoming the first crewed spaceflight to orbit directly over Earth's poles. From a report: Led by cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who is the financier of this mission, the Fram2 crew has been free-flying through orbit since Monday. The group splashed down at 9:19 a.m. PT, or 12:19 p.m. ET, off the coast of California -- the first West Coast landing in SpaceX's five-year history of human spaceflight missions. The company livestreamed the splashdo
  
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• Scientists Warn Indonesia's Rice Megaproject Faces Failure

  05-04-2025 07:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto's ambitious plan to create 1 million hectares of new rice farms in eastern Merauke Regency faces strong criticism from scientists who have warned it will fail due to unsuitable soils and climate. Military "food brigades" are currently guarding bulldozers clearing swampy forests in Indonesian New Guinea for the project, which aims to boost food self-sufficiency for the nation's 281 million people.
  Soil scientists warn that Merauke's conditions could lead to a
  
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• Two Teenagers Built 'Cal AI', a Photo Calorie App With Over a Million Users

  05-04-2025 05:30 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a world filled with "vibe coding," Zach Yadegari, teen founder of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old-fashioned contrast. Ironic because Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, are both just 18 years old and still in high school. Yet their story, so far, is a classic. Launched in May, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Better still, he tells TechCrunch that the customer retention rate is over 30% an
  
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• Wikimedia Drowning in AI Bot Traffic as Crawlers Consume 65% of Resources

  05-04-2025 03:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Web crawlers collecting training data for AI models are overwhelming Wikipedia's infrastructure, with bot traffic growing exponentially since early 2024, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. According to data released April 1, bandwidth for multimedia content has surged 50% since January, primarily from automated programs scraping Wikimedia Commons' 144 million openly licensed media files.
  This unprecedented traffic is causing operational challenges for the non-profit. When Jimmy Carter died i
  
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• An Interactive-Speed Linux Computer Made of Only 3 8-Pin Chips

  05-04-2025 02:20 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Software engineer and longtime Slashdot reader, Dmitry Grinberg (dmitrygr), shares a recent project they've been working on: "an interactive-speed Linux on a tiny board you can easily build with only 3 8-pin chips": There was a time when one could order a kit and assemble a computer at home. It would do just about what a contemporary store-bought computer could do. That time is long gone. Modern computers are made of hundreds of huge complex chips with no public datasheets and many hundreds of w
  
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• AT&T Email-To-Text Gateway Service Ending

  05-04-2025 01:40 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader CyberSlugGump shares a support article from AT&T, writing: On June 17th, AT&T will stop supporting email-to-text messages. That means you won't be able to send a text message to an AT&T customer from an email address. You can still get in touch with AT&T customers using SMS (text), MMS, and standard email services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Midjourney Releases V7, Its First New AI Image Model In Nearly a Year

  05-04-2025 01:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Midjourney's new V7 image model features a revamped architecture with smarter text prompt handling, higher image quality, and default personalization based on user-rated images. While some features like upscaling aren't yet available, it does come with a faster, cheaper Draft Mode. TechCrunch reports: To use it, you'll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney "personalization" profile, if you haven't already. This profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences; V
  
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• NSA Warns 'Fast Flux' Threatens National Security

  05-04-2025 00:20 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a
  
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