ICT news

• IBM Orders US Sales To Locate Near Customers or Offices

  18-04-2025 23:20 via it.slashdot.org
  
  IBM is mandating that U.S. sales and Cloud employees return to the office at least three days a week, with work required at designated client sites, flagship offices, or sales hubs. According to The Register, some IBM employees argue that these policies "represent stealth layoffs because older (and presumably more highly compensated) employees tend to be less willing to uproot their lives, and families where applicable, than the 'early professional hires' IBM has been courting at some legal risk
  
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• Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional

  18-04-2025 22:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A judge in Nevada has ruled that "tower dumps" -- the law enforcement practice of grabbing vast troves of private personal data from cell towers -- is unconstitutional. The judge also ruled that the cops could, this one time, still use the evidence they obtained through this unconstitutional search. Cell towers record the location of phones near them about every seven seconds. When the cops request a tower dump, they ask a telecom for the numbe
  
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• Netflix CEO Counters Cameron's AI Cost-Cutting Vision: 'Make Movies 10% Better'

  18-04-2025 22:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos pushed back on director James Cameron's recent assertion that AI could slash film production costs by half, arguing instead for quality improvements over cost reduction during Netflix's first-quarter earnings call Thursday. "I read the article too about what Jim Cameron said about making movies 50% cheaper," Sarandos said. "I remain convinced that there's an even bigger opportunity to make movies 10% better."
  Sarandos pointed to Netflix's current AI implementations in
  
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• Hard Drives Have Less Environmental Impact Than SSDs, Seagate Says

  18-04-2025 21:20 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  A new report from Seagate reveals that hard drives significantly outperform solid-state drives in environmental impact metrics, challenging common industry assumptions about storage sustainability. According to Seagate's "Decarbonizing Data" report released this month [PDF], standard hard drives produce just 29.7 kg of embodied carbon dioxide compared to a staggering 4,915 kg for equivalently sized data center SSDs.
  On a per-terabyte basis, hard drives generate less than 1 kg of CO2/TB versus 16
  
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• Toothpaste Widely Contaminated With Lead and Other Metals, US Research Finds

  18-04-2025 20:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Bruce66423 shares a report: Toothpaste can be widely contaminated with lead and other dangerous heavy metals, new research shows.
  Most of 51 brands of toothpaste tested for lead contained the dangerous heavy metal, including those for children or those marketed as green. The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.
  About 90% of toothpastes contained lead, 65% contained arsenic, just under half contained mercur
  
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• Anti-Spying Phone Pouches Offered To EU Lawmakers For Trip To Hungary

  18-04-2025 20:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Members of the European Parliament were offered special pouches to protect digital devices from espionage and tampering for a visit to Hungary this week, a sign of rising spying fears within Europe.
  Five lawmakers from the Parliament's civil liberties committee traveled to Hungary on Monday for a three-day visit to inspect the EU member country's progress on democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights.
  One lawmaker on the trip confirmed to POLITICO that
  
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• GoDaddy Registry Error Knocked Zoom Offline for Nearly Two Hours

  18-04-2025 19:20 via it.slashdot.org
  
  A communication error between GoDaddy Registry and Markmonitor took Zoom's services offline for almost two hours on Wednesday when GoDaddy mistakenly blocked the zoom.us domain. The outage affected all services dependent on the zoom.us domain.
  GoDaddy's block prevented top-level domain nameservers from maintaining proper DNS records for zoom.us. This created a classic domain resolution failure -- when users attempted to connect to any zoom.us address, their requests couldn't be routed to Zoom's
  
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• Climate Change Will Make Rice Toxic, Say Researchers

  18-04-2025 18:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Rice, the world's most consumed grain, will become increasingly toxic as the atmosphere heats and as carbon dioxide emissions rise, potentially putting billions of people at risk of cancers and other diseases, according to new research published this week in The Lancet. From a report: Eaten every day by billions of people and grown across the globe, rice is arguably the planet's most important staple crop, with half the world's population relying on it for the majority of its food needs, especia
  
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• The Most-Cited Papers of the Twenty-First Century

  18-04-2025 18:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Nature has published an analysis of the 21st century's most-cited scientific papers, revealing a surprising pattern: breakthrough discoveries like mRNA vaccines, CRISPR, and gravitational waves don't make the list. Instead, a 2016 Microsoft paper on "deep residual learning" networks claims the top spot, with citations ranging from 103,756 to 254,074 depending on the database.
  The list overwhelmingly features methodology papers and software tools rather than groundbreaking discoveries. AI researc
  
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• Why the 'Weakest Samurai Warlord' Is Admired To This Day

  18-04-2025 17:20 via slashdot.org
  
  New research suggests Oda Ujiharu, long derided as feudal Japan's most ineffective military leader, may have been mischaracterized. The Sengoku-period daimyo, who ruled from Oda Castle in present-day Ibaraki Prefecture, lost his fortress an unprecedented nine times to rival clans -- but recaptured it eight times, often with inferior forces.
  "His refusal to accept defeat and his iron will to get up and keep fighting is why many historians reject the 'weakest samurai warlord' nickname and instead
  
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• Project To Suck Carbon Out of Sea Begins in UK

  18-04-2025 16:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  A ground-breaking project to suck carbon out of the sea has started operating on England's south coast. From a report: The small pilot scheme, known as SeaCURE, is funded by the UK government as part of its search for technologies that fight climate change. [...] These projects, known as carbon capture, usually focus either on capturing emissions at source or pulling them from the air. What makes SeaCure interesting is that it is testing whether it might be more efficient to pull planet-warming
  
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• A New Journal Record: Sage Title Retracts 678 More Papers, Tally Over 1,500

  18-04-2025 16:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Sage has retracted 678 more papers from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), concluding an investigation that has now purged 1,561 articles -- the most ever removed from a single journal. The publisher, which acquired JIFS from IOS Press in November 2023, began investigating the journal in early 2024 after discovering "indicators that raised concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process."
  This final batch follows 467 articles retracted in August and
  
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• AI Support Bot Invents Nonexistent Policy

  18-04-2025 15:00 via slashdot.org
  
  An AI support bot for the code editor Cursor invented a nonexistent subscription policy, triggering user cancellations and public backlash this week. When developer "BrokenToasterOven" complained about being logged out when switching between devices, the company's AI agent "Sam" falsely claimed this was intentional: "Cursor is designed to work with one device per subscription as a core security feature."
  Users took the fabricated policy as official, with several announcing subscription cancellat
  
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• ESA Video Game Trains AI To Recognize Craters On the Moon

  18-04-2025 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino writes: German public news outlet Tagesschau reports (source: YouTube) on an ESA video game that helps train a future moon lander's guidance AI to spot craters. Games have already helped collect visual data on millions of craters. The University Darmstadt developed the game, called IMPACT, to support ESA's efforts to establish a base on the moon. An older article from August 2024 provides further details on the project.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Q-CTRL Unveils Jam-Proof Positioning System That's 50x More Accurate Than GPS

  18-04-2025 09:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  schwit1 shares a report from Interesting Engineering: Australia's Q-CTRL developed a new system called "Ironstone Opal," which uses quantum sensors to navigate without GPS. It's passive (meaning it doesn't emit signals that could be detected or jammed) and highly accurate. Instead of relying on satellites, Q-CTRL's system can read the Earth's magnetic field, which varies slightly depending on location (like a magnetic fingerprint or map). The system can determine where you are by measuring these
  
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• Police Using AI Personas to Infiltrate Online Activist Spaces, Records Reveal

  18-04-2025 05:30 via slashdot.org
  
  samleecole shares a report from 404 Media: American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media obtained via public records requests. Mass
  
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• Amazon To Launch First Vega OS-powered TV Streaming Device This Year

  18-04-2025 03:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon plans to release its first TV streaming device powered by Vega OS later this year while courting major publishers to bring their apps to the platform, according to Lowpass, which cites sources familiar with the company's plans and multiple leaks.
  Vega, a Linux-based operating system, may eventually replace Amazon's Android-based Fire OS across its device ecosystem. The company has already implemented Vega in three products: the Echo Show 5 and Echo Hub smart displays, as well as the Echo
  
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• Liz Truss Announces 'Uncensorable' Social Media Venture

  18-04-2025 02:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  databasecowgirl writes: [Liz Truss will launch an "uncensorable" social media platform this summer.] The shortest-serving prime minister, who was quickly shown the door after crashing the UK economy, claims the platform is needed to take on the Deep State. Truss has worked diligently to earn comparisons to Trump with appearances at American political rallies sporting a red MAGA cap. The effort has paid off with Trump's recent tariff announcement and resulting market meltdown, resulting in the tw
  
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• HP Agrees To $4 Million Settlement Over Claims of 'Falsely Advertising' PCs, Keyboards

  18-04-2025 01:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  HP has agreed to a $4 million settlement over allegations of deceptive pricing practices on its website, including falsely inflating original prices for computers and accessories to create the illusion of steep discounts. Ars Technica reports: Earlier this month, Judge P. Casey Pitts for the US District Court of the San Jose Division of the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval [PDF] of a settlement agreement regarding a class-action complaint first filed against HP on Oct
  
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• Microsoft Researchers Develop Hyper-Efficient AI Model That Can Run On CPUs

  18-04-2025 01:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has introduced BitNet b1.58 2B4T, the largest-scale 1-bit AI model to date with 2 billion parameters and the ability to run efficiently on CPUs. It's openly available under an MIT license. TechCrunch reports: The Microsoft researchers say that BitNet b1.58 2B4T is the first bitnet with 2 billion parameters, "parameters" being largely synonymous with "weights." Trained on a dataset of 4 trillion tokens -- equivalent to about 33 million books, by one estimate -- BitNet b1.58 2B4T outperf
  
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• US Halts $5 Billion New York Offshore Wind Project Mid-Build

  18-04-2025 00:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In its most aggressive attack against offshore wind yet, the Trump administration halted the $5 billion Empire Wind 1, already under construction off New York's coast. Norwegian developer Equinor announced yesterday that it received notice from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) ordering Empire Wind 1 to halt all activities on the outer continental shelf until BOEM has completed its review. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted this tw
  
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