ICT news

• Top Colleges Are Too Costly Even for Parents Making $300,000

  25-04-2025 23:24 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Families earning $300,000 annually -- placing them among America's highest earners -- are increasingly finding themselves unable to afford elite college tuition without taking on substantial debt. Bloomberg's analysis of financial aid data from 50 selective colleges reveals households earning between $100,000 and $300,000 occupy a precarious middle ground: too affluent for meaningful aid but insufficiently wealthy to absorb annual costs approaching $100,000.
  The squeeze begins around $150,000 in
  
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• Microsoft Launches Windows Recall After Year-Long Delay

  25-04-2025 22:45 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has finally released Windows Recall to the general public, nearly a year after first announcing the controversial feature. Available exclusively on Copilot+ PCs, Recall continuously captures screenshots of user activity, storing them in a searchable database with extracted text. The feature's original launch was derailed by significant security concerns, as critics noted anyone with access to a Recall database could potentially view nearly everything done on the device.
  Microsoft's rev
  
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• Intel's AI PC Chips Aren't Selling Well

  25-04-2025 22:05 via slashdot.org
  
  Intel is grappling with an unexpected market shift as customers eschew its new AI-focused processors for cheaper previous-generation chips. The company revealed during its recent earnings call that demand for older Raptor Lake processors has surged while its newer, more expensive Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake AI PC chips struggle to gain traction.
  This surprising trend, first reported by Tom's Hardware, has created a production capacity shortage for Intel's 'Intel 7' process node that will "persist
  
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• How Democrats and Republicans Cite Science

  25-04-2025 21:20 via politics.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a Nature story: The United States is known for the deep polarization between its two major political parties -- the right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. Now an analysis of hundreds of thousands of policy documents reveals striking differences in partisan policymakers' use of the scientific literature, with Democratic-led congressional committees and left-wing think tanks more likely to cite research papers than their right-wing counterparts. The analysis als
  
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• Swiss National Bank Chairman Rebuffs Bitcoin as Reserve Asset

  25-04-2025 20:45 via slashdot.org
  
  The head of the Swiss National Bank said on Friday that cryptocurrencies failed to meet the institution's currency reserve standards, rebuffing calls by crypto advocates that it hold bitcoin as a hedge against growing global economic risks. From a report: Cryptocurrency campaigners are ramping up pressure on the SNB to buy bitcoin, arguing that the economic turmoil triggered by U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs made it more important for the central bank to diversify its reserves. They have
  
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• Microsoft's Big AI Hire Can't Match OpenAI

  25-04-2025 20:06 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users.
  OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's
  
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• Microsoft To Kill Windows Maps App in July

  25-04-2025 19:26 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft will remove its Maps app from the Microsoft Store in July 2025, delivering an "update" that renders the application completely nonfunctional. Following the cutoff, users won't be able to reinstall the app even if previously downloaded, according to a Microsoft support document. While the app will retain personal data like saved navigation routes and map URLs, this information will become unusable after the deprecation.
  The Maps application, a remnant from the Windows Phone and Windows
  
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• The 'You Wouldn't Steal a Car' Campaign Used a Pirated Font

  25-04-2025 18:41 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The iconic "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" anti-piracy campaign, which dramatically equated digital piracy with physical theft, appears to have used a pirated font in its own materials. New evidence indicates the campaign utilized "XBAND Rough," a free clone of the commercial "FF Confidential" font, which requires a license.
  TorrentFreak independently confirmed campaign materials from 2005 embedded the XBAND Rough font rather than the original created by Just Van Rossum in 1992. Researchers discovere
  
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• YC Partner Argues Most AI Apps Are Currently 'Horseless Carriages'

  25-04-2025 18:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Pete Koomen, a Y Combinator partner, argues that current AI applications often fail by unnecessarily constraining their underlying models, much like early automobiles that mimicked horse-drawn carriages rather than reimagining transportation. In his detailed critique, Koomen uses Gmail's AI email draft feature as a prime example. The tool generates formal, generic emails that don't match users' actual writing styles, often producing drafts longer than what users would naturally write.
  The critic
  
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• Apple Aims To Source All US iPhones From India in Pivot Away From China

  25-04-2025 17:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple plans to shift the assembly of all US-sold iPhones to India [alternative source] as soon as next year, according to Financial Times, which cites people familiar with the matter, as President Donald Trump's trade war forces the tech giant to pivot away from China. From the report: The push builds on Apple's strategy to diversify its supply chain but goes further and faster than investors appreciate, with a goal to source from India the entirety of the more than 60 million iPhones sold annua
  
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• Federal Reserve, FDIC Pull Statements on Crypto

  25-04-2025 16:43 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have withdrawn several statements regarding banks' crypto-related activities in an effort to support innovation and clarify current policies. From a report: Two joint statements from 2023 on liquidity and other risks regarding banks' crypto-related activities were pulled on Thursday, the FDIC said. The move aims to clarify that banking organizations may engage in crypto activities so long as they are consistent with current laws a
  
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• Yahoo Wants To Buy Chrome

  25-04-2025 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google's Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it. From a report: The information came out during the fourth day of the Justice Department's remedies trial to rectify Google's search monopoly. The DOJ has -- among other proposals -- requested Judge Amit Mehta break up Google by requiring it sell its Chrome browser, which the agency says is a key distribution channel for its pop
  
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• Perplexity CEO Says Its Browser Will Track Everything Users Do Online To Sell Ads

  25-04-2025 15:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said this week on the TBPN podcast that one reason Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app. This so it can sell premium ads. "That's kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you," Srinivas said. "Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely wo
  
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• Intel Says Employees Must Return To the Office 4 Days a Week

  25-04-2025 12:00 via slashdot.org
  
  New Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has mandated that employees return to the office four days a week starting September 1 to boost collaboration and decision-making. Tan also signaled upcoming job cuts and organizational changes, including a flatter management structure and fewer meetings. "When we spend time together in person, it fosters more engaging and productive discussion and debate," Tan wrote in a note to employees posted on Intel's website Thursday. "It drives better and faster decision-making.
  
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• Sydney Radio Station Secretly Used AI-Generated Host For 6 Months Without Disclosure

  25-04-2025 09:00 via radio.slashdot.org
  
  The Sydney-based CADA station secretly used an AI-generated host named "Thy" for its weekday shows over six months without disclosure. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: After initial questioning from Stephanie Coombes in The Carpet newsletter, it was revealed that the station used ElevenLabs -- a generative AI audio platform that transforms text into speech -- to create Thy, whose likeness and voice were cloned from a real employee in the ARN finance team. The Australian Communications and Medi
  
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• Air Pollution Still Plagues Nearly Half of Americans

  25-04-2025 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Air in the U.S. has gotten cleaner for decades, adding years to people's lives and preventing millions of asthma attacks, but nearly half of Americans still live with unhealthy air pollution, a new report finds. The report comes as the Trump administration is considering rolling back some key air quality regulations. Air quality across the country has improved dramatically since regulations like the Clean Air Act were put in place in the 1970s to gov
  
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• Waymo Reports 250,000 Paid Robotaxi Rides Per Week In US

  25-04-2025 04:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Waymo is now providing over 250,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the U.S., up from 200,000 in February, as it expands into cities like Austin and grows partnerships with Uber and automakers. CNBC reports: "We can't possibly do it all ourselves," said Pichai on a call with analysts for Alphabet's first-quarter earnings. Pichai noted that Waymo has not entirely defined its long-term business model, and there is "future optionality around personal ownership" of vehicles equipped with Waymo's sel
  
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• US Agency To Ease Self-Driving Vehicle Deployment Hurdles, Retain Reporting Rules

  25-04-2025 03:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The Trump administration introduced a new framework to expedite self-driving vehicle deployment by reducing regulatory hurdles, while maintaining mandatory safety incident reporting. NHTSA is also expanding its exemption program, allowing domestically produced autonomous vehicles lacking traditional safety controls to operate on U.S. roads. Reuters reports: The Trump administration said Thursday it aims to speed up the deployment of self-driving vehicles but will maintain rules requiring reporti
  
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• You'll Soon Manage a Team of AI Agents, Says Microsoft's Work Trend Report

  25-04-2025 02:50 via slashdot.org
  
  ZipNada shares a report from ZDNet: Microsoft's latest research identifies a new type of organization known as the Frontier Firm, where on-demand intelligence requirements are managed by hybrid teams of AI agents and humans. The report identified real productivity gains from implementing AI into organizations, with one of the biggest being filling the capacity gap -- as many as 80% of the global workforce, both employees and leaders, report having too much work to do, but not enough time or ener
  
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• Employee Monitoring App Leaks 21 Million Screenshots In Real Time

  25-04-2025 02:10 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cybernews: Researchers at Cybernews have uncovered a major privacy breach involving WorkComposer, a workplace surveillance app used by over 200,000 people across countless companies. The app, designed to track productivity by logging activity and snapping regular screenshots of employees' screens, left over 21 million images exposed in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, broadcasting how workers go about their day frame by frame. The leaked data is extremely s
  
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• Microsoft Brings Native PyTorch Arm Support To Windows Devices

  25-04-2025 01:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has announced native PyTorch support for Windows on Arm devices with the release of PyTorch 2.7, making it significantly easier for developers to build and run machine learning models directly on Arm-powered Windows machines. This eliminates the need for manual compilation and opens up performance gains for AI tasks like image classification, NLP, and generative AI. Neowin reports: With the release of PyTorch 2.7, native Arm builds for Windows on Arm are now readily available for Pytho
  
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• AMD Publishes Open-Source GIM Driver For GPU Virtualization, Radeon 'In The Roadmap'

  25-04-2025 00:50 via news.slashdot.org
  
  AMD has open-sourced its "GPU-IOV Module" for enabling SR-IOV-based virtualization on Instinct accelerators using the Linux kernel and KVM hypervisor, with features like GPU scheduling and VF/PF management. Notably, AMD plans to extend this virtualization support to client Radeon GPUs. Phoronix reports: The AMD GPU-IOV Module is for the Linux kernel and for providing SR-IOV based hardware virtualization in conjunction with the KVM hypervisor. GIM provides the GPU IOV virtualization, virtual func
  
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• New Android Spyware Is Targeting Russian Military Personnel On the Front Lines

  25-04-2025 00:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Russian military personnel are being targeted with recently discovered Android malware that steals their contacts and tracks their location. The malware is hidden inside a modified app for Alpine Quest mapping software, which is used by, among others, hunters, athletes, and Russian personnel stationed in the war zone in Ukraine. The app displays various topographical maps for use online and offline. The trojanized Alpine Quest app is being p
  
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