ICT news

• 'Harassed by Assasin's Creed Gamers, A Professor Fought Back With Kindness'

  04-05-2025 23:41 via games.slashdot.org
  
  A Dartmouth College associate professor of Japanese literature and culture became a narrative consultant for Ubisoft's game Assassin's Creed Shadow (which launched in March). Sachi Schmidt-Hori's job "involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters," writes the Associated Press.
  But when a trailer was released in May of 2024, some reacted to a game character named Yasuke who was a Black African samurai, according to the article, "with gamers criticizing his
  
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• Disneyland Imagineers Defend New Show Recreating Walt Disney as a Robot

  04-05-2025 22:41 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "When Disneyland turns 70 this July, Main Street's Opera House will play host to the return of Walt Disney, who will sit down with audiences to tell his story in robot form," writes Gizmodo.
  But they point out Walt's granddaughter Johanna Miller wrote a Facebook post opposing the idea in November. ("They are Dehumanizing him. People are not replaceable...")The idea of a Robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense. It would be an imposter... You could
  
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• 'KDE Plasma LTS Releases Are Dead'

  04-05-2025 21:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  With its Start menu-style application launcher and its bottom-of-the-screen taskbar, KDE Plasma is a "nice" and "traditional" desktop environment that's "also highly customizable," notes It's FOSS News.
  But there's a change coming...
  In contrast to other desktop environments, KDE offers a long-term support release (LTS) of Plasma, where bug fixes and security updates are provided for an extended period, with no new major changes being introduced. However, that is no longer the case now. Shared b
  
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• Tech Leaders Launch Campaign To Make CS and AI a Graduation Requirement

  04-05-2025 20:20 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  "Our future won't be handed to us," says the young narrator in a new ad from the nonprofit Code.org. "We will build it."
  "But how can we when the education we need is still just an elective?" says another young voice...
  The ad goes on to tout the power "to create with computer science and AI — the skills transforming every industry..." and ends by saying "This isn't radical. It's what education is supposed to do. Make computer science and AI a graduation requirement."
  There's also a hard-h
  
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• FSF Announces Free Software Hackathon Honoring Its 40th Anniversary

  04-05-2025 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Thursday the Free Software Foundation announced plans for a celebratory hackathon in November to improve free/libre software "in honor of its fortieth anniversary.The FSF has been campaigning for software freedom for over forty years. As part of its celebrations, the organization is inviting the wider free software community (both projects and individual contributors) to participate in a global, online hackathon to help improve important libre software projects.
  All free software projects, regar
  
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• We May Be In a 'Post-Herd Immunity World', says Immunology Expert

  04-05-2025 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on infectious disease and immunology, told the Guardian that "We're living in a post-herd-immunity world. I think the measles outbreak proves that. Measles — because it is the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, the most contagious human disease really — it is the first to come back."Three large outbreaks in Canada, Mexico and the US now account for the overwhelming majority of roughly 2,300 measles cases across the World Health Organization
  
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• Security Researchers Create Proof-of-Concept Program that Evades Linux Syscall-Watching Antivirus

  04-05-2025 16:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader Mirnotoriety shared this report from the Register:A proof-of-concept program has been released to demonstrate a so-called monitoring "blind spot" in how some Linux antivirus and other endpoint protection tools use the kernel's io_uring interface.
  That interface allows applications to make IO requests without using traditional system calls [to enhance performance by enabling asynchronous I/O operations between user space and the Linux kernel through shared ring buffers]. That's a
  
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• Firefox Could Be Doomed Without Google Search Deal, Executive Says

  04-05-2025 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge:
  Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the [U.S.] Justice Department's proposals to restrict Google's search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. "It's very frightening," Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.The Department of Justice wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a
  
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• Did Peking U. Just Make the World's Fastest Transistor - Without Using Silicon?

  04-05-2025 09:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "It is the fastest, most efficient transistor ever," proclaims an announcment from Peking University. "And most important of all, there's no trace of silicon involved," adds ZME Science.
  From the South China Morning Post:
  A team of researchers at Peking University claims to have shattered chip performance limits and proven that China can use new materials to "change lanes" in the semiconductor race by circumventing silicon-based roadblocks entirely.The researchers, led by physical chemistry prof
  
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• How Badly Did ChatGPT and Copilot Fail to Predict the Winners of the Kentucky Derby?

  04-05-2025 06:34 via slashdot.org
  
  In 2016, an online "swarm intelligence" platform stunned horse-racing fans by making a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers in order. (But the next year its predictions weren't even close, with TechRepublic suggesting 2016's race just had an unusual cluster of obvious picks.)
  Since then it's become almost a tradition — asking AI to predict the winning horses each year, then see how close it came. So before today's race, a horse named "Journalism"
  
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• Dying Satellites Can Drive Climate Change and Ozone Depletion, Study Finds

  04-05-2025 03:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  There's 9,000 satellites circling the earth, the Guardian points out, with projections over over 60,000 by 2040.But "A new study shows that the emissions from expired satellites, as they fall to Earth and burn up, will be significant in future years, with implications for ozone hole recovery and climate."
  Most old satellites are disposed of by reducing their altitude and letting them burn up as they fall, releasing pollution into Earth's atmosphere such as aerosolised aluminium. To understand th
  
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• AI-Driven Robot Installs Nearly 10,000 Solar Modules in Australia

  04-05-2025 00:43 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed alm
  
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