ICT news

• Florida Fails To Pass Bill Requiring Encryption Backdoors For Social Media Accounts

  09-05-2025 23:25 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A Florida bill, which would have required social media companies to provide an encryption backdoor for allowing police to access user accounts and private messages, has failed to pass into law. The Social Media Use by Minors bill was "indefinitely postponed" and "withdrawn from consideration" in the Florida House of Representatives earlier this week. Lawmakers in the Florida Senate had already voted to advance the legislation, but a bill requi
  
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• Newark Airport Radar Outage Strikes Again, Delaying More Flights

  09-05-2025 22:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Just days after a radar and communications outage at Newark Liberty International Airport, the FAA confirmed a second incident on May 9 that disrupted radar and radio contact for 90 seconds due to a telecom failure at Philadelphia TRACON. "As of 12:30PM ET, FlightAware stats showed 292 total delays for flights into or out of Newark, which is also experiencing delays due to runway construction," reports The Verge. From the report: After the first outage on April 28th, an air traffic controller wh
  
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• Whoop Angers Users Over Reneged Free Upgrade Promises

  09-05-2025 22:26 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Wearable startup Whoop just announced its new Whoop 5.0 fitness tracker yesterday, but some existing users are already calling foul. From a report: Previously, Whoop said people who had been members for at least six months would get free upgrades to next-generation hardware. Now, the company says that members hoping to upgrade from a Whoop 4.0 to 5.0 will have to pay up.
  Whoop is a bit different from other fitness trackers in that it runs entirely on a subscription membership model. Most wearabl
  
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• US Senator Introduces Bill Calling For Location-Tracking on AI Chips To Limit China Access

  09-05-2025 21:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  A U.S. senator introduced a bill on Friday that would direct the Commerce Department to require location verification mechanisms for export-controlled AI chips, in an effort to curb China's access to advanced semiconductor technology. From a report: Called the "Chip Security Act," the bill calls for AI chips under export regulations, and products containing those chips, to be fitted with location-tracking systems to help detect diversion, smuggling or other unauthorized use of the product.
  "With
  
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• 37signals To Delete AWS Account, Cutting Cloud Costs By Millions

  09-05-2025 20:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Software firm 37signals is completing its migration from AWS to on-premises infrastructure, expecting to save $1.3 million annually on storage costs alone. CTO David Heinemeier Hansson announced the company has begun migrating 18 petabytes of data from Amazon S3 to Pure Storage arrays costing $1.5 million upfront but only $200,000 yearly to operate.
  AWS waived $250,000 in data egress fees for the transition, which will allow 37signals to completely delete its AWS account this summer. The company
  
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• Scientists Have Explored Just 0.001% of Deep Ocean Floor, New Study Finds

  09-05-2025 20:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  A comprehensive analysis in Science Advances reveals that humans have explored less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor -- an area equivalent to merely one-tenth the size of Belgium. Oceanographer Katherine Bell and colleagues at the Ocean Discovery League compiled data from approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives conducted between 1958 and 2024, finding that expeditions have concentrated overwhelmingly around waters near the United States, Japan, and New Zealand.
  The study exposes significant gaps in
  
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• CrowdStrike, Responsible For Global IT Outage, To Cut Jobs In AI Efficiency Push

  09-05-2025 19:20 via it.slashdot.org
  
  CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year, has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to "AI efficiency." From a report: In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike's chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business.
  "We're operating in a market and techn
  
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• Panasonic To Cut 10,000 Jobs

  09-05-2025 18:40 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Panasonic will undertake a major restructuring across a range of its business, including consumer electronics, cutting 10,000 jobs globally, as the Japanese company plans to streamline, spinning out struggling divisions in hopes of reversing its dwindling market share and fending off fierce Chinese competition. Panasonic did not say which businesses it intended to shrink. The company expects to book structural reform costs of roughly $900 million this busines
  
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• Tech Industry Warns US Investment Pledges Hinge on Research Tax Break

  09-05-2025 18:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Major tech companies lobbying to salvage a tax deduction for research and development are warning they may pull back from high-profile pledges of new US investments if Congress doesn't fully reinstate the break.
  Big tech companies have pledged more than $1.6 trillion in investments in the US since Donald Trump took office, promising to build factories and data centers in alignment with Trump's push to build in America. But industry representatives are signali
  
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• Prompt Engineering is Quickly Going Extinct

  09-05-2025 17:20 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  The specialized role of prompt engineering, not long ago heralded as a promising new career path in AI, has virtually disappeared just two years after its emergence. Many companies are now considering strong AI prompting a standard skill rather than a dedicated position, Fast Company reports, with some firms even deploying AI systems to generate optimal prompts for other AI tools.
  "AI is already eating its own," Malcolm Frank, CEO of TalentGenius, told the publication. "Prompt engineering has be
  
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• Nvidia CEO: 'You Won't Lose Your Job To AI, But To Someone Who Uses It'

  09-05-2025 16:40 via slashdot.org
  
  Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has served up another blunt take on the job market as AI permeates society. From a report: "You will not lose your job to AI, but will lose it to someone who uses it," Huang said at the Milken Institute Conference. Added Huang, "I recommend 100% take advantage of AI, don't be that person."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• AI-Generated 'Slop' Threatens Internet Ecosystem, Researchers Warn

  09-05-2025 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Researchers are sounding alarms about the proliferation of AI-generated content -- dubbed "slop" -- that may be overwhelming the internet's human-created material. Fil Menczer, distinguished professor of informatics at Indiana University, who has studied social bots since the early 2010s, is now expressing serious concern about generative AI's impact. "Am I worried? Yes, I'm very worried," he told Bloomberg.
  Another research from Georgetown University found over 100 Facebook pages with millions
  
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• Education Giant Pearson Hit By Cyberattack Exposing Customer Data

  09-05-2025 15:00 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Education giant Pearson suffered a cyberattack, allowing threat actors to steal corporate data and customer information, BleepingComputer has learned. Pearson is a UK-based education company and one of the world's largest providers of academic publishing, digital learning tools, and standardized assessments. The company works with schools, universities, and individuals in over 70 countries through its print and online services. In a stat
  
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• IRS Hopes To Replace Fired Enforcement Workers With AI

  09-05-2025 13:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Facing deep staffing cuts, the IRS plans to lean heavily on AI to maintain tax collection efforts, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stating that smarter IT and the "AI boom" will offset reductions in revenue enforcement staff. The Register reports: When asked by Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD) whether proposed reductions in the IRS's IT budget, along with plans to cut additional staff, would affect the agencies ability to collect tax revenue, Bessent said it wouldn't, thanks to the current "
  
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• Instagram's AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed Therapists

  09-05-2025 11:30 via slashdot.org
  Instagram's AI chatbots are masquerading as licensed therapists, complete with fabricated credentials and license numbers, according to an investigation by 404 Media. When questioned, these user-created bots from Meta's AI Studio platform provide detailed but entirely fictional qualifications, including nonexistent license numbers, accreditations, and practice information.
  Unlike Character.AI, which displays clear disclaimers that its therapy bots aren't real professionals, Meta's chatbots featu
  
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• SpaceX Gets Approval To Sell Starlink In India

  09-05-2025 09:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: Almost immediately after India's government issued this week new tightened regulations for allowing private satellite constellations to sell their services in India, it also apparently completed negotiations with SpaceX to allow it to sell Starlink in India based on these rules. Business Today reports: "According to sources, the DoT [Department of Transportation] granted the LoI [Letter of Intent] after Starlink accepted 29 strict security condition
  
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• Celsius CEO Mashinsky Sentenced To 12 Years in Multi-Billion-Dollar Crypto Fraud Case

  09-05-2025 07:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Alexander Mashinsky, the former CEO of Celsius Network, was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Thursday after pleading guilty to two counts of fraud, a dramatic fall for the leader of a company once hailed as the "bank" of the crypto industry. From a report: Standing before U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl in Manhattan's Southern District, Mashinsky faced the consequences of what prosecutors described as a sweeping scheme to defraud investors. In December he pleaded guilty to commodities fraud
  
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• NOAA Retires Extreme Weather Database

  09-05-2025 05:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database "will be retired," a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events. The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of service
  
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• Alibaba's ZeroSearch Teaches AI To Search Without Search Engines, Cuts Training Costs By 88%

  09-05-2025 04:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Alibaba Group researchers have developed "ZeroSearch," a technique that enables large language models to acquire search capabilities without using external search engines during training. The approach transforms LLMs into retrieval modules through supervised fine-tuning and employs a "curriculum-based rollout strategy" that gradually degrades generated document quality.
  In tests across seven question-answering datasets, ZeroSearch matched or exceeded the performance [PDF] of models trained with
  
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• Trump To End Biden-Era High-Speed Internet Program

  09-05-2025 03:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joe Biden aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort "racist" and "totally unconstitutional" and threatening to end it "immediately." The New York TimesL: Mr. Trump's statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in com
  
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• Apple Is Planning Smart Glasses With and Without AR

  09-05-2025 00:40 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple has "made progress" on a chip for a product that could rival the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company is also reportedly working on glasses that use augmented reality. The Verge reports: The chip is apparently based on the chips Apple uses for the Apple Watch, though the company has removed parts and is being designed in such a way that it can handle the "multiple cameras" that the smart glasses might have, Bloomberg reports. Apple wants mass produc
  
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• Cloudflare CEO: AI Is Killing the Business Model of the Web

  09-05-2025 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that AI is breaking the economic model of the web by decoupling content creation from value, with platforms like Google and OpenAI increasingly providing answers without driving traffic to original sources. He argued that unless AI companies start compensating creators, the web's content ecosystem will collapse -- calling most current AI investment a "money fire" with only a small fraction holding l
  
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