ICT news

• FDA To Use AI In Drug Approvals To 'Radically Increase Efficiency'

  11-06-2025 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The FDA plans to use AI to "radically increase efficiency" in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, drawing on lessons from Operation Warp Speed to reduce review times to weeks. The plan was laid out in an article published Tuesday in JAMA. The New York Times reports: Another initiative involves a review of chemicals and other "concerning ingredients" that appear in U.S. food but not in the food of other developed nations. And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a
  
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• A Mathematician Calculated The Size of a Giant Meatball Made of Every Human

  11-06-2025 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  A mathematician on Reddit calculated that if all 8.2 billion humans were blended into a uniform goo, the resulting meatball would form a sphere just under 1 kilometer wide -- small enough to fit inside Central Park. ScienceAlert reports: "If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide," Reddit contributor kiki2703 wrote in a post ... Reasoning the d
  
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• Tech Giants' Indirect Emissions Rose 150% In Three Years

  11-06-2025 05:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Indirect carbon emissions from the operations of four of the leading AI-focused tech companies rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023, due to the demands of power-hungry data centers, a United Nations report (PDF) said on Thursday. The use of artificial intelligence by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta drove up their global indirect emissions because of the vast amounts of energy required to power data centers, the report by the International
  
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• FreeBSD 14.3 Released

  11-06-2025 03:40 via bsd.slashdot.org
  
  Michael Larabel of Phoronix highlights the key updates in today's stable release of FreeBSD 14.3: FreeBSD 14.3 has back-ported a number of improvements from FreeBSD 15 back to the FreeBSD 14 series. Plus a number of routine package updates and other fixes. Some of the FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE highlights include:- Updating the ZFS support against OpenZFS 2.2.7.
  - Merging of the Realtek RTW88 and RTW89 WiFi drivers based on the Linux 6.14 kernel code.
  - The LinuxKPI code has been improved to support c
  
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• 'Bitcoin Baby' Soon To Be a Teenager

  11-06-2025 03:00 via slashdot.org
  
  "Twelve years ago, a baby was born after someone used bitcoin to pay for a frozen egg IVF," writes longtime Slashdot reader bobdevine. "I, for one, welcome..."Blockworks tells the story of how it all came to be: In February 2012 -- almost two years after Laszlo's pizzas -- a fertility doctor named C. Terence Lee set about a personal and professional quest to onboard his patients to Bitcoin by accepting BTC for his services. He started with a "Bitcoin accepted here" sign in his window, and then a
  
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• News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google's New AI Tools

  11-06-2025 02:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "It is true, Google AI is stomping on the entire internet," writes Slashdot reader TheWho79, sharing a report from the Wall Street Journal. "From HuffPost to the Atlantic, publishers prepare to pivot or shut the doors. ... Even highly regarded old school bullet-proof publications like Washington Post are getting hit hard." From the report: Traffic from organic search to HuffPost's desktop and mobile websites fell by just over half in the past three years, and by nearly that much at the Washingto
  
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• Trump Quietly Throws Out Biden's Cyber Policies

  11-06-2025 01:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: President Trump quietly took a red pen to much of the Biden administration's cyber legacy in a little-noticed move late Friday. Under an executive order signed just before the weekend, Trump is tossing out some of the major touchstones of Biden's cyber policy legacy -- while keeping a few others. The order preserves efforts around post-quantum cryptography, advanced encryption standards, and border gateway protocol security, along with the Cyber Tr
  
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• 40,000 IoT Cameras Worldwide Stream Secrets To Anyone With a Browser

  11-06-2025 01:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Connor Jones reports via The Register: Security researchers managed to access the live feeds of 40,000 internet-connected cameras worldwide and they may have only scratched the surface of what's possible. Supporting the bulletin issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this year, which warned of exposed cameras potentially being used in Chinese espionage campaigns, the team at Bitsight was able to tap into feeds of sensitive locations. The US was the most affected region, with
  
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• Starbucks To Roll Out Microsoft Azure OpenAI Assistant For Baristas

  11-06-2025 00:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Starbucks is piloting a generative AI assistant called "Green Dot Assist" to streamline barista tasks and improve service speed, with plans for a broader rollout in fiscal 2026. The assistant is built on Microsoft Azure's OpenAI platform. CNBC reports: Instead of flipping through manuals or accessing Starbucks' intranet, baristas will be able to use a tablet behind the counter equipped with Green Dot Assist to get answers to a range of questions, from how to make an iced shaken espresso to troub
  
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