ICT news

• Australia Risks 2035 Climate Goal Without Bigger Emissions Cuts

  28-11-2025 22:31 via news.slashdot.org
  Australia warned it's in danger of missing its 2035 climate targets without deeper pollution cuts, which in turn threatens the nation's ambitions to reach net zero by mid-century. From a report: Emissions are set to fall 48% by 2035 from 2005 levels based on current projections [non-paywalled source], the government said in a report on Thursday. That's short of an official pledge to cut greenhouse gases between 62% and 70%. The forecast doesn't take into account new action planned under the nati
  
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• Singapore Takes Top Spot in Global Talent Index

  28-11-2025 21:02 via news.slashdot.org
  Singapore has claimed the top spot in the 2025 Global Talent Competitiveness Index for the first time, displacing Switzerland from a position the European nation had held since the ranking's inception in 2013. The index, produced by business school INSEAD and the Portulans Institute, measured 135 economies across 77 indicators spanning soft skills, AI talent concentration, and formal education systems. The city-state ranked first globally in formal education and what the report calls "Generalist
  
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• Europe Fears It Can't Catch Up in Great Power Competition

  28-11-2025 20:00 via slashdot.org
  European leaders have spent years warning that the continent risked falling behind the U.S., China and Russia in the global contest for economic, technological and military dominance, and officials now believe they have reached that point.
  The mood darkened over the summer when Europe found itself on the sidelines as Washington and Beijing negotiated a reset of global trade rules, and turned bleak this month when the White House presented a Ukraine cease-fire plan without consulting European cap
  
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• Someone Is Trying To 'Hack' People Through Apple Podcasts

  28-11-2025 19:01 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple's Podcasts app on both iOS and Mac has been exhibiting strange behavior for months, spontaneously launching and presenting users with obscure religion, spirituality and education podcasts they never subscribed to -- and at least one of these podcasts contains a link attempting a cross-site scripting attack, 404 Media reports. Joseph Cox, a journalist at the outlet, documented the issue after repeatedly finding his Mac had launched the Podcasts app on its own, presenting bizarre podcasts wi
  
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• Australia's Streaming Quotas Become Law

  28-11-2025 18:01 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Australia's streaming quotas have become law. Legislation requiring the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max to spend a portion of their local earnings on original Australian content has been passed in parliament, and now comes into effect. From a report: The quotas were announced earlier this month. This will see global streamers with more than one million Australian subscribers made to spend 10% of their total Australian expenditure -- or 7.5% of their revenues -- on local originals, whether
  
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• Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy

  28-11-2025 17:01 via hardware.slashdot.org
  China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year -- nearly nine times as many as the United States and more than the rest of the world combined -- as the country races to automate its manufacturing base amid rising labor costs at home and tariff threats from abroad.
  The nation's stock of operational robots surpassed 2 million in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Of 131 factories globally recognized by the World Economic Forum for boosting productivity through cuttin
  
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• Violent Conflict Over Water Hit a Record Last Year

  28-11-2025 16:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Researchers at the Pacific Institute documented 420 water-related conflicts globally in 2024, a record that far surpasses the 355 incidents logged in 2023 and continues a trend that has seen such violence more than quadruple over the past five years. The Oakland-based water think tank's database tracks disputes where water triggered violence, where water systems were targeted, and where infrastructure became collateral damage in broader conflicts.
  The Middle East reported the most incidents at 1
  
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• Major AI Conference Flooded With Peer Reviews Written Fully By AI

  28-11-2025 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  An analysis of submissions to next year's International Conference on Learning Representations has found that roughly one in five peer reviews were fully generated by AI, a discovery that came after researchers including Carnegie Mellon's Graham Neubig grew suspicious of feedback on their manuscripts that seemed unusually verbose and requested non-standard statistical analyses.
  Neubig posted on X offering a reward for anyone who could scan the conference's submissions for AI-generated text, and
  
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• Why Can't ChatGPT Tell Time?

  28-11-2025 13:30 via slashdot.org
  ChatGPT can browse the web, write code and analyze images, but ask it what time it is and you might get the correct answer, a confident wrong answer, or a polite refusal -- sometimes all three within minutes of each other.
  The problem stems from how large language models work. These systems predict answers based on training data and don't receive constant real-time updates about things like time unless they specifically search the internet. AI robotics expert Yervant Kulbashian told The Verge th
  
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• AWS Introduces DNS Failover Feature for Its Notoriously Unreliable US East Region

  28-11-2025 11:01 via it.slashdot.org
  Amazon Web Services has rolled out a DNS resilience feature that allows customers to make domain name system changes within 60 minutes of a service disruption in its US East region, a direct response to the long history of outages at the cloud giant's most troubled infrastructure.
  AWS said customers in regulated industries like banking, fintech and SaaS had asked for additional capabilities to meet business continuity and compliance requirements, specifically the ability to provision standby res
  
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• Seven Years Later, Airbus is Still Trying To Kick Its Microsoft Habit

  28-11-2025 08:31 via it.slashdot.org
  Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch. The Register: As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives. Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremel
  
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• Canada Rolls Back Climate Rules To Boost Investments

  28-11-2025 06:01 via news.slashdot.org
  Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has signed an agreement with Alberta's premier that will roll back certain climate rules to spur investment in energy production, while encouraging construction of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. From a report: Under the agreement, which was signed on Thursday, the federal government will scrap a planned emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and drop rules on clean electricity in exchange for a commitment by Canada's top oil-producing province to stren
  
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• US Patent Office Issues New Guidelines For AI-Assisted Inventions

  28-11-2025 03:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued new guidelines outlining when inventions created with the help of AI can be patented. From a report: USPTO Director John Squires said on Wednesday in a notice set to be published Friday, that the office considers generative AI systems to be "analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, research databases, or any other tool that assists in the inventive process."
  "They may provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by t
  
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• Epic's Sweeney Says Platforms Should Stop Tagging Games Made With AI

  28-11-2025 02:10 via games.slashdot.org
  The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need t
  
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• Social Media Giants Liable For Financial Scams Under New EU Law

  28-11-2025 01:28 via tech.slashdot.org
  Platforms including Meta and TikTok will be held liable for financial fraud for the first time under new rules agreed by EU lawmakers in the early hours of Thursday. From a report: The Parliament and Council agreed on the package of rules after eight hours of negotiations to strengthen safeguards against payment fraud. The deal adds another layer of EU regulatory risk for U.S. tech giants, which have lobbied the White House to confront Brussels' anti-monopoly and content moderation rules.
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