ICT news

• KDE Plasma 6.6 Released

  17-02-2026 23:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.6.In this new major release, Spectacle can recognize texts from screenshots, a new on-screen keyboard and new login manager are available for testing, and a first-time wizard Plasma Setup was adde
  
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• Most VMware Users Still 'Actively Reducing Their VMware Footprint,' Survey Finds

  17-02-2026 23:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than two years after Broadcom took over VMware, the virtualization company's customers are still grappling with higher prices, uncertainty, and the challenges of reducing vendor lock-in. Today, CloudBolt Software released a report, "The Mass Exodus That Never Was: The Squeeze Is Just Beginning," that provides insight into those struggles. CloudBolt is a hybrid cloud management platform provider that aims to identify VMware customers' pa
  
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• US Lawyers Fire Up Privacy Class Action Accusing Lenovo of Bulk Data Transfers To China

  17-02-2026 22:26 via yro.slashdot.org
  A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China. From a report: The case filed by Almeida Law Group on behalf of San Francisco-based "Spencer Christy, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated" centers on the Data Security Program regulations implemented by the DOJ last year. According to the suit, these were "implemented to prevent adversarial countries from acquiring large quantit
  
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• The Small English Town Swept Up in the Global AI Arms Race

  17-02-2026 21:45 via news.slashdot.org
  Residents of Potters Bar, a small town just north of London, are trying to block what would be one of Europe's largest data centers from being built on 85 acres of rolling farmland that separates their community from the neighboring village of South Mimms. Multinational operator Equinix acquired the land last October after the local council granted planning permission in January 2025, and the company intends to break ground this year on a development it estimates will cost more than $5 billion.
  
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• Microsoft's AI Chief Says All White-Collar Desk Work Will Be Automated Within 18 Months

  17-02-2026 21:04 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" from AI, and believes most work involving "sitting down at a computer" -- accounting, legal, marketing, project management -- will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Britain Lost 14,000 Pubs, a Quarter, in 13 Years

  17-02-2026 20:25 via news.slashdot.org
  Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline.
  Leek trained a random forest model on 49,840 pubs and found spatial isolation -- how far a pub stood from its nearest neighbour -- was the single strongest
  
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• A YouTuber's $3M Movie Nearly Beat Disney's $40M Thriller at the Box Office

  17-02-2026 19:45 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage -- a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget.
  Iron Lung, a 127-minute sci-fi adaptation of a video game Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and edited
  
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• Blind Listening Test Finds Audiophiles Unable To Distinguish Copper Cable From a Banana or Wet Mud

  17-02-2026 19:05 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different 'interfaces.'
  Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original
  
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• Micron's PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s

  17-02-2026 18:25 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry's first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS -- roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.
  The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two variants: the Pro, available in capacities up to 30.72 TB, and the endurance-oriented Max, topping out at 25.6 TB. Both variants share th
  
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• 99% of Adults Over 40 Have Shoulder 'Abnormalities' on an MRI, Study Finds

  17-02-2026 17:44 via science.slashdot.org
  Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it's one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem -- in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone s
  
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• China Once Stole Foreign Ideas. Now It Wants To Protect Its Own

  17-02-2026 17:05 via slashdot.org
  China's courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year -- making it the world's most litigious country for IP disputes -- as the nation's own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity.
  The problem runs from knockoff "Lafufu" plush toys (cheap copies of Pop Mart's wildly popular Labubu dolls, which prompted a nationwide crackdown a
  
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• Mazda Finally Admits Its Infotainment System Is the Worst

  17-02-2026 16:27 via tech.slashdot.org
  Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons.
  The current lineup -- the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 -- still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated action buttons to navigate a tablet-like screen perched atop the dashboard. Upper-trim CX-70 and CX-90 models do have 12.3-inch touchscreens,
  
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• 'Software Isn't Dead, But Its Cosy Business Model Might Be'

  17-02-2026 15:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  The software industry's decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences.
  As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way to consumption-based and hybrid alternatives. Snowflake and Databricks (valued at $134 billion) already charge based on usage. Salesforce in
  
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• Valve's Steam Deck OLED Will Be 'Intermittently' Out of Stock Because of the RAM Crisis

  17-02-2026 15:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock "intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages." From a report: The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we now know why. The update comes shortly after Valve delayed the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller from a planned shipping window of early 2026 because of the memory and storage c
  
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• Sony Tech Can Identify Original Music in AI-Generated Songs

  17-02-2026 13:30 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Sony Group has developed a technology that can identify the underlying music used in tunes generated by AI, making it possible for songwriters to seek compensation from AI developers if their music was used. From a report: Sony Group's technology analyzes which musicians' songs were used in learning and generating music. It can quantify the contribution of each original work, such as "30% of the music used by the Beatles and 10% by Queen," for example.
  If the AI developer agrees to cooperate for
  
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• EU Parliament Blocks AI Features Over Cyber, Privacy Fears

  17-02-2026 10:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The European Parliament has disabled AI features on the work devices of lawmakers and their staff over cybersecurity and data protection concerns, according to an internal email seen by POLITICO. The chamber emailed its members on Monday to say it had disabled "built-in artificial intelligence features" on corporate tablets after its IT department assessed it couldn't guarantee the security of the tools' data.
  "Some of these features use cloud services to car
  
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• Secondhand Laptop Market Goes 'Mainstream' Amid Memory Crunch

  17-02-2026 07:01 via it.slashdot.org
  Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets -- Italy, the UK, Germany, Spain, and France.
  Affordability is the primary driver in the secondhand segment, the analyst says, with around 40 percent of sales driven by budg
  
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• The Music Industry Enters Its Less-Is-More Era

  17-02-2026 04:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  The music industry's long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone -- roughly 39% of the French service's daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month.
  Streaming services now host 253 million songs, according to Luminate's most recent annual report, after adding 51 million tracks over the course
  
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• Samsung Ad Confirms Rumors of a Useful S26 'Privacy Display'

  17-02-2026 01:01 via yro.slashdot.org
  Samsung has all but confirmed that its upcoming Galaxy S26 will feature a built-in privacy display, releasing an ad that demonstrates a "Zero-peeking privacy" toggle capable of blacking out on-screen content for anyone peering over the user's shoulder.
  The underlying technology is reportedly Samsung Display's Flex Magic Pixel OLED panel, first shown at MWC 2024, which adjusts viewing angles on a pixel-by-pixel basis -- and leaker Ice Universe has shared a video of the feature selectively hiding
  
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