ICT news

• EVs Are Already Making Your Air Cleaner, Research Shows

  22-02-2026 23:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Fossil fuels produce NO2, which is linked to asthma attacks, bronchitis, and higher risks of heart disease and stroke, according the EV news site Electrek. But the nonprofit news site Grist.org notes a new analysis showing that those emissions decreased by 1.1% for every increase of 200 electric vehicles — across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes.
  "A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level led to a decline in air pollution," said Sandrah Eckel, a public health professor at the University
  
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• Long Before Tech CEOs Turned To Layoffs To Cover AI Expenses, There Was WorldCom

  22-02-2026 22:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?" In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing account
  
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• 'Open Source Registries Don't Have Enough Money To Implement Basic Security'

  22-02-2026 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they're still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations.And it's not just because bandwidth is expensive, he said at this year's FOSDEM. "The problem is they don't have enough money to spend on the very secur
  
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• Researchers Develop Detachable Crawling Robotic Hand

  22-02-2026 20:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time.
  This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can also hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously, and "can even unscrew the cap off a m
  
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• AI Now Helps Manage 16% of America's Apartments

  22-02-2026 19:34 via slashdot.org
  Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. "Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI..." reports SFGate, "from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in."
  Now imagine it's far more than just one apartment complex...At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings, my initial interactions were also with a robot. At the Allegro, my fiance and I entered the leasing office for o
  
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• Amazon Disputes Report an AWS Service Was Taken Down By Its AI Coding Bot

  22-02-2026 18:34 via slashdot.org
  Friday Amazon published a blog post "to address the inaccuracies" in a Financial Times report that the company's own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December.
  Amazon writes that the "brief" and "extremely limited" service interruption "was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims."And "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false."
  The disruption was an extremely limited ev
  
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• Man Accidentally Gains Control of 7,000 Robot Vacuums

  22-02-2026 17:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  A software engineer tried steering his robot vacuum with a videogame controller, reports Popular Science — but ended up with "a sneak peak into thousands of people's homes."
  While building his own remote-control app, Sammy Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the robot communicated with DJI's remote cloud servers. But he soon discovered that the same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own device also provided access to live camera fe
  
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• F-35 Software Could Be Jailbreaked Like an IPhone: Dutch Defense Minister

  22-02-2026 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Lockheed Martin's F-35 combat aircraft is a supersonic stealth "strike fighter." But this week the military news site TWZ reports that the fighter's "computer brain," including "its cloud-based components, could be cracked to accept third-party software updates, just like 'jailbreaking' a cellphone, according to the Dutch State Secretary for Defense."
  TWZ notes that the Dutch defense secretary made the remarks during an episode of BNR Nieuwsradio's "Boekestijn en de Wijk" podcast, according to a
  
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• Has the AI Disruption Arrived - and Will It Just Make Software Cheaper and More Accessible?

  22-02-2026 12:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  Programmer/entrepreneur Paul Ford is the co-founder of AI-driven business software platform Aboard. This week he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled "The AI Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun," arguing that Anthropic's Claude Code "was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I've been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer... [W]hen the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hun
  
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• After 16 Years, 'Interim' CTO Finally Eradicating Fujitsu and Horizon From the UK's Post Office

  22-02-2026 09:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Besides running tech operations at the UK's Post Office, their interim CTO is also removing and replacing Fujitsu's Horizon system, which Computer Weekly describes as "the error-ridden software that a public inquiry linked to 13 people taking their own lives."
  After over 16 years of covering the scandal they'd first discovered back in 2009, Computer Weekly now talks to CTO Paul Anastassi about his plans to finally remove every trace of the Horizon system that's been in use at Post Office branche
  
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• Ask Slashdot: What's Your Boot Time?

  22-02-2026 06:34 via ask.slashdot.org
  How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and "You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?"
  And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?
  In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were, has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time? Is
  
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• DNA Technology Convicts a 64-Year-Old for Murdering a Teenager in 1982

  22-02-2026 03:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  "More than four decades after a teenager was murdered in California, DNA found on a discarded cigarette has helped authorities catch her killer," reports CNN:Sarah Geer, 13, was last seen leaving her friend's houseï in Cloverdale, California, on the evening of May 23, 1982. The next morning, a firefighter walking home from work found her body, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office said in a news release... Her death was ruled a homicide, but due to the "limited forensic science of th
  
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• Pro-Gamer Consumer Movement 'Stop Killing Games' Will Launch NGOs in America and the US

  22-02-2026 00:43 via yro.slashdot.org
  The consumer movement Stop Killing Games "has come a long way in the two years since
  YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft's
  destruction of The Crew in 2024," writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. "The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group's petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again." (And Ubisoft has since updated
  
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• Pro-Gamer Consumer Movement 'Stop Killing Games' Will Launch NGOs in America and the EU

  22-02-2026 00:43 via yro.slashdot.org
  The consumer movement Stop Killing Games "has come a long way in the two years since
  YouTuber Ross Scott got mad about Ubisoft's
  destruction of The Crew in 2024," writes the gaming news site PC Gamer. "The short version is, he won: 1.3 million people signed the group's petition, mandating its consideration by the European Union, and while Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reminded us all that nothing is forever, his company promised to never do something like that again." (And Ubisoft has since updated
  
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