ICT news

• 'How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?'

  23-02-2026 19:50 via it.slashdot.org
  Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writ
  
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• Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude

  23-02-2026 19:10 via slashdot.org
  U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday.
  Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House law
  
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• Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

  23-02-2026 18:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa.
  Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its n
  
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• PayPal Attracts Takeover Interest After Stock Slump

  23-02-2026 17:48 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter.
  The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people s
  
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• Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds

  23-02-2026 17:02 via news.slashdot.org
  Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius.
  Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a mo
  
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• Stressful People in Your Life Could Be Adding Months To Your Biological Age

  23-02-2026 16:22 via science.slashdot.org
  A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers.
  The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345
  
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• Sam Altman Would Like To Remind You That Humans Use a Lot of Energy, Too

  23-02-2026 15:40 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans.
  In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely unt
  
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• Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Calculate AI's Contribution To U.S. Growth May Be Basically Zero

  23-02-2026 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero.
  The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly
  
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• Is AI Impacting Which Programming Language Projects Use?

  23-02-2026 13:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  "In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever..." writes GitHub's senior developer advocate.
  They point to this as proof that "AI isn't just speeding up coding. It's reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place."Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what "easy" means. When AI handles b
  
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• Rule-Breaking Black Hole Growing At 13x the Cosmic 'Speed Limit' Challenges Theories

  23-02-2026 09:34 via science.slashdot.org
  "A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..."
  "How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answe
  
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• Should Job-Seekers Stop Using AI to Write Their Resumes?

  23-02-2026 06:35 via it.slashdot.org
  When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were "eerily similar," reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was "abundantly clear" they'd used AI.)Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market.... Employers say that's having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same...It's easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some emp
  
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• Raspberry Pi Stock Rises Over Its Possible Use With OpenClaw's AI Agents

  23-02-2026 03:34 via build.slashdot.org
  This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. "The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw."The Register explain
  
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• Telegram Disputes Russia's Claim Its Encryption Was Compromised

  23-02-2026 00:45 via it.slashdot.org
  Russia's domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia's state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals "tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians," Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to "push people to use a new state-backed alternative."Russia's communications watchdog limited access to Tel
  
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