ICT news

• Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox

  24-02-2026 23:30 via it.slashdot.org
  Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop.
  "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it pe
  
  Read more

• New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says

  24-02-2026 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand.
  The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in
  
  Read more

• CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes

  24-02-2026 21:00 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems.
  The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 mi
  
  Read more

• Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards

  24-02-2026 20:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs.
  The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows incr
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents

  24-02-2026 19:01 via news.slashdot.org
  More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 â" neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it.
  The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-o
  
  Read more

• Microsoft Execs Worry AI Will Eat Entry Level Coding Jobs

  24-02-2026 18:01 via developers.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.
  The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is based on several assumptions, the first of which is that agentic coding assistants "give senior engineers an AI boost... while imposing an AI drag
  
  Read more

• Billions of Dollars Later and Still Nobody Knows What an Xbox Is

  24-02-2026 17:04 via games.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes.
  The brand started as a powerful video game console, but Game Pass and cloud gaming pushed it toward a hazier identity: the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign tried to redefine it as any device th
  
  Read more

• Discord Distances Itself From Persona Age Verification After User Backlash

  24-02-2026 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded."
  After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Russia Targets Telegram as Rift With Founder Pavel Durov Deepens

  24-02-2026 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services.
  The articles, credited to materials from Russia'
  
  Read more

• Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches

  24-02-2026 14:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanit
  
  Read more

• Quantum Algorithm Beats Classical Tools On Complement Sampling Tasks

  24-02-2026 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem."We st
  
  Read more

• Texas Is About To Overtake California In Battery Storage

  24-02-2026 08:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GW
  
  Read more

• US Farmers Are Rejecting Multimillion-Dollar Datacenter Bids For Their Land

  24-02-2026 04:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her nei
  
  Read more

• New Microsoft Gaming CEO Has 'No Tolerance For Bad AI'

  24-02-2026 03:02 via games.slashdot.org
  In her first major interview as Microsoft's new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that "great games" must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has "no tolerance for bad AI." Stepping in after Phil Spencer's retirement, she's pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters a new era. Variety reports: Sharma was quick in laying out her top priorities for Microsoft Gaming in an internal memo announcing h
  
  Read more

• Microsoft Says Bug In Classic Outlook Hides the Mouse Pointer

  24-02-2026 02:25 via it.slashdot.org
  joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse pointer vanished while using the app.[...] Microsoft explained in a recent support document that the mouse pointer (and in some cases the cursor)
  
  Read more

• Viral Doomsday Report Lays Bare Wall Street's Deep Anxiety About AI Future

  24-02-2026 01:45 via slashdot.org
  A 7,000-word "doomsday" thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, "painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work," reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are out. Worries of software-industry disruption don't go far enough. The "global intelligence crisis" is about to hit. The new, broader question: What if AI is so bullish
  
  Read more

• Trump's 'Board of Peace' Explores Stablecoin For Gaza

  24-02-2026 01:02 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave's economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin -- a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar -- are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could
  
  Read more

• OpenAI Calls In the Consultants For Its Enterprise Push

  24-02-2026 00:20 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI has formed a multi-year "Frontier Alliance" with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterprise products. OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI's enter
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!