ICT news

• UK Scientists See Little Evidence for Claims Smartphones Are Rewiring Kids' Brains

  14-06-2026 23:35 via mobile.slashdot.org
  UK's Members of Parliament (MP) were "looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children's brains," writes The Register — but they got "a less satisfying answer from neuroscientists on Wednesday: nobody can really prove it."Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee this week, three researchers spent much of the session explaining that concern and evidence are not quite the same thing. Asked what evidence exists on the impact of digital devices
  
  Read more

• As 'Disclosure Day' Premieres, Steven Spielberg Says He Believes Aliens Really Have Visited Earth

  14-06-2026 22:11 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Steven Spielberg grants that his 1977 UFO film Close Encounters was "speculative," writes the Associated Press, but "Disclosure Day, he insists, is the real deal.""It's my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction," Spielberg said in a recent interview. "It's much more reflective of the world as it is evolving and discoveries that are being made as we speak." Spielberg, at 79, is trying to revive and reconsider the alien wonder that's long li
  
  Read more

• Will Meta's $14 Billion Bet on AI Ever Pay Off?

  14-06-2026 20:43 via tech.slashdot.org
  "A year after spending over $14 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang and a group of his top Scale AI engineers to revamp its artificial intelligence efforts, Meta is at least back on the map in AI," reports CNBC, "though it's still far behind OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market."Wang's big accomplishment was the delivery of the Muse Spark AI model in April, marking Meta's first jump into proprietary foundation models and away from a strict adherence to open source, or open weight as it's mor
  
  Read more

• Vintage AMD R600 Graphics Driver Sees Code Cleanups Thanks To GitHub Copilot

  14-06-2026 18:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  Phoronix reports:
  The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits [last] Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot.Gert Wollny has been among the few open-source developers left working on the AMD R600g driver that covers from the Radeon HD 2000 series through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards... [T]he old open-source GPU driver support is being assi
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• How America's Energy Department is Building a National Platform for Doing Science with AI

  14-06-2026 17:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  America's Energy Department "wants to build a single national platform for doing science with AI," reports Communications of the ACM:
  It is called the Genesis Mission, and the idea is to connect the country's 17 national laboratories, their supercomputers, scientific datasets, and a growing layer of AI models and agents into one system researchers can access. The DOE has taken to calling it 'a national operating system for science.' That means treating compute, data, and AI models the way the co
  
  Read more

• Blizzard Sues To Take Down Another Private World of Warcraft Server, Project Ascension

  14-06-2026 16:34 via games.slashdot.org
  "Blizzard Entertainment is continuing its crusade against private World of Warcraft servers," reports the gaming news site Aftermath:The company filed a new lawsuit on Friday in a California court against the makers of Project Ascension, alleging copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations, and other claims. Blizzard Entertainment claims that Project Ascension is a "lucrative way to exploit and profit from the popularity of the WoW game experience," according to the compl
  
  Read more

• Bitcoin Has Lost Nearly Half Its Value in 11 Months

  14-06-2026 13:34 via slashdot.org
  The price of bitcoin dropped 13% down to $64,394 just in June — but there's more bad news, reports CNBC." "Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value since reaching a record high above $123,000 in July 2025."
  While previous bitcoin selloffs were often followed by large rebounds in price, the latest decline may prompt some investors to revisit why they own bitcoin in the first place, [says Daniel Sotiroff, associate director of ETF and Passive Strategies Research at Morningstar]. Here's what he
  
  Read more

• Four LTS Java Versions Get End-of-Support in a Three-Year Window (2029-2032)

  14-06-2026 09:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  Simon Ritter joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. He's now written an opinion piece for InfoWorld warning that "Between 2029 and 2032, every currently supported long-term support (LTS) version of Java will reach end-of-support within a single three-year window."
  That's Java 17 in 2029, Java 8 in 2030, Java 21 in 2031, and Java 11 in 2032...On paper, this looks like a manageable upgrade cycle. In practice, it creates a collision of timel
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• UK Police Officer Accused of Using AI to Fake Evidence

  14-06-2026 06:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The Sunday Times reports:
  A criminal investigation has begun after a police officer allegedly used AI to create evidential material in a "number of cases". Derbyshire Constabulary said an officer was being investigated over an allegation of suspected perverting the course of justice. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed it was engaging with defence lawyers and the courts over potentially affected cases...
  It is the first known allegation of AI misuse by police in a criminal case in the
  
  Read more

• How Author Dave Eggers Avoids Smartphones, Internet Access, and Flock Cameras

  14-06-2026 03:47 via news.slashdot.org
  A few weeks ago on a bike ride "inspiration struck" for Dave Eggers, reports SFGate...Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. The problem? Eggers doesn't own a smartphone. "It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence," Eggers said... It's a funny predicament for Eggers, given that he's arguably the city's biggest proponent of the written word... Now age 56, Eggers' latest book is called "Contrapposto"...On writing days, Eggers bikes to his sailboat docked near the Go
  
  Read more

• Amazon CEO's Talks with U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models

  14-06-2026 00:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The Wall Street Journal reports:The Trump administration's decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic's most capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy and U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, people familiar with the matter said.
  Researchers at Amazon had used a series of prompts to get Anthropic's Fable 5 model to provide them with information that could be used to aid cyberattacks and was supposed to be off limits, Jassy
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!