ICT news

• A Recount Could Mean Japan Has 7,000 More Islands

  17-02-2023 20:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The number of islands in Japan is expected to more than double after 7,000 new islands it didn't know existed were discovered. Well, kind of. From a report: The nation currently comprises 6,852 islands, but that figure dates back to a 1987 study conducted by the Japan Coast Guard. During a December 2021 parliamentary session, a lawmaker argued the data was old and the true figure could be vastly different. "An accurate understanding of the number of islands is an important administrative matter
  
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• Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top US Universities

  28-08-2026 09:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New York Times reports: While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration's assault on sci
  
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• Is ChatGPT Changing How You're Writing?

  28-08-2026 05:30 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report fro SFGATE: From "rizz" to "meat proxy," words and phrases have fallen in and out of favor for centuries. Culture, politics and technological development have long influenced these trends, and now, new research shows that ChatGPT is beginning to influence how humans communicate. The findings from a team at the Pew Research Center show how, in a short time since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 and other chatbots followed, the use of certain words and p
  
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• AI's Memory Crunch Is Coming For Android Apps

  28-08-2026 01:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  Google is imposing new memory-use limits on Android apps as the AI data center boom contributes to a broader memory chip shortage that could leave lower-cost phones with less RAM. Developers will have until February 2027 to meet new thresholds for memory and bitmap usage. To aid developers, Google is adding tools to flag apps that exceed the limits and help prevent slowdowns and crashes. TechCrunch reports: The company explains that the mobile industry is now facing "significant hardware supply
  
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• OpenAI Is Developing a 'Persistent' AI Agent

  28-08-2026 00:00 via features.slashdot.org
  Wired reports that OpenAI is testing a new "Persistent mode" for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly "put to sleep," proactively creating follow-up tasks for itself across sessions and using prior interactions and knowledge of the user to decide what to do next. Code alluding to the feature was spotted in the product's code base, though it has not been rolled out or officially announced yet. From the report: Persistent mode appears in Codex's "reasoning effort" menu, in
  
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• Ring Says New Encryption Limits What It Can Give Police

  27-08-2026 23:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Ring is rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE, or "Throw Away the Key Encryption," that rotates video keys every five minutes and permanently deletes Ring's copy after 24 hours. The system is designed to preserve cloud features such as smart alerts and AI video search while limiting what Ring can provide under legal process to non-video account information and encrypted footage. The Verge reports: Ring says TAKE uses unique, rotating encryption keys for your footage, stored in
  
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• Claude, Codex, and Hermes Installed Unowned Code Inside Corporate Networks

  27-08-2026 22:08 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents [including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes]. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.The potentially dangerous
  
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• Trump Declares National Emergency to Ban Some Foreign Grid Equipment

  27-08-2026 21:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader dhartshorn writes: Foreign-produced "bulk power" equipment is now effectively banned, and the list of what constitutes such equipment is essentially everything used to make up the grid... much of which we are heavily dependent on foreign sources to supply. In a Wednesday executive order, President Trump said foreign supply of electric equipment "constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat" to national security. The Hill reports: Under the order, it will be up to Ener
  
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• Panic Passes Trump Tariff Refunds Back to Playdate Customers

  27-08-2026 20:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Panic is refunding Playdate customers the 19% tariff charges it passed along while the Trump administration's import duties were in effect, after the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs illegal and the company began receiving refunds from the government. Panic says the money "just [wasn't] ours to keep." Ars Technica reports: In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally "begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year" and had consequently
  
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• Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face For $13 Billion

  27-08-2026 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The Information reported on Wednesday that Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. "Deal talks began after Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools, received acquisition interest from another suitor," reports CNBC, citing the (paywalled) report. Business Insider separately reported the acquisition talks. From CNBC: If completed, the acquisition would put one of the most widely used platforms for sharing and
  
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• Operation Bluebird Launches New Twitter

  27-08-2026 18:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned "Twitter" name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now. "We are a small company, we have investors, and we have a product," Stephen Coates, one of Operation Bluebird's cofounders, told Ars. "And we have waited months and months to launch, and we are not going to wait anymore."[...] Twitter.now, still in it
  
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• How Meta's Plan To Replace Workers With AI Agents Fell Apart

  27-08-2026 17:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Reuters reports that Meta explored shrinking some teams by as much as 60% as part of an "AI native" restructuring plan that would shift much of employees' day-to-day work to AI agents and smaller teams of human "builders." But the effort quickly ran into employee revolt and disappointing productivity gains, leading Zuckerberg to scrap a planned second wave of cuts after Meta laid off 10% of its workforce in May. From the report: In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his top lieutenants gather
  
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• More Than 100 Water Systems Were Hit In July Cyberattacks

  27-08-2026 13:00 via it.slashdot.org
  CISA says more than 100 internet-exposed U.S. water and wastewater systems were targeted in July, often through programmable logic controllers connected directly to cellular modems. "That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group," reports The Register. From the report: Suspected Iranian attackers targeted water and wastewater facilities across at least a dozen s
  
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• Radiation Link In Flight Attendant's Breast Cancer, French Court Finds

  27-08-2026 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  A French court has for the first time recognized cosmic radiation as a contributing occupational factor in a flight attendant's breast cancer, alongside passive smoking and years of night work. The landmark ruling could open the door to similar claims from other aircrew, as research continues to link long-term high-altitude flying with elevated exposure to radiation-related cancers. The BBC reports: Sophie Lainault, a 59 year-old former stewardess on Air France, sought to have her cancer recogni
  
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• Bill Gates Proposes Major Limits On AI Development

  27-08-2026 05:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." [...] "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be o
  
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• OpenAI Releases Its Official Report On the Hugging Face Breach

  27-08-2026 01:00 via it.slashdot.org
  TechCrunch reports that OpenAI released its official report Wednesday on the Hugging Face breach, "offering the clearest picture yet of how an unusual chain of events allowed an AI model to escape its testing environment and triggered a sprawling cybersecurity incident." The AI company says the breach began when an unreleased cyber model, tested without normal production safeguards, encountered an impossible task and chained together previously unknown exploits to escape its environment and comp
  
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• China's Moonshot In Talks With Microsoft, Amazon, Google Over K3 Revenue Sharing

  27-08-2026 00:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said. Any deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major U.S. cloud company. The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models, often far cheaper than Western offeri
  
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• Apple Maps Now Has Ads

  26-08-2026 23:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple has begun rolling out ads in Apple Maps, with sponsored businesses appearing at the top of search results and in the "suggested places" section for users in the U.S. and Canada. Apple says the ads can be based on approximate location, search terms, or the area of the map being viewed, but are not tied to users' Apple Accounts and personal data remains on-device. 9to5Mac reports: Ads appear just like every other business listing, except they have a small blue badge that says 'Ad.' You can s
  
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• Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books For AI Training

  26-08-2026 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, N
  
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• Xbox's New Disc-to-Digital Program Gives Physical Games a Digital Future

  26-08-2026 21:00 via games.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program. The program -- announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31 -- will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and X
  
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• Amazon to Acquire DuckLabs, Adding the Team Behind DuckDB

  26-08-2026 20:25 via developers.slashdot.org
  Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. "The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it," reports GeekWire. "It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage." The DuckDB project itself will remain free and open source under the
  
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• Meta Reaches $18 Billion of Settlements Over Children's Social Media Addiction

  26-08-2026 19:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. Meta will, however, still be allowed to use personalized recommendations and targeted advertising. Reuters reports: The settlements in
  
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• Firefox 157 Will Include JPEG XL By Default On All Platforms

  26-08-2026 18:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Mozilla plans to enable JPEG XL decoding by default in Firefox 157, which is due at the end of September. Phoronix reports: Firefox Nightly has JPEG-XL support enabled by default right now to help in vetting this support while Mozilla believes the support is in good enough shape for a stable debut with Firefox 157. This follows Chrome shipping JPEG-XL and Google Research developing jxl-rs as a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that is both performant and secure.In today's Mozilla Hacks blog post
  
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• Chinese Government Fears AI Might Replace Human Intimacy

  26-08-2026 17:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  China has imposed new restrictions on AI companion services over concerns they can foster "emotional dependence or addiction" and replace real-world social interaction. Officials are also worried that increasingly satisfying AI relationships could deepen loneliness and further discourage marriage and parenthood. The Guardian reports: No country has rolled out AI as comprehensively and as enthusiastically as China; the country's demographic challenges are forcing the government to turn to technol
  
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• Scientists May Have Figured Out Why Dead Brains Don't Always Rot

  26-08-2026 13:00 via science.slashdot.org
  fahrbot-bot shares a report from Smithsonian Magazine: The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains. But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation
  
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• SpaceX Plans to Build a $100 Billion Spaceport In Louisiana

  26-08-2026 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  SpaceX plans to spend up to $100 billion building a new Starship launch facility in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, which the state says could eventually "support thousands of launches annually." CNBC reports: Once built, Starbase, LA will serve as the main launch facility for Starship, SpaceX's in-development rocket that's the largest ever built and designed to be fully reusable. Musk has aspirations to massively expand SpaceX's Starlink satellite network, to launch orbital data centers and to som
  
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• Lab Supply Companies Have Been Selling Antibodies Using Manipulated Images

  26-08-2026 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Antibodies play a central role in your body's immune defense. But they're also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, dis
  
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• Alabama Launches Investigation Into OpenAI's Hack of Hugging Face

  26-08-2026 01:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Alabama's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as part of an investigation into whether inadequate safeguards contributed to an incident in which an unreleased cybersecurity model escaped its isolated environment and hacked Hugging Face. TechCrunch reports: The investigation comes weeks after OpenAI admitted that one of its unreleased and guardrail-free cybersecurity models had escaped an isolated environment, connected to the internet, and hacked AI dataset platform Hugging Face. As Reuters f
  
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• New Zealand Introduces Under-16 Social Media, AI Companion Ban

  26-08-2026 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  New Zealand has introduced legislation that would ban children under 16 from social media platforms and AI companion services. "We have protections to keep children safe in the real world and we need them in the virtual world too," said Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in announcing the bill. Jurist.org reports: The Online Safety (Minimum Age and Child Safety Risk Assessment) Bill would require an age restriction on platforms with harmful features for children. These features include recommender
  
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• FDA Approves First Wearable Device to Monitor Glucose, Ketone Levels

  25-08-2026 23:01 via science.slashdot.org
  The FDA has authorized the first wearable in the U.S. to continuously monitor ketone levels and the first device globally to track both ketones and glucose together in a single system. From a report: [Abbott's] Libre Duo 10 Day continuously measures both glucose and ketone levels in the fluid just beneath the skin every minute, day and night. Readings are transmitted wirelessly to a compatible smartphone, where users can view current glucose and ketone levels and whether those values are trendin
  
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