ICT news

• AI Helps Crack Salt Water's Curious Electrical Properties

  29-07-2023 04:02 via science.slashdot.org
  
  sciencehabit shares a report from Science: Water is a near-universal solvent, able to dissolve substances ranging from limestone to the sugar in your coffee. That chemical superpower originates, oddly enough, in water's electrical properties. It can oppose and almost entirely cancel electric fields -- including attractions among dissolved ions that might otherwise pull them together. Curiously, dissolving salt in water weakens that electrical response. Now, a team of physicists has figured out e
  
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• As KDE Turns 30, Contributors and Commits are Going Strong

  21-09-2026 21:04 via tech.slashdot.org
  "In a few weeks, KDE will turn 30 years old," writes core contributor Kevin Ottens, celebrating with some special KDE community data analytics (including a 30-year graph of the number of contributors):
  It peaks around 180 on average (and sometimes reaches towards around 200 people) then shrinks again hitting bottom around 110 persons on average in 2017... Since then, we had two major events happening. First, 2018 is the year where we had the first set of KDE Goals being picked by the community,
  
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• Are Book Publishers Warming Up to the AI Industry?

  21-09-2026 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  There's at least 15 author-driven lawsuits underway against AI companies, while publishers have filed roughly 10 more coordinated suits of their own, notes Publisher's Weekly.Yet "While the lawsuits play out, some publishers are building bridges."Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O'Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the t
  
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• Australia Considers Smart Glasses Ban in Government Workplaces, While 70 People Sue Meta Over Unknowing Data Collection

  21-09-2026 12:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Australia is considering barring the use of camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces..." reports Reuters, "in what it said could be the first ban of its kind."
  But meanwhile "more than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta's smart glasses have sued the social media giant," reports the Los Angeles Times, "claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to workers abroad who are paid to review and label photos and videos."The contractors in Kenya work for c
  
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• North Korean Hackers Posed as Recruiters. They Infected 30,000 Devices Worldwide

  21-09-2026 07:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  "I would like to verify your technical abilities, so please download the specified file and complete the assigned task..."
  Fake job listings aimed at software developers and IT professionals led to 30,000 infected devices in over 100 countries — and 7,000 compromised cryptocurrency wallets, leading to over $10 million (USD) transferred to North Korea. Inc. reports:
  The hacks occurred from December 2025 through July 2026, according to a joint cybersecurity advisory issued Friday by Japanese
  
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• Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI And Google Made Illegal Agreement On AI Slowdown

  21-09-2026 03:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  Tom's Hardware reports:
  Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that this agreement would "reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions" and that this coordination started in July 2026 after the leading AI labs signed a statement admitting there is "intense co
  
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• Democracy vs Digital Infrastructure: Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Charts 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State'

  20-09-2026 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current:The new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the artificial state: the digital communication infrastructure by which governments and private corporations automate and ultimate
  
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• The Brain Is Actually Two Completely Separate Organs

  20-09-2026 18:04 via science.slashdot.org
  "New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years," Stanford Medicine announced this week:
  The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts' beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and
  
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• To Enforce Its Proposed Social Media Ban for 450 Million Pre-Teens, EU Builds an Open Source App

  20-09-2026 13:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  The European Commission "proposed on Thursday banning children under 13 from social media, with parent-supervised accounts until 15," reports Reuters.
  "Enforcement would rely on a tool Brussels built itself" — a free, open-source age verification smartphone app "that tells a platform whether a user meets an age threshold without revealing their identity..."If passed, the proposed Kids Act would create the world's largest social media access restriction, covering 450 million people across 2
  
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• Tech Industry Scratches Its Head Over Trump's 'AI Force' Proposal

  20-09-2026 09:04 via politics.slashdot.org
  Saturday morning President Trump announced he's creating an AI task force and appointing an AI czar, reports Politico.
  "I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS," Trump wrote Saturday in what Politico earlier described as "a lengthy Truth Social post on Saturday morning."TRUMP: Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country. RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, UKRAINE, UKRAINE
  
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• Customer-Losing Flock Now Offers Buyouts to Avoid Laying Off Employees

  20-09-2026 04:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  Mashable writes:
  Flock Safety offered employees voluntary buyouts on Friday, WIRED reported... Without the buyouts, those familiar with the situation suspect the company would have to lay off some of its 1,500 employees.
  WIRED writes that people familiar with the program "say they believe that a significant number of the startup's roughly 1,500 employees may try to depart."
  Flock is making the severance offers as it continues to lose customers... The company has had many of its contracts either
  
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• Developer Abandons 'PS5 Linux' Project After Sony Patches AI-Discovered Exploit

  20-09-2026 00:05 via games.slashdot.org
  "In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC,"
  writes the blog It's FOSS.
  It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5's on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he's "stopping all my work on PS5 Linux" and "stepping away from the PS5 scene."
  stopping work on porting the project to the PS5 Pro, which would've shipped sometime in 2027.Andy Nguyen: After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and
  
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• Fake AI Intelligence Almost Made the US Military Start a War With China

  19-09-2026 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program, reports CNN.
  "The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode."Armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship [according to two of the sources]. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incid
  
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• US Air Force F-16 Crashes in Michigan After Pentagon Orders More Flyovers

  19-09-2026 15:04 via news.slashdot.org
  The F-16 "experienced an incident," the Texas Military Department said in a statement, adding that "The pilot successfully ejected the aircraft and is receiving care at a nearby hospital."
  ABC News reports:A Texas Air National Guard F-16 crashed in Michigan during a training mission on Thursday afternoon, sparking an hourslong evacuation near the crash site, according to officials.The incident prompted the evacuation of homes and businesses within 1 mile of the crash site due to a "hazardous che
  
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• Gemini Breached Three Outside Systems, and Claude-Using Researchers Breached OpenAI

  19-09-2026 10:34 via slashdot.org
  "Software security researchers used Anthropic's Claude AI platform to hack OpenAI's ChatGPT tool," reports CBS News.Using Claude, "On July 25, 2026, we chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts," write researchers at security platform Hacktron AI. "With these accounts, we could then access internal OpenAI repositories, and potentially many other connectors... Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI's own help foru
  
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• Has the James Web Space Telescope Discovered a New 'Black Hole Star'?

  19-09-2026 06:04 via science.slashdot.org
  The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image,
  writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they're looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core.
  But Quanta adds that "not everyone agrees with this bold interpretation."[Two Webb telescope surveys of distant objects included little red dots] for hours at a time. They tabulated precisely
  
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• AI Insiders Issue New Warnings - Including Former Anthropic Engineer Jacob Coxon

  19-09-2026 01:34 via slashdot.org
  Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted "For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I'm honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be good for us to have an answer to 'What would a successful pace look like?'"
  CNN noted Wednesday they're just some of the many AI insiders who are now concerned about the speed of re
  
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• Will California Gut Its Net Neutrality Law to Comply with Trump Admin Demands?

  18-09-2026 21:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  In 2021, America approved $65 billion to fund broadband internet services as part of President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But Trump's administration announced they'd withhold funds from states with net neutrality protections...States could object and sue the government, Ars Technica reported last October, "but even a successful lawsuit could take years and leave unserved homes without broadband for the foreseeable future." So where does that leave California's net neutrality laws? Ar
  
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• Rust is Now a 'Tier One' Language at Microsoft

  18-09-2026 16:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  The Register reports:When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. "Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company," explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for the Rust tooling team, during a keynote talk today at this year's annual RustConf,
  
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• Journalist Calls Out 'Collective Amnesia' of Schools' Romance With Big Tech Over AI

  18-09-2026 12:04 via news.slashdot.org
  "Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by
  New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools tells "the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi," acco
  
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• America Acknowledges for the First Time: It Has Deployed Weapons In Space

  18-09-2026 07:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Tuesday U.S. Space Force chief Douglas Schiess said his branch of the U.S. military operates "on-orbit weapons," reports Reuters, to defend "against space-enabled attacks." He promised "disciplined and responsible choices" when scaling America's orbital defense arsenal in the coming years.NPR calls this week's reveleations "remarkable... after previous warnings about countries such as Russia possibly weaponizing a global frontier long agreed in treaties to be used for only peaceful purposes."
  Th
  
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• Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could 'Kill All Humans'. But Meta's Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company

  18-09-2026 03:04 via slashdot.org
  Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee "became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could 'kill all humans', saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon's
  
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• Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data

  17-09-2026 22:34 via slashdot.org
  Ars Technica reports:Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
  Amazon Web Services was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian
  
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• Hackers Stole Flock's Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

  17-09-2026 18:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED," according to an article published on both sites.
  Though Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, "The hackers were able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections."
  The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the
  
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• 'Zuckoff' App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions

  17-09-2026 13:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  The New York Post reports:A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta's creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski says tales of dirtbags recording themselves perving on women or harassing strangers prompted him to launch the app...
  Zuckoff — which detects Bluetooth signatures broadcast by smart glasses and can estimate their distance — has gained som
  
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• OpenAI Admits Six More Instances of AI Models Acting Deceptively

  17-09-2026 09:04 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI announced Wednesday that "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer."But along with the announcement, OpenAI announced it "found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training," reports CNN.
  And they add that OpenAI is also "introducing a new process for the company to publicly report such instances."Under the new sy
  
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• Adafruit's New CircuitPython 'Turbo' Brings Native Code To Tiny Boards

  17-09-2026 04:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released "CircuitPython" in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language).
  Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) brings this update:
  Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards.
  It builds on MicroPython's Native and V
  
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• As Part of California's Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste?

  17-09-2026 00:04 via hardware.slashdot.org
  "As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind," reports the Los Angeles Times.
  He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant.""Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height ... these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre
  
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• Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower Development. Nvidia's CEO Wants It 'As Fast as You Can'

  16-09-2026 19:34 via slashdot.org
  "Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run as fast as you can."Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to i
  
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• Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)

  16-09-2026 15:04 via news.slashdot.org
  Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images:In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20Ã-- less memory used during very large ima
  
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