ICT news

• Anthropic Maps AI Model 'Thought' Processes

  28-03-2025 07:14 via slashdot.org
  
  Anthropic researchers have developed a breakthrough "cross-layer transcoder" (CLT) that functions like an fMRI for large language models, mapping how they process information internally. Testing on Claude 3.5 Haiku, researchers discovered the model performs longer-range planning for specific tasks -- such as selecting rhyming words before constructing poem sentences -- and processes multilingual concepts in a shared neural space before converting outputs to specific languages.
  The team also conf
  
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• New Filtration Technology Could Be Gamechanger In Removal of PFAS 'Forever Chemicals'

  24-01-2026 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: New filtration technology developed by Rice University may absorb some Pfas "forever chemicals" at 100 times the rate than previously possible, which could dramatically improve pollution control and speed remediations. Researchers also say they have also found a way to destroy Pfas, though both technologies face a steep challenge in being deployed on an industrial scale. A new peer-reviewed paper details a layered double hydroxide (LDH) material made
  
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• California Becomes First State To Join WHO Disease Network After US Exit

  24-01-2026 03:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  California became the first U.S. state to join the World Health Organization's Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), one day after the U.S. formally exited the WHO. The Hill reports: This announcement comes just one day after the U.S.'s withdrawal from the WHO became official after nearly 80 years of membership, having been a founding member of the organization. "The Trump administration's withdrawal from WHO is a reckless decision that will hurt all Californians and Americans," [C
  
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• Campaigner Launches $2 Billion Legal Action In UK Against Apple Over Wallet's 'Hidden Fees'

  24-01-2026 02:25 via news.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: The financial campaigner James Daley has launched a 1.5 billion pound (approximately $1.5 billion) class action lawsuit against Apple over its mobile phone wallet, claiming the U.S. tech company blocked competition and charged hidden fees that ultimately harmed 50 million UK consumers. The lawsuit takes aim at Apple Pay, which they say has been the only contactless payment service available for iPhone users in Britain over the p
  
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• Justice Department Opens Criminal Probe Into Silicon Valley Spy Allegations

  24-01-2026 01:45 via yro.slashdot.org
  The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into Deel over allegations that it recruited a spy inside rival Rippling, according to documents seen by The Wall Street Journal. From the report: An Ireland-based Rippling employee, Keith O'Brien, alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deel Chief Executive Alex Bouaziz recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling. O'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, i
  
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• TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users

  24-01-2026 01:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: When TikTok users in the U.S. opened the app today, they were greeted with a pop-up asking them to agree to the social media platform's new terms of service and privacy policy before they could resume scrolling. These changes are part of TikTok's transition to new ownership. In order to continue operating in the U.S., TikTok was compelled by the U.S. government to transition from Chinese control to a new, American-majority corporate entity. Called
  
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• White House Labels Altered Photo of Arrested Minnesota Protester a 'Meme'

  24-01-2026 00:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  The White House doubled down after posting a digitally altered photo of Minnesota protester Nekima Levy Armstrong, dismissing it as a "meme" despite objections from her attorney and comparisons to reality-distorting propaganda. "YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter," White House spokesper
  
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• PowerShell Architect Retires After Decades At the Prompt

  23-01-2026 23:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Jeffrey Snover, the driving force behind PowerShell, has retired after a career that reshaped Windows administration. The Register reports: Snover's retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft, during which he pulled the company back from imposing a graphical user interface (GUI) on administrators who really just wanted a command line from which to run their scripts. Snover joined Microsoft as the 20th century drew to a clo
  
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• Microsoft Gave FBI a Set of BitLocker Encryption Keys To Unlock Suspects' Laptops

  23-01-2026 23:02 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is enabled by default. This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is locked and powered off.But, by default, BitLocker rec
  
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• Toilet Maker Toto's Shares Get Unlikely Boost From AI Rush

  23-01-2026 22:25 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto's electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an AI infrastructure buildout that's tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory.
  [...]
  
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• The Great Graduate Job Drought

  23-01-2026 21:41 via slashdot.org
  Global hiring remains 20% below pre-pandemic levels and job switching has hit a 10-year low, according to a LinkedIn report, and new university graduates are bearing the brunt of a labor market that increasingly favors experienced candidates over fresh talent.
  In the UK, the Institute of Student Employers found that graduate hiring fell 8% in the last academic year and employers now receive 140 applications for each vacancy, up from 86 per vacancy in 2022-23. US data from the New York Federal Re
  
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• Wall Street Pushes Solo 401(k)s as More Americans Work for Themselves

  23-01-2026 21:01 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. That's nearly three times the maximum for typical salaried workers in the US.
  While they've existed for decades serving a workforce that often st
  
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• China Makes Too Many Cars, and the World Is Increasingly OK With It

  23-01-2026 20:22 via tech.slashdot.org
  After years of Western governments raising alarms about Chinese automotive overcapacity and erecting tariff barriers, an unexpected pivot is now underway as major economies cautiously open their markets to Chinese electric vehicles, Bloomberg writes. Beijing itself has started acknowledging the problem at home. Chinese regulators last week warned of "severe penalties" for automakers defying efforts to rationalize pricing in the country's car market, and earlier this month a government ministry u
  
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• Solar and Wind Overtake Fossil Fuels in the EU

  23-01-2026 19:44 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Wind and solar power overtook fossil fuels last year as a source of electricity in the EU for the first time, a new report found. Semafor adds: The milestone was hit largely thanks to a rise in solar power, which generated a record 13% of electricity in the EU, according to Ember. Together, wind and solar hit 30% of EU electricity generation, edging out fossil fuels at 29%.
  The shift is especially important with the bloc's alternative to Russian LNG -- Washington -- becoming increasingly unrelia
  
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• Toronto Man Posed as Pilot To Rack Up Hundreds of Free Flights, Prosecutors Say

  23-01-2026 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  A Toronto man posed as a pilot for years in order to fool airlines into giving him hundreds of free flights, prosecutors have alleged, in a case that has prompted comparisons to the Hollywood thriller Catch Me If You Can. From a report: Authorities in Hawaii announced this week that Dallas Pokornik, 33, had been charged with wire fraud after he allegedly fooled three major US carriers into giving him free tickets over a span of four years.
  Airlines typically offer standby tickets to their own st
  
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• Apple's Secret Product Plans Stolen in Luxshare Cyberattack

  23-01-2026 18:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The Apple supplier subject to a major cyberattack last month was China's Luxshare, it has now emerged. More than 1TB of confidential Apple information was reportedly stolen.
  It was reported in December that one of Apple's assemblers suffered a significant cyberattack that may have compromised sensitive production-line information and manufacturing data linked to Apple. The specific company targeted, the scope of the breach, and its operational impact were unc
  
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• When Two Years of Academic Work Vanished With a Single Click

  23-01-2026 17:40 via science.slashdot.org
  Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT's "data consent" option in August to test whether the AI tool's functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently deleted and his project folders emptied without any warning or undo option, he wrote in a post on Nature.
  Bucher, a ChatGPT Plus subscriber paying $20 pe
  
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• Anthropic's AI Keeps Passing Its Own Company's Job Interview

  23-01-2026 17:01 via slashdot.org
  Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company's own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have taken it, and dozens now work at Anthropic. But Claude Opus 4 outperformed most human applicants.
  Hume redesigned the test, making it harder.
  
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• Apple Accuses European Commission of 'Political Delay Tactics' To Justify Fines

  23-01-2026 16:21 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple has accused the European Commission of using "political delay tactics" to postpone new app marketplace policies and create grounds for investigating and fining the iPhone maker, a preemptive response to reports that the commission plans to blame Apple for the announced closure of third-party app store Setapp.
  MacPaw, the developer behind Setapp, said it would shut down the marketplace next month because of "still-evolving and complex business terms that don't fit Setapp's current business
  
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• 'Almost Everyone' Laid Off at Vimeo Following Bending Spoons Buyout

  23-01-2026 15:40 via slashdot.org
  Vimeo is laying off employees around the world just months after Italian software company Bending Spoons completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of the video hosting platform. Dave Brown, Vimeo's former brand VP, described the cuts on LinkedIn as affecting "a large portion of the company." One video engineer claimed "almost everyone" was laid off, "including the entire video team," and another software engineer said he lost his job alongside "a gigantic amount of the company."
  This marks Vimeo's
  
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• US Formally Withdraws From WHO

  23-01-2026 15:00 via science.slashdot.org
  The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times: While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on Thursday that the Trump administration was conside
  
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• TikTok Finalizes Deal To Form New American Entity

  23-01-2026 14:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years. The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under "defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm securi
  
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• 'Active' Sitting Is Better For Brain Health

  23-01-2026 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A systematic review of 85 studies has now found good reason to differentiate between 'active' sitting, like playing cards or reading, and 'passive' sitting, like watching TV. [...] "Total sitting time has been shown to be related to brain health; however, sitting is often treated as a single entity, without considering the specific type of activity," explains public health researcher Paul Gardiner from the University of Queensland in Australia
  
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• AI Boosts Research Careers But Flattens Scientific Discovery

  23-01-2026 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. "You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole," says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who led the study. From a recent IEEE Spectrum article: To quantify the effect, Evans and collaborators from the Beijing National Research Center for I
  
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• South Korea Launches Landmark Laws To Regulate AI

  23-01-2026 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems -- a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, the new law is designed primarily to foster growth in the domestic AI sector, while also introducing baseline safeguar
  
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• Intel Struggles To Meet AI Data Center Demand

  23-01-2026 03:02 via slashdot.org
  Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its AI data-center CPUs while new PC chips squeeze margins. CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the turnaround as supply-constrained, not demand-constrained, with manufacturing yields (18A) improving but still below targets. Reuters reports: The forecast underscores the difficulties faced by Intel in predicting global chip markets, where the company's current products are the result of decisions made years ago. The company, whose shares have risen 40% in the past
  
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• Epic and Google Have a Secret $800 Million Unreal Engine and Services Deal

  23-01-2026 02:25 via yro.slashdot.org
  A federal judge revealed a previously undisclosed ~$800 million, six-year partnership between Epic Games and Google tied to Unreal Engine services and joint marketing. It raises questions about whether the deal influenced Epic's willingness to settle its antitrust case over Android. The Verge reports: [California District Judge James Donato] allowed Epic and Google to keep most of the details of the plan under wraps. But during the hearing, he quizzed witnesses, including Epic CEO Tim Sweeney an
  
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• EU Parliament Calls For Detachment From US Tech Giants

  23-01-2026 01:45 via slashdot.org
  The European Parliament is calling on the European Commission to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants by prioritizing EU-based cloud, AI, and open-source infrastructure. The report frames "European Tech First," public procurement reform, and Public Money, Public Code as necessary self-defense against growing U.S. control over critical digital infrastructure. Heise reports: In terms of content, the report focuses on a strategic reorientation of public procurement and infrastructure. The compromi
  
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• New Jersey Law Requires E-Bike Drivers To Have License, Insurance

  23-01-2026 01:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: As one of his final acts in office, former New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law new requirements for e-bikes in his state. The new legislation signed Monday requires that owners and operators of e-bikes have licenses, registration and insurance. Owners and operators of e-bikes must be at least 17 years old and have a valid driver's license or be at least 15 years old with a motorized bicycle license under the law, which covers all types o
  
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• The Microsoft-OpenAI Files

  23-01-2026 00:20 via slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI's defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk's ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. "Previously undisclosed emails, messages, slide decks, reports, and deposition transcripts reveal how
  
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