ICT news

• Chinese Scientists Report Using Quantum Computer To Hack Military-grade Encryption

  14-10-2024 19:44 via it.slashdot.org
  
  schwit1 writes: Chinese scientists have mounted what they say is the world's first effective attack on a widely used encryption method using a quantum computer. The breakthrough poses a "real and substantial threat" to the long-standing password-protection mechanism employed across critical sectors, including banking and the military, according to the researchers.
  Despite the slow progress in general-purpose quantum computing, which currently poses no threat to modern cryptography, scientists ha
  
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• Newborn Chicks Connect Sounds With Shapes Just Like Humans, Study Finds

  20-02-2026 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Why does "bouba" sound round and "kiki" sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. But now a new study adds an unexpected twist: baby chickens make these same sound-
  
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• US Plans Online Portal To Bypass Content Bans In Europe and Elsewhere

  20-02-2026 03:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, "including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda," reports Reuters. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. Reuters reports: One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user's traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site w
  
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• California's New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves

  20-02-2026 02:25 via hardware.slashdot.org
  California's recently-proposed AB-2047 would require 3D printers sold in the state to be DOJ-approved models equipped with "firearm blocking technology," banning non-certified machines after 2029 and criminalizing efforts to bypass the software. Adafruit notes that unlike similar legislation proposed in Washington State and New York, California's version "adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models,
  
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• Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro For 'Complex Problem-Solving'

  20-02-2026 01:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro "represents a step forward in core reasoning." The "upgraded core intelligence" that debuted last week with Gemini 3 Deep Think is now available in Gemini 3.1
  
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• OpenClaw Security Fears Lead Meta, Other AI Firms To Restrict Its Use

  20-02-2026 01:02 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. "You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment," he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. "Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts." Grad isn't the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic
  
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• Minecraft Java Is Switching From OpenGL To Vulkan

  20-02-2026 00:20 via developers.slashdot.org
  Minecraft: Java Edition is switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports: For modders, they're suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: "Switching from OpenGL to Vulkan will have an impact on the mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that up
  
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• IRS Loses 40% of IT Staff, 80% of Tech Leaders In 'Efficiency' Shakeup

  19-02-2026 23:40 via it.slashdot.org
  The IRS's IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal "efficiency" overhaul, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as the biggest in two decades. ... The IRS lost a quarter of its workforce overall in 2025. But the tech team was clearly affected more deeply. At the start of
  
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• Mark Zuckerberg Grilled On Usage Goals and Underage Users At California Trial

  19-02-2026 23:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company's efforts to secure ever more of its users' time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta's growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn't seek to attract children as users. [...] Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the pla
  
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• China's Hottest App of 2026 Just Asks If You're Still Alive

  19-02-2026 22:21 via slashdot.org
  A bare-bones Chinese app called "Are You Dead?" -- whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they're still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins -- has rocketed to the top of China's app store charts and gone viral globally without spending a dime on advertising.
  The app wasn't built for the elderly, as many assumed; its creators are Gen-Z developers who said they were inspired by the isolation of urban life in a country where one
  
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• Microsoft's New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass

  19-02-2026 21:45 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft's accelerated aging experiments suggest the data etched into them would remain stable for over 10,000 years at room temperature, requiring zero energy to
  
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• Europe's Labor Laws Are Strangling Its Ability To Innovate, New Analysis Argues

  19-02-2026 21:05 via tech.slashdot.org
  A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe's failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes -- problems California shares in abundance -- but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estimates, corporate restructuring costs the equivalent of 31 months of salary per employee in Germany, 38 in France, and 62 in Spain, compared to seven in the United States.
  The downstr
  
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• Bafta To Reward 'Human Creativity' as Film and TV Grapples With AI

  19-02-2026 20:25 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Bafta has brought in "human achievement" as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intelligence would change how people worked "but at the base of everything in this industry is human creativity."
  However, while AI has been banned in Bafta's performance a
  
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• LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find

  19-02-2026 19:45 via it.slashdot.org
  AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models -- Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini -- appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and 18 of the duplicates were the exact same string. The estimated entropy of LLM-generated 16-character passwords came in
  
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• A Half-Century of US Labor Data Shows Steady Retreat From Evening and Night Work

  19-02-2026 19:10 via news.slashdot.org
  Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF].
  The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh argue the primary driver is rising real incomes -- night work
  
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• New Study Tracks How Businesses Quietly Replaced Freelancers With AI Tools

  19-02-2026 18:35 via slashdot.org
  A new study [PDF] from Ramp's economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost.
  The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp's Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp's expense management platform. The share of total business spend going
  
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• Accenture Links Staff Promotions To Use of AI Tools

  19-02-2026 17:45 via slashdot.org
  Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require "regular adoption" of artificial intelligence, according to an internal email seen by the Financial Times.
  The consultancy has also begun collecting
  
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• HR Teams Are Drowning in Slop Grievances

  19-02-2026 17:05 via slashdot.org
  Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country -- and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabricated case law.
  Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings "confidently incom
  
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• The RAM Crunch Could Kill Products and Even Entire Companies, Memory Exec Admits

  19-02-2026 16:25 via it.slashdot.org
  Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng, whose company is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices, admitted in a televised interview that the ongoing global RAM shortage could force companies to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026 -- and that some may not survive at all if they cannot secure enough memory.
  The interview, conducted in Chinese by Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, drew an important distinction: it was the interviewer
  
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• Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World's Biggest Company by Sales

  19-02-2026 16:08 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos' Seattle-area garage.
  Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending Jan. 31. Amazon, which operates on a fi
  
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• EV Sales Boom As Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports

  19-02-2026 14:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: In 2024, the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles and slashed tariffs on their electric equivalents. It was a policy driven less by the country's climate ambitions and more by fiscal pressures. For years, subsidizing gasoline for consumers has been a major drag on Ethiopia's budget, costing the state billions of dollars over the past decade. The country defaulted on its sovereign bonds in 2023 after ri
  
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• A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments

  19-02-2026 11:20 via slashdot.org
  India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud.
  The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than eve
  
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• Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing

  19-02-2026 11:00 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found.The research,
  
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• Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life

  19-02-2026 08:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be "news to me." White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: "I'll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I'm sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too." The Hill reports: Lara Trump, speaking on the Pod Force One podcast, said the
  
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• EPA Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule

  19-02-2026 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency's rollback of its "endangerment finding," which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the E.P.A.'s move to eliminate limits on greenhouse gases from vehicles, and potentially other so
  
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• Uber Putting $100 Million into EV Charging for Robotaxis

  19-02-2026 02:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  Uber plans to invest $100 million in EV charging infrastructure to support current and future robotaxi fleets in cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Dallas, "eventually partner[ing] with multiple robotaxi companies on actual robotaxi deployment -- WeRide, Waabi, Lucid, Nuro, May Mobility, Momenta, and Waymo of course," reports CleanTechnica. From the report: "Cities can only unlock the full promise of autonomy and electrification if the right charging infrastructure is built for scale. Th
  
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• Google's Pixel 10a Is the Same Damn Phone As the Pixel 9a

  19-02-2026 01:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google's Pixel 10a is essentially a flatter version of last year's Pixel 9a, keeping the same Tensor G4 chip, camera hardware, RAM, storage, and $500 price while dropping features like Pixelsnap Qi2 charging and advanced Gemini AI capabilities found in higher-end models. Gizmodo reports: We use words like "candy bar" or "slab" to describe our full-screen smartphones, but Google has designed what is likely the slabbiest phone of the modern era. During an hour-long hands-on with Google's all-new G
  
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• Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda

  19-02-2026 01:02 via politics.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives. The sum is the biggest election investment by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The company was previously cautious about campaign engagements, making small donations out of a corporate political action comm
  
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• Mark Zuckerberg Testifies During Landmark Trial On Social Media Addiction

  19-02-2026 00:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in a landmark Los Angeles trial examining whether Meta and other social media firms can be held liable for designing platforms that allegedly addict and harm children. NBC News reports: It's the first of a consolidated group of cases -- from more than 1,600 plaintiffs, including over 350 families and over 250 school districts -- scheduled to be argued before a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Plaintiffs accuse the owners of Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and S
  
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• Google's AI Music Maker Is Coming To the Gemini App

  18-02-2026 23:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Google is bringing its Lyria 3 AI music model into the Gemini app, allowing users to generate 30-second songs from text, images, or video prompts directly within the chatbot. The Verge reports: Lyria 3's text-to-music capabilities allow Gemini app users to make songs by describing specific genres, moods, or memories, such as asking for an "Afrobeat track for my mother about the great times we had growing up." The music generator can make instrumental audio and songs with lyrics composed automati
  
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