ICT news

• Climate Scientists Respond To Attacks on Objectivity

  25-10-2024 22:41 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Climate scientists who were mocked and gaslighted after speaking up about their fears for the future have said acknowledging strong emotions is vital to their work. From a report: The researchers said these feelings should not be suppressed in an attempt to reach supposed objectivity. Seeing climate experts' fears and opinions about the climate crisis as irrelevant suggests science is separate from society and ultimately weakens it, they said.
  The researchers said they had been subject to ridicu
  
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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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• GameHub Will Give Mac Owners Another Imperfect Way To Play Windows Games

  18-02-2026 23:00 via games.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For a while now, Mac owners have been able to use tools like CrossOver and Game Porting Toolkit to get many Windows games running on their operating system of choice. Now, GameSir plans to add its own potential solution to the mix, announcing that a version of its existing Windows emulation tool for Android will be coming to macOS. Hong Kong-based GameSir has primarily made a name for itself as a manufacturer of gaming peripherals -- the com
  
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• Texas Sues TP-Link Over China Links and Security Vulnerabilities

  18-02-2026 22:25 via news.slashdot.org
  TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors. The Register: The Lone Star State's Attorney General, Ken Paxton, is filing the lawsuit against California-based TP-Link Systems Inc., which was originally founded in China, accusing it of decepti
  
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• Study of 12,000 EU Firms Finds AI's Productivity Gains Are Real

  18-02-2026 21:43 via it.slashdot.org
  A study of more than 12,000 European firms found that AI adoption causally increases labour productivity by 4% on average across the EU, and that it does so without reducing employment in the short run.
  Researchers from the Bank for International Settlements and the European Investment Bank used an instrumental variable strategy that matched EU firms to comparable US firms by sector, size, investment intensity and other characteristics, then used the AI adoption rates of those US counterparts as
  
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• Ohio Newspaper Removes Writing From Reporters' Jobs, Hands It To an 'AI Rewrite Specialist'

  18-02-2026 21:05 via news.slashdot.org
  Cleveland.com, the digital arm of Ohio's Plain Dealer newspaper, has removed writing from the workloads of certain reporters and handed that job to what editor Chris Quinn calls an "AI rewrite specialist" who turns reporter-gathered material into article drafts.
  The reporters on these beats -- covering Lorain, Lake, Geauga, and most recently Medina County -- are assigned entirely to reporting, spending their time on in-person interviews and meeting sources for coffee. Editors review the AI-produ
  
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• Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months

  18-02-2026 20:25 via news.slashdot.org
  Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling "the Fuckening."
  Yang cited a conversation with the CEO of a publicly traded tech company who said the firm is cutting 15% of its workforce now and plans another 20% cut in two years, followed by yet another 20% two years after tha
  
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• Linus Torvalds on How Linux Went From One-Man Show To Group Effort

  18-02-2026 19:45 via linux.slashdot.org
  Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates.
  Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, on a Finnish FTP server -- about 10,000 lines of code that he had cross-compiled under Minix. He originally wanted to call it "Freax," but his friend Ari Lemmk
  
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• Vermont EV Buses Prove Unreliable For Transportation This Winter

  18-02-2026 19:05 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader writes: Electric buses are proving unreliable this winter for Vermont's Green Mountain Transit, as it needs to be over 41 degrees for the buses to charge, but due to a battery recall the buses are a fire hazard and can't be charged in a garage.
  Spokesman for energy workers advocacy group Power the Future Larry Behrens told the Center Square: "Taxpayers were sold an $8 million 'solution' that can't operate in cold weather when the home for these buses is in New England."
  "We'r
  
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• Microsoft Says Bug Causes Copilot To Summarize Confidential Emails

  18-02-2026 18:28 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft says a Microsoft 365 Copilot bug has been causing the AI assistant to summarize confidential emails since late January, bypassing data loss prevention (DLP) policies that organizations rely on to protect sensitive information. From a report: According to a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this bug (tracked under CW1226324 and first detected on January 21) affects the Copilot "work tab" chat feature, which incorrectly reads and summarizes emails stored in users' Sent Items and Dr
  
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• Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans To Expand 'Search Party' Surveillance Beyond Dogs

  18-02-2026 17:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  Ring's AI-powered "Search Party" feature, which links neighborhood cameras into a networked surveillance system to find lost dogs, was never intended to stop at pets, according to an internal email from founder Jamie Siminoff obtained by 404 Media.
  Siminoff told employees in early October, shortly after the feature launched, that Search Party was introduced "first for finding dogs" and that the technology would eventually help "zero out crime in neighborhoods." The on-by-default feature faced in
  
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• WordPress Gets AI Assistant That Can Edit Text, Generate Images and Tweak Your Site

  18-02-2026 17:00 via slashdot.org
  WordPress has started rolling out an AI assistant built into its site editor and media library that can edit and translate text, generate and edit images through Google's Nano Banana model, and make structural changes to sites like creating new pages or swapping fonts.
  Users can also invoke the assistant by tagging "@ai" in block notes, a commenting feature added to the site editor in December's WordPress 6.9 update. The tool is opt-in -- users need to toggle on "AI tools" in their site settings
  
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• Lab-Grown Meat Exists (But Nobody Wants To Eat It)

  18-02-2026 16:20 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, scientists unveiled the first lab-grown burger at a cost of $330,000. By 2023, the FDA approved cultivated chicken for sale. The price had dropped to around $10-$30 per pound, and over $3 billion in investor money had poured into more than 175 companies developing meat grown from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals.
  The promise is straightforward: real meat, no slaughter required. You could eat beef without killing cattle, chicken without ind
  
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• FDA Reverses Decision and Agrees To Review Moderna's Flu Vaccine

  18-02-2026 15:40 via science.slashdot.org
  The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its decision on Moderna's flu vaccine and has agreed to review it for possible approval, Moderna announced on Wednesday. From a report: Last week, the agency rejected Moderna's application for review of a new flu vaccine, saying the company's research design was flawed. But in subsequent discussions the company said that the agency had relented and agreed to begin a review.
  Moderna said it split its application for the flu vaccine based on age, seeki
  
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• India Tells University To Leave AI Summit After Presenting Chinese Robot as Its Own

  18-02-2026 15:00 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian university has been asked to vacate its stall at the country's flagship AI summit after a staff member was caught presenting a commercially available robotic dog made in China as its own creation, two government sources said.
  "You need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University," Neha Singh, a professor of communications, told state-run broadcaster DD News this week in remarks that have since gone vira
  
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• Thousands of CEOs Just Admitted AI Had No Impact On Employment Or Productivity

  18-02-2026 14:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973. Ne
  
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• Single Dose of DMT Rapidly Reduces Symptoms of Major Depression

  18-02-2026 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  In a small double-blind clinical trial, a single intravenous dose of DMT produced rapid and clinically meaningful reductions in symptoms of major depressive disorder within a week, with effects lasting up to three months in some patients. "Unlike psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD), whose effects can last for hours, intravenous DMT has a half-life of around five minutes," notes ScienceAlert. "Its psychedelic effects are correspondingly brief, potentially making it more practical to
  
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