ICT news

• Congress Lets Broadband Funding Run Out, Ending $30 Low-Income Discounts

  02-05-2024 02:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission chair today made a final plea to Congress, asking for money to continue a broadband-affordability program that gave out its last round of $30 discounts to people with low incomes in April. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) has lowered monthly Internet bills for people who qualify for benefits, but Congress allowed funding to run out. People may receive up to $14 in May if their ISP opted into off
  
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• Google Opens Up Its Smart Home To Everyone

  16-05-2024 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is opening up API access to its Google Home smart home platform, allowing app developers to access over 600 million connected devices and tap into the Google Home automation engine. In addition, Google announced that it'll be turning Google TVs into Google Home hubs and Matter controllers. The Verge reports: The Home APIs can access any Matter device or Works with Google Home device, and allows developers to build their own experiences using Google Home devices and automations into their
  
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• Apple Brings Eye-Tracking To Recent iPhones and iPads

  15-05-2024 23:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  This week, in celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Apple is introducing several new accessibility features. Noteworthy additions include eye-tracking support for recent iPhone and iPad models, customizable vocal shortcuts, music haptics, and vehicle motion cues. Engadget reports: The most intriguing feature of the set is the ability to use the front-facing camera on iPhones or iPads (at least those with the A12 chip or later) to navigate the software without additional hardware or
  
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• Android 15 Gets 'Private Space,' Theft Detection, and AV1 Support

  15-05-2024 22:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's I/O conference is still happening, and while the big keynote was yesterday, major Android beta releases have apparently been downgraded to Day 2 of the show. Google really seems to want to be primarily an AI company now. Android already had some AI news yesterday, but now that the code-red requirements have been met, we have actual OS news. One of the big features in this release is "Private Space," which Google says is a place wher
  
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• Walmart's Reign as America's Biggest Retailer Is Under Threat

  15-05-2024 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  With Amazon on its heels, the nation's biggest company by revenue is hunting for ways to continue growing. From a report: For a decade, Walmart has reigned as the nation's biggest company by revenue. Its sales last year added up to $648 billion -- more than $1.2 million a minute. That status comes with benefits. It gives Walmart power in negotiations with product manufacturers and in dealing with government officials over policy issues. It's also a point of pride: Job postings often tout working
  
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• Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos

  15-05-2024 21:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: There are concerning reports on Reddit that Apple's latest iOS 17.5 update has introduced a bug that causes old photos that were deleted -- in some cases years ago -- to reappear in users' photo libraries. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. "Same here," said one R
  
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• Senators Urge $32 Billion in Emergency Spending on AI After Finishing Yearlong Review

  15-05-2024 19:29 via news.slashdot.org
  
  A bipartisan group of four senators led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is recommending that Congress spend at least $32 billion over the next three years to develop AI and place safeguards around it, writing in a report released Wednesday that the U.S. needs to "harness the opportunities and address the risks" of the quickly developing technology. AP: The group of two Democrats and two Republicans said in an interview Tuesday that while they sometimes disagreed on the best paths forward, it wa
  
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• Intel's New Thunderbolt Share Provides File and Screen Sharing Without Hurting Network Performance

  15-05-2024 18:42 via slashdot.org
  
  Intel unveiled Thunderbolt Share on Wednesday with which it promises to streamline screen and file sharing between two PCs. Tom's Hardware: Thunderbolt Share will allow PC owners to connect their two computers with a wired connection that leverages Thunderbolt's speed (40Gbps or higher), low latency, and built-in security. It allows PC-to-PC access that shares the screen, keyboard, mouse, and storage. The software also enables folder synchronization or easy drag-and-drop file transfer between th
  
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• FBI Seizes BreachForums Hacking Forum Used To Leak Stolen Data

  15-05-2024 18:02 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The FBI has seized the notorious BreachForums hacking forum that leaked and sold stolen corporate data to other cybercriminals. From a report: The seizure occurred on Wednesday morning, soon after the site was used last week to leak data stolen from a Europol law enforcement portal. The website is now displaying a message stating that the FBI has taken control over it and the backend data, indicating that law enforcement seized both the site's servers and domains. [...] The seizure message also
  
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• Former Windows Chief Explains Why macOS on iPad is Futile Quest

  15-05-2024 17:20 via slashdot.org
  
  Tech columnist and venture investor MG Siegler, commenting on the new iPad Pro: I love the iPad for the things it's good at. And I love the MacBook for the things it's good at. What I want is less a completely combined device and more a single device that can run both macOS and iPadOS. And this new iPad Pro, again equipped with a chip faster than any MacBook, can do that if Apple allowed it to.
  At first, maybe it's dual boot. That is, just let the iPad Pro load up macOS if it's attached to the M
  
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• Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures

  15-05-2024 16:48 via science.slashdot.org
  
  schwit1 shares a report: Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday announced that it was closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and cl
  
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• Boeing May Face Criminal Prosecution Over 737 Max Crashes, US Says

  15-05-2024 16:09 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Department of Justice says it is considering whether to prosecute Boeing over two deadly crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft. From a report: The aviation giant breached the terms of an agreement made in 2021 that shielded the firm from criminal charges linked to the incidents, the DOJ said. Boeing has denied that it violated the agreement. The crashes - one in Indonesia in 2018, and another in Ethiopia in 2019 - killed a total of 346 people.
  The plane maker failed to "design, implement, a
  
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• Has Section 230 'Outlived Its Usefulness'?

  15-05-2024 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Frank Pallone Jr (D-N.J.) made their case for why Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act has "outlived its usefulness." Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects online platforms from liability for user-generated content, allowing them to moderate content without being treated as publishers."Unfortunately, Section 230 is now poisoning the healthy online ecosystem it once fostere
  
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• Google Will Use Gemini To Detect Scams During Calls

  15-05-2024 12:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  At Google I/O on Tuesday, Google previewed a feature that will alert users to potential scams during a phone call. TechCrunch reports: The feature, which will be built into a future version of Android, uses Gemini Nano, the smallest version of Google's generative AI offering, which can be run entirely on-device. The system effectively listens for "conversation patterns commonly associated with scams" in real time. Google gives the example of someone pretending to be a "bank representative." Comm
  
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• Revolutionary Genetics Research Shows RNA May Rule Our Genome

  15-05-2024 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Philip Ball reports via Scientific American: Thomas Gingeras did not intend to upend basic ideas about how the human body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their Âproject was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the human gen
  
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• 2023 Temperatures Were Warmest We've Seen For At Least 2,000 Years

  15-05-2024 05:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in June of last year, global temperatures went from very hot to extreme. Every single month since June, the globe has experienced the hottest temperatures for that month on record -- that's 11 months in a row now, enough to ensure that 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will likely be similarly extreme. There's been nothing like this in the temperature record, and it acts as an unmistakable indication of human-driven warm
  
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• Comcast To Launch Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ Bundle

  15-05-2024 04:10 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Later this month, Comcast will launch a three-way bundle with Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+. It will "come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today," said. Comcast chief Brian Roberts. Variety reports: The goal is to "add value to consumers" and at the same time "take some of the dollars out of" other companies' streaming businesses, he added, while reinforcing Comcast's broadband service offerings. Comcast's impending launch of the StreamSaver bundle come as other media compan
  
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• Project Astra Is Google's 'Multimodal' Answer to the New ChatGPT

  15-05-2024 03:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  At Google I/O today, Google introduced a "next-generation AI assistant" called Project Astra that can "make sense of what your phone's camera sees," reports Wired. It follows yesterday's launch of GPT-4o, a new AI model from OpenAI that can quickly respond to prompts via voice and talk about what it 'sees' through a smartphone camera or on a computer screen. It "also uses a more humanlike voice and emotionally expressive tone, simulating emotions like surprise and even flirtatiousness," notes Wi
  
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• Google Targets Filmmakers With Veo, Its New Generative AI Video Model

  15-05-2024 02:50 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  At its I/O developer conference today, Google announced Veo, its latest generative AI video model, that "can generate 'high-quality' 1080p resolution videos over a minute in length in a wide variety of visual and cinematic styles," reports The Verge. From the report: Veo has "an advanced understanding of natural language," according to Google's press release, enabling the model to understand cinematic terms like "timelapse" or "aerial shots of a landscape." Users can direct their desired output
  
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• 1 In 4 US Teens Say They Play Games On a VR Headset

  15-05-2024 02:10 via games.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: 1 in 4 U.S. teens told Pew Research Center they play games on a VR headset. The survey was conducted on 1453 U.S. teens aged 13 to 17. Pew claims the participants were "recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses" and "weighted to be representative of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents by age, gender, race and ethnicity, household income, and other categories." Broken out by gender, 32% of boy
  
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• OpenAI's Chief Scientist and Co-Founder Is Leaving the Company

  15-05-2024 01:30 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI's co-founder and Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the company to work on "something personally meaningful," wrote CEO Sam Altman in a post on X. "This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. [...] I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together." He will be replaced by OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachocki. Here's Altman's full X post announci
  
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• VMware Giving Away Workstation Pro, Fusion Pro Free For Personal Use

  15-05-2024 00:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Dan Robinson reports via The Register: VMware has made another small but notable post-merger concession to users: the Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro desktop hypervisor products will now be free for personal use. The cloud and virtualization biz, now a Broadcom subsidiary, has announced that its Pro apps will be available under two license models: a "Free Personal Use" or a "Paid Commercial Use" subscription for organizations. Workstation Pro is available for PC users running Windows or Linux, wh
  
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• Feds Probe Waymo Driverless Cars Hitting Parked Cars, Drifting Into Traffic

  15-05-2024 00:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into construction zones -- all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said (PDF) Monday. To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars equipped wit
  
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• Dublin To New York City Portal Temporarily Shut Down Due To Inappropriate Behavior

  14-05-2024 23:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  A portal linking New York City to Dublin via a livestream has been temporarily shut down after inappropriate behavior ensued, according to the Dublin City Council. From a report: Less than a week after the 24/7 visual art installation was put in place, officials have opted to close it down temporarily after people began to flash each other, grind on the portal, and one person even shared pictures of the twin tower attack to people in New York City. Alternatively, the portal had also been the sit
  
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• AI in Gmail Will Sift Through Emails, Provide Search Summaries, Send Emails

  14-05-2024 22:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Gemini AI often just feels like a chatbot built into a text-input field, but you can really start to do special things when you give it access to a ton of data. Gemini in Gmail will soon be able to search through your entire backlog of emails and show a summary in a sidebar. That's simple to describe but solves a huge problem with email: even searching brings up a list of email subjects, and you have to click-through to each one just to read it.
  Havi
  
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• Unity's Marc Whitten Resigns Amid Runtime Fee Controversy

  14-05-2024 22:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Marc Whitten, Unity Create's chief product and technology officer, is stepping down on June 1, 2024, following the company's contentious Runtime Fee policy. Whitten will assist with the transition until December 31, 2024. The now-discarded Runtime Fee, announced in September 2023, faced severe backlash from developers who viewed it as a punitive per-install tariff. Unity reworked the fee and acknowledged its lack of communication with developers. CEO John Riccitiello also departed in October 202
  
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• Google's Invisible AI Watermark Will Help Identify Generative Text and Video

  14-05-2024 21:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Among Google's swath of new AI models and tools announced today, the company is also expanding its AI content watermarking and detection technology to work across two new mediums. The Verge: Google's DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, took the stage for the first time at the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday to talk not only about the team's new AI tools, like the Veo video generator, but also about the new upgraded SynthID watermark imprinting system. It can now mark video that was digitall
  
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• The Walls Are Closing In On John Deere's Tractor Repair Monopoly

  14-05-2024 20:49 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  samleecole writes: For the last decade, farmers have been warning that John Deere, a company celebrated by farmers, country musicians, and politicians, has been doing something else very American: Concentrating power, stripping away the ownership rights of people who buy their products, and adding a bevy of artificial, software-based repair restrictions that have effectively created a regime in which farmers can no longer fix their own tractors, combines, harvesters, and other agricultural equip
  
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• Google Search Will Now Show AI-Generated Answers To Millions By Default

  14-05-2024 20:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is shaking up Search. On Tuesday, the company announced big new AI-powered changes to the world's dominant search engine at I/O, Google's annual conference for developers. From a report: With the new features, Google is positioning Search as more than a way to simply find websites. Instead, the company wants people to use its search engine to directly get answers and help them with planning events and brainstorming ideas. "[With] generative AI, Search can do more than you ever imagined,"
  
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• Google is Experimenting With Running Chrome OS on Android

  14-05-2024 19:24 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: At a privately held event, Google recently demonstrated a special build of Chromium OS -- code-named "ferrochrome" -- running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8. However, Chromium OS wasn't shown running on the phone's screen itself. Rather, it was projected to an external display, which is possible because Google recently enabled display output on its Pixel 8 series. Time will tell if Google is thinking of positioning Chrome OS as a platform for its desktop m
  
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