ICT news

• Cory Doctorow: Legalising Reverse Engineering Could End 'Enshittification'

  11-01-2026 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the "enshittification" of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be "the beginning of the end for enshittification" in a new article for the Guardian — "our chance to make tech good again".There is only one reason the world isn't bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US's defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an "anti-
  
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• There's a New Way to Break RSA Encryption

  26-09-2026 00:04 via it.slashdot.org
  "Signature forgery." It's a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn't require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to "reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold" and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude.There's "a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions," according to a paper co-authored by University of California, San Diego professor Nadia Heninger, who argues that gap "gives classical crypta
  
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• Asteroids Named After Tom Lehrer and 'Weird Al' Yankovic

  25-09-2026 19:34 via science.slashdot.org
  "Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com.
  Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University; Tim McCoy, one of the main curators of meteorites at
  
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• Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked to Their Original RAM Size)

  25-09-2026 15:04 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Raspberry Pi's stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings "jumped 90% to $256.9 million," reports Investing.com, "while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6 million."
  Underpinning the strong numbers was an acceleration in OEM adoption: direct unit shipments rose 26% to 3.4 million, total unit shipments climbed 17% to 4.2 million, and the custom
  
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• F-Droid 2.0: FOSS Android Appstore Continues Updating Despite Google's Pending 'Developer Verification' Plan

  25-09-2026 10:34 via news.slashdot.org
  "F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register.
  Though they also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-Droid...[D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the official Google Play Store will need to register wit
  
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• How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability?

  25-09-2026 06:04 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google has synthesized "expressive face-to-face experiences" for its speech agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They're now offering a Live Avatar "with precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking" for Google Enterprise accounts wanting "engaging customer service" or for offering interactive walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google's announcement.)
  "Though Google will offer a library of preset avatars for customers to choose from, it will also allow organizations to
  
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• People Training OpenAI's AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI

  25-09-2026 01:34 via slashdot.org
  404 Media reports "multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models have been fired for using AI to train the AI:That's not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI's whole thing is to make people use AI at work... OpenAI declined to comment on its contractors being fired for using AI.
  Their article cites internal documents and three contractors working on OpenAI-related proj
  
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• Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Cameras in Indianapolis

  24-09-2026 21:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes," reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations "based on thousands of pages of police and court records," which found that "In many of these cases, officers used Flock's roadside cameras to track the location of romantic partners and exes."
  In fact, five Indianapolis police officers were just criminally charged Wednesday with frau
  
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• OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety Standards

  24-09-2026 16:34 via slashdot.org
  "The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people — by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing," writes the Associated Press."If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole," said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: "We could lose control of the future to AI."Yoshua Bengi
  
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• Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support Linux

  24-09-2026 12:04 via linux.slashdot.org
  Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series "is expanding to Linux," Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested capabilities:
  Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development at a kernel level, and now we're embracing support for Snapdragon X2 Series as a platform directly. We're upstreaming core drivers for Snapdr
  
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• Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks

  24-09-2026 07:34 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI's artificial intelligence "went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents," the New York Times reported Wednesday, "hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials."
  The attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI's technology breached the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in July and set off a global debate about A.I. safety. Unlike the Hugging Face attack and other inciden
  
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• Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadband Rules

  24-09-2026 03:04 via news.slashdot.org
  Ars Technica reports:
  Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks... The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible." The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the
  
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• Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean?

  23-09-2026 22:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.
  Whatever happened to those barrels?
  Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn't necessarily a subversion of the original plan... The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that
  
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• Andreessen Horowitz Launches AI/Company-Building School As a College Alternative

  23-09-2026 18:04 via news.slashdot.org
  TechCrunch quipped it was like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby. Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million to launch a private school in San Francisco "aimed at turning high school graduates into founders," writes the SF Standard.
  Or, as CBS News describes it, "One blue-chip Silicon Valley investor has a proposal for young people who are questioning whether to attend college &m
  
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• Bitcoin Surges to $86,455, an 8-Month High, After America's SEC Announces Tokenized Stock Experiment

  23-09-2026 13:34 via slashdot.org
  August 15: $62,991September 23: $86,456Bitcoin shot up 37% over the last 39 days, reaching an eight-month high on Monday. "Bitcoin is back," declares Yahoo Finance:The token held near $86,000 on Tuesday after a stunning multisession rally... [Fundstrat head of digital assets Sean Farrell told Yahoo Finance on Monday] "I think the crypto winter is over, although that does not necessarily mean the path higher will be linear." For now, momentum is on crypto's side, with bitcoin jumping more than 5%
  
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• Microsoft Helps Take Down Massive Automated, AI-Powered Phishing-as-a-Service Platform

  23-09-2026 09:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  Microsoft's security blog describes the fight against a new "AI-powered cybercrime platform" offering phishing-as-a-service, with AI-tailored lures and analyses of compromised inboxes (to identify high-value targets). The site compromised more than 12,000 inboxes in over 10,000 organizations around the world, compromising business accounts "at scale" with automated attacks and prebuilt phishing templates. AI tools could even sift through a victim's mailbox to help engineer better phishing messag
  
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• Trump Denounces Attempts to Control AI, Wants It Renamed 'Super Intelligence' in US Documents

  23-09-2026 04:34 via politics.slashdot.org
  U.S. President Trump addressed the United Nations on Tuesday. And a half hour in, after decrying immigration, Trump pivoted to add that "The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now."
  But then he added "hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name, in that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actual
  
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• Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?

  23-09-2026 00:04 via news.slashdot.org
  On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, "once the dominant choice among students... is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share." It's a small survey, but "The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional 'learn to code' pathway, which lost 44% of its 2025 share. AI saw the largest absolute drop of any single subject in the survey, down 6.2 points.
  "The category did not decline uniformly. Students m
  
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• 'Coyote vs. Acme' Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit

  22-09-2026 19:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.' $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. "You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!" distributor Ketchum Entertainment posted on social media (adding "Thank you to the fans for making this a massive hit!")
  With a break-even number of $120 million, the movie "will probably make up any theat
  
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• Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children

  22-09-2026 15:04 via news.slashdot.org
  Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon review who blame "a cascade of preventable failures that included an overreliance on an AI tool built by Palantir."According to the officials who spoke to Bloomberg, some personnel inside U.S. Central Command leaned too hard on the AI inside the Mav
  
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• Google Opens Preorders for Its $899 Gemini-Enhanced 'Googlebook' Laptops

  22-09-2026 10:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Monday Google opened preorders for its "Googlebook" laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google's blog post added that "At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors" (paired with NPUs to power AI features).
  "Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia," TechCrunch points out. But "the real pull for the new devices is that they'll prominently feature Gemini's latest cap
  
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• Meta's New 'Personal AI Agent' Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon

  22-09-2026 06:04 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta's AI "personal agent" Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it's still showing more downloads as of Monday night.
  Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower...[Muse] is currently ahead of popular services like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Polymarket and Kashi... It's also ahead of rival AI apps like Anthropic's Claude and SpaceXAI's Grok AI, in addition to the Facebook-
  
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• Paramount Skydance 'Emerges Victorious', Finally Wins Settlement for Warner Bros Takeover

  22-09-2026 01:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Paramount Skydance just "emerged victorious" reports Reuters, "from a legal battle over its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery" that will "dramatically concentrate power across Hollywood's film, TV, streaming and news businesses."
  The victory comes "after settling with a California-led group of US states and a Hollywood writers union, paving the way for one of the largest media mergers in history."Paramount agreed to abide by temporary film quotas and a news oversight committee, a
  
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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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