ICT news

• Criticisms Rise Before Vote on America's Cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act'

  06-06-2026 17:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  An upcoming vote in a few weeks on America's cryptocurrency "Clarity Act" is "rattling Wall Street and consumer advocates," reports CNN, with its proposal to regulate the bulk of crypto markets through America's Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "It allows crypto companies to operate, at long last, in compliance with U.S. rules, rather than what they have been doing — essentially running their businesses within a patchwork of state and federal legal gray areas."
  Even for Jamie Dimon, t
  
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• Ladybird Browser Stops Accepting Public Pull Requests

  06-06-2026 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The Ladybird browser isn't opposed to AI coding tools, but it's just brought a new change to their code-contributing policies.
  February 23: "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI."
  I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go... The requirement from the start was byte-for-byt
  
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• New Power Banks Released By BMX With Safer Semi-Solid-State Batteries

  06-06-2026 21:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  From Android Authority:
  Singapore-based BMX has announced that its SolidSafe magnetic power bank lineup, first showcased at CES 2026, is now available for purchase through its website and Amazon US, with prices starting at $59. What sets these power banks apart is their use of semi-solid-state batteries. Traditional lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries rely on liquid electrolytes to move energy between electrodes. Semi-solid-state batteries significantly reduce the amount of flammable liqui
  
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• Teen Social Media Bans Risk Strengthening Big Tech's Dominance, Warns Bluesky Exec

  06-06-2026 19:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Bluesky's chief operating officer believes teen social media bans "risk entrenching Big Tech's dominance," reports CNBC:Rose Wang, Bluesky's chief operating officer, told CNBC on the sidelines of SXSW in London on Wednesday that the smaller open-source platform isn't opposed to regulation but that smaller players in the industry should be protected. "I support the protection and the safety of youth... The question that we have then is at what cost? Because essentially what I'm scared of is in th
  
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• Early Research Suggests a Path to Predict and Prevent Lung Cancer

  06-06-2026 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  Scientists "have made a discovery that may help prevent some people from developing lung cancer," reports the New York Times, noting that lung cancer "kills more people worldwide than any other cancer."A team of more than 80 researchers working across four continents have identified a set of proteins in the blood that accurately predict lung cancers more than five years before diagnosis. The scientists also found early evidence that an existing anti-inflammatory drug could significantly reduce l
  
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• 2027's 'Tomb Raider' Remake: Unreal Engine 5 and AI-Assisted Assets 'Refined' By Humans

  06-06-2026 16:34 via games.slashdot.org
  An official trailer dropped this week for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis. It's "a full-blown remake of the original 1996 Tomb Raider game," reports Kotaku, "rebuilt from the ground up using Unreal Engine 5." Developed by Flying Wild Hog (with assistance/guidance from longtime Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics), "it will also make some changes to puzzles, combat, platforming..." The game's Steam page acknowledges that AI-assisted tools were used during development "to support some early explor
  
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• Utah Residents Sue Officials Over Kevin O'Leary Data Center Plan

  06-06-2026 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Utah residents and a progressive nonprofit are suing officials over Kevin O'Leary's planned Stratos Project AI data center, arguing that the special authority overseeing it gives unelected officials too much control over land use, taxation, public health, and local governance. The lawsuit comes as O'Leary has agreed to shrink the proposed 40,000-acre project by 75% amid mounting political and community pushback. NBC News reports: The lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Utah's 3rd District Court by th
  
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• Scientists Find Wind Blowing From Our Milky Way's Black Hole

  06-06-2026 13:00 via science.slashdot.org
  After 50 years of searching, astronomers say they have finally found evidence of a long-sought "wind" blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow. And there is no perfect vacuum in the universe," team co-leader and Northwestern University researcher Mark Gorski said in a statement. "With new observations, this is the first time we've had a clean enough view to see the wind's
  
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• Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Reaches Criticality In First Test

  06-06-2026 05:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just over a year ago, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to accelerate the development of nuclear power in the US. While an entire startup ecosystem has developed around the use of different -- and typically smaller -- reactor designs, only one of them has been fully licensed so far, and there are no plans to actually build any instances of that design.The executive order directed the Department of Energy to have three
  
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• The US Military Quietly Turned GPS Into a Global 'Numbers Station,' Evidence Suggests

  06-06-2026 01:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  A security researcher says evidence suggests the U.S. military has been using an obscure GPS message field for nearly 20 years to broadcast encrypted key-distribution data, effectively turning GPS satellites into a global "numbers station." The hidden-looking 176-bit messages appear tied to the Pentagon's Over-the-Air Distribution system for remotely updating cryptographic keys, meaning ordinary GPS receivers may have been receiving the traffic all along without anyone outside the military notic
  
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• Google Will Pay SpaceX $920 Million Per Month For Compute

  06-06-2026 00:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Ahead of its upcoming IPO, SpaceX announced that Google will pay the company $920 million per month for access to roughly 110,000 Nvidia GPUs and related compute infrastructure. Google says the agreement is short-term "bridge capacity" to meet stronger-than-expected demand for Gemini Enterprise, while SpaceX is using deals like this and its Anthropic contract to bolster its pitch for a historic public offering. TechCrunch reports: The deal is similar in length and scope to the one SpaceX announc
  
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• Bitcoin Falls To $60,000 As Zcash Bug Rocks Crypto

  05-06-2026 23:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Bitcoin briefly fell below $60,000 on Friday, "extending its weekly loss to nearly 20% and threatening to fall below $59,000," reports CoinDesk. Crypto was also hit by a 40%-plus plunge in Zcash after Shielded Labs disclosed a years-old bug that could have allowed undetected counterfeit ZEC creation. From the report: Now, with stocks in plunge mode -- the Nasdaq down nearly 4% on Friday -- bitcoin finds itself perfectly correlated. "Short term, Bitcoin feels like swallowing broken glass," wrote
  
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• 340 Local News Outlets Now Blocking the Internet Archive

  05-06-2026 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit's repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you're not aware, not very good for the public interest. Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number o
  
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• GOV.UK Goes Dutch On Payments As It Dumps Stripe

  05-06-2026 21:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The UK's Government Digital Service is replacing Stripe with Dutch payments provider Adyen for many GOV.UK Pay transactions, including local authorities, police forces, and armed forces units. The three-year deal covers about 1,000 services and is meant to make payments more flexible while keeping the user experience largely unchanged. The Register reports: According to the tender notice published in February 2025, the contract covers around 17 percent of payments made through GOV.UK Pay but mor
  
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• BSA Lashes Out At Mandatory Open-Source Licensing

  05-06-2026 20:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: The American Business Software Alliance (BSA) does not consider mandatory open-source licensing to be an appropriate indicator of sovereignty. This is among the "pointed messages" they sent to the French government consultation (closed) today. "What protects Europe is the ability to govern, audit, and mitigate risk, not where a company files its corporate papers," said Thomas Boue of BSA. "Criteria of this kind raise costs, reduce access to best-in-
  
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• Google Says It Will Replenish More Water Than It Uses At Data Centers

  05-06-2026 19:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: There's been a lot of pushback in recent months around the impact of AI data centers on local communities, with the use of water being a key issue for many. Google, in an expansion of its "water stewardship" programs, is making commitments that include replenishing more water than it uses at its data center sites. AI data centers go through a lot of water use in cooling the hardware used to power models, and Google is no exception. While Googl
  
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• Valve Says Steam Machine 'Shipping This Summer'

  05-06-2026 18:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Valve says its long-awaited Steam Machine and Steam Frame are both "shipping this summer." The company is also expanding its Verified program beyond Steam Deck to cover the new hardware. "Steam Verified is a developer-focused program where game makers ensure that their titles are capable of running on the Deck (meaning they'll run fine under Linux), that the UI elements and text are readable at standard resolutions, and that sensible default graphics settings are used," notes Tom's Hardware. Fro
  
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• ISS Astronauts Told To Prepare For Possible Evacuation Over Air Leak

  05-06-2026 17:20 via science.slashdot.org
  NASA ordered astronauts on the International Space Station to shelter in their spacecraft and prepare for possible evacuation after a worsening air leak in the Russian Zvezda service module's transfer tunnel. The Guardian reports: The four astronauts of NASA's Crew-12 mission on the station -- two US astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut -- received orders from NASA mission control at 9.04am ET (2pm BST) on Friday to enter their Crew Dragon spacecraft docked to the station and d
  
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• Used Waymo Robotaxi Batteries Become Backup Storage For Power Grids

  05-06-2026 09:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions have struck a "strategic supply agreement" to repurpose used batteries from Waymo's electric robotaxi fleet into stationary storage for California and Texas power grids. The arrangement could give robotaxi batteries a second life storing renewable energy after they're no longer suitable for vehicle use. It will also "support B2U projects in regions where Waymo's autonomous robotaxis operate -- meaning the used Waymo batteries could bolster the local power grids th
  
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• Bees Can Use Tools To Solve Problems, Study Finds

  05-06-2026 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Bumblebees can use tools to solve a problem, according to experiments that demonstrate their remarkably advanced cognitive abilities. The bees were given an adapted version of an experiment that, 100 years ago, first demonstrated chimpanzees could work out how to retrieve an out-of-reach banana by stacking boxes. Since then, various other primates, elephants and crows have joined an elite cohort of species known to be capable of this level o
  
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• Anthropic Urges Global Pause in AI Development, Flags 'Self-Improvement' Risk

  05-06-2026 01:00 via slashdot.org
  Anthropic is urging leading AI labs to consider slowing development, warning that frontier models are advancing fast enough that they may soon be able to improve themselves without direct human intervention. The company says a global ability to pause or slow AI development would "likely be a good thing," citing internal data about accelerating model capabilities. From a blog post: Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing tha
  
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• New IronWorm Malware Hits 36 Packages In npm Supply-Chain Attack

  05-06-2026 00:00 via it.slashdot.org
  A new npm supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages with Rust-based infostealer malware called IronWorm. According to BleepingComputer, the malware "targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files." From the report: According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF
  
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• Companies Are Using Reddit To Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search

  04-06-2026 23:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape -- in this case, a popular Reddit community. In a post last week, the moderators
  
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• Meta Keeps Delaying the Release of Its New AI Model to Developers

  04-06-2026 22:00 via meta.slashdot.org
  Meta has reportedly delayed the developer release of its Muse Spark AI model API multiple times, and as of Tuesday, had no scheduled launch date, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled). Reuters reports: A Meta spokesperson told Reuters on Wednesday that the company is already testing the Application Programming Interface (API) with some early partners and is looking forward to releasing it this month. "The muse spark API will be coming soon," Meta AI Chief Alexandr Wang announced in a
  
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• LinkedIn China Spying Threat Prompts Warning From US, Allies

  04-06-2026 21:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  The U.S. and its Five Eyes intelligence partners issued a joint warning (PDF) that Chinese military intelligence services are using LinkedIn and other professional networking sites to recruit people with access to government, military, foreign policy, or sensitive economic information. "These actors use an aggressive online recruitment strategy whereby intelligence officers or their affiliates pose as employees of private consultancies, think tanks or human resources firms, and place online job
  
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• Supreme Court Sides With Trump Administration On Federal Regulation of Telecom Companies

  04-06-2026 20:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Thursday in upholding the power of federal regulators to enforce data privacy laws on telecommunications companies. The 8-1 decision (PDF) preserved one of the Federal Communications Commission's key tools, though the companies also won a concession from the Republican administration that could shift the regulatory landscape.The appeal from telecommunications giants Verizon and AT
  
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• Samsung Ditches New Jersey For Texas, Costing Garden State 1,000 Jobs

  04-06-2026 19:00 via slashdot.org
  schwit1 shares a report from NJ.com: Samsung is pulling up stakes in New Jersey and heading to Texas, a move that could leave roughly 1,000 Garden State workers facing a stark choice: relocate or risk losing their jobs. The South Korean tech giant confirmed this week that it will move its US headquarters from Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to its existing campus in Plano, Texas, marking a stunning reversal less than a year after it celebrated the opening of a new headquarters in Bergen County. The reloca
  
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• Apple Is Bringing Age Verification To Texas This Week

  04-06-2026 18:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  joshuark shares a report from The Verge: Apple will introduce age verification in the App Store for users in Texas starting on Thursday, June 4th. The move, as spotted by MacRumors, comes just days after a federal appeals court allowed Texas' App Store Accountability Act to go into effect while a lawsuit against it proceeds. People in Texas who are creating a new Apple account will need to verify they're over 18 using a credit card or government ID. Apple may also automatically verify users' age
  
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• Google Ordered To Put Clearer Links In AI Search, Let UK Publishers Opt Out

  04-06-2026 17:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: UK regulators today ordered (PDF) Google to put clearer attributions and links to publishers' content in its AI-generated search features. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) also said Google must give publishers a way to opt out of AI features in search. "In a world first, publishers will now have effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search, such as AI Overviews," the CMA said today. "This
  
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• NASA Says Goodbye to Its Longtime Mars MAVEN Mission

  04-06-2026 13:00 via science.slashdot.org
  NASA has officially ended the MAVEN mission after the Mars orbiter stopped responding in December, apparently after an unexpected spin drained its batteries and knocked out communications. Launched in 2013 and orbiting Mars since 2014, MAVEN spent more than a decade studying how the planet lost its atmosphere and helped explain how Mars transformed from a potentially habitable world into the cold, dry planet seen today. The New York Times reports: The NASA spacecraft MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosp
  
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