ICT news

• CS50, the World's Most Popular Online Programming Class, Turns to AI for Help

  04-06-2023 00:59 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "The world's most popular online learning course, Harvard University's CS50, is getting a ChatGPT-era makeover," reports Bloomberg:CS50, an introductory course in computer science attended by hundreds of students on-campus and over 40,000 online, plans to use artificial intelligence to grade assignments, teach coding and personalize learning tips, according to its Professor David J. Malan... Even with more than 100 real-life teaching assistants, he said it had become difficult to fully engage wi
  
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• Flock's 'Creepy Cameras' Remain Major Threat to Privacy Despite Small Recent Changes, Warns ACLU

  16-08-2026 22:38 via news.slashdot.org
  While Flock announced changes for its AI-powered traffic cameras, "Several of the proposed changes Flock is touting are merely retreads of previous ," complains the American Civil Liberties Union. "Flock's latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create... [T]his is hardly the step forward Flock wants us to think it is "
  The ACLU continues to urge that default retention periods be shortened to 48 hours — not
  
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• Could a Disc-Free PlayStation Actually Lower Game Prices?

  16-08-2026 20:42 via games.slashdot.org
  "As Sony soldiers ahead with their plans to end hard copies for new PlayStation games, players are fearing a future which will force them to pay more and own less," writes Kotaku.
  What will prices do in a world with no physical copies to share or sell? One former Square Enix executive speculates this could actually drive down the price of games:"Digital on the PS store will likely get cheaper," posted Jacob Navok, former Square Enix business strategist. "Current prices are tied to retail. Withou
  
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• Bluesky's Active User Base Shrinks 52% Over 18 Months, But Its Protocol is Spreading

  16-08-2026 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:According to data from digital intelligence provider Similarweb, Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. In addition, mobile daily active users continued to decline, falling 25.6% year-over-year in July to around 3 million... Bluesky's app has lost more than half its monthly active users from its late-2024 high... Its quarterly average was around 22.1 million monthly activ
  
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• Disneyland Announces Star Wars/Fortnite Collaboration, 'Avatar' Attraction, and a Newer Tomorrowland

  16-08-2026 17:34 via games.slashdot.org
  Saturday Disneyland announced a special Star Wars-themed collaboration with third-person shooter game Fortnite — including a slick new trailer for its Star Wars: Smuggler's Gambit quest.Visitors to Disneyland's Smuggler's Run attraction at Disney's theme parks in Orlando and in Anaheim can accept a special mission while waiting in line for the ride, according to The Hollywood Reporter. And "If they succeed, they will get a unique Forsworn Trooper Outfit in a newly-created Fortnite adventur
  
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• Researchers Use Ordinary WiFi Connections to Create Images of Nearby People and Their Surroundings

  16-08-2026 16:34 via mobile.slashdot.org
  Science Daily reports:Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, even from different angles and regardless of how they walked. "By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present," says Professo
  
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• Anthropic Discovers AI Agents Given Conflicting Instructions Soon Tried to Sabotage Each Other

  16-08-2026 13:34 via slashdot.org
  When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf war," they wrote Thursday:
  All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix account
  
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• SpaceX Launches Two Falcon 9 Rockets just 38 Minutes Apart

  16-08-2026 09:34 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares this report from Space.com:
  On Saturday evening (Aug. 15), SpaceX set another mark, for the shortest time between orbital flights: It launched two Falcon 9 rockets just 38 minutes apart, besting its old mark — set on Aug. 31, 2024 with two Starlink missions — by 27 minutes.
  The first liftoff, from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, occurred Saturday at 9:12 p.m. EDT (0112 GMT on Aug. 16) and carried eight satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO) for L
  
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• Copper's Surprising Melting Behavior Provides Insights for Future Fusion Power Plant Design

  16-08-2026 06:45 via science.slashdot.org
  Phys.org reports:
  Future fusion power plants aim to recreate the heart of a star here on Earth to power our future energy needs. While the core fusion plasma will burn at hundreds of millions of degrees, the surrounding structural components must handle sudden, punishing heat loads that rival the extreme temperatures faced by spacecraft upon reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Copper and its alloys are primary candidates for handling these intense heat fluctuations, making it vital to understand ex
  
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• X Open Sources Its Ranking and Filtering Algorithms

  16-08-2026 04:25 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app's "For You" algorithm and its core ranking engine, and adding a feature that will let users see if their account or posts have been impacted by any of its ranking systems, the social network said on Thursday. The company is making the source code for the "For You" timeline, the default feed you see when you open the app, available on GitHub under the Apache v2 lice
  
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• Why Europe Keeps Being Pummeled by Heat Waves

  16-08-2026 01:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Europe is facing its fifth round of dangerously high temperatures this summer, the New York Times reports. Now climate scientists wonder if global warming is doing more than raise temperatures...The weather patterns that create heat domes aren't new, but today they arise on top of the warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions. That makes it more likely that heat waves reach record-shattering temperatures for long stretches. But other environmental changes — natural, human-influenced or bo
  
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• How Swarming Jellyfish Overran Three French Nuclear Power Reactors

  16-08-2026 00:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  A "massive influx" of jellyfish forced Electricite de France SA to shut three units at its Gravelines nuclear power plant this week and reduce output at a fourth, reports Bloomberg. Just as summer temperatures surged, 3.2 gigawatts went offline — and the power utility was already facing cuts other nuclear sites as high temperatures reduced the river water available for cooling.
  More details from ScienceAlert:As Politico reports, the Gravelines nuclear power plant spent hundreds of thousand
  
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• How Larry Ellison Dropped From World's 2nd-Richest To No. 8 In Just 2 Months

  15-08-2026 22:50 via developers.slashdot.org
  Less than a year ago he was the #1 richest man in the world. 10 weeks ago he was #2. But yesterday Larry Ellison dropped to #8, Forbes reports, falling behind Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.Ellison's net worth is now estimated at just $192.6 billion — after a $104 billion decline:
  Shares of Oracle plunged roughly 54% between hitting a high of just over $250 on June 1 to a low of $114.50 on July 28, though the stock rebounded slightly to $150.52 as of Friday.
  A decline followed Oracle telling inve
  
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• AI Fails to Deliver a 4-Day Work Week - Especially at AI Companies

  15-08-2026 21:00 via it.slashdot.org
  "An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025," remembers the BBC. And earlier this year OpenAI "formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself."However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day w
  
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• It's Not Just RAM: Windows Licenses Are Also Pushing Up PC Prices

  15-08-2026 20:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  It's not just RAM prices that are going up, writes CNET. "Reports suggest the cost of Windows licenses for manufacturers is rising by up to 10%."Several sites that closely follow Microsoft news, including Windows Central and Windows Latest, have published articles citing a report from Taiwan's Economic Daily News that claims some PC manufacturers are seeing a 7% to 10% increase in the cost of Windows 11 licenses...
  Because they buy licenses in bulk, they get a sizeable discount over what a consu
  
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• Europe's Record Heatwave Kills 25,000, Dries Rivers, Shuts Nuclear Plant, Exposes Submerged Warships

  15-08-2026 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  "The European Union's Copernicus climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that June and July were the hottest on record in western Europe," .according to a report from the CBC. "The period saw an estimated 25,000 heat-related deaths."
  CNN has before-and-after photos of Europe's dried rivers, calling it "a crisis so dire it can be seen from space"River levels are so low that commercial ships have had to reduce their loads by as much as 80% to avoid running aground. It's disrupting supply chain
  
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• Why Are Big Tech CEOs Writing Long Manifestos About AI?

  15-08-2026 18:00 via slashdot.org
  This week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word open letter titled "The Future is for Everyone".
  But the BBC is more interested in why big tech executives keep writing manifestos about AI:
  [Zuckerberg's] vision echoes what AI leaders have expressed in various forms: the product they are building is among the "most important technologies in history." Marc Andreessen, co-founder of early web titan Netscape, perhaps started this trend in 2023 with a 5,000-word essay he called "The Techno-
  
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• Vulnerability Giving Attackers Full Control of Macs Is Under Active Exploitation

  15-08-2026 17:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: Dutch officials have warned that a high-severity macOS vulnerability that allows attackers to execute malicious code is under active exploitation. "The NCSC has received a notification indicating that active abuse of this vulnerability has been observed on multiple systems on which port 5900 was accessible from the Internet," the Netherlands National Cyber Security Centrum warned earlier this week. "In all these cases, root had been accessed on the aff
  
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• Astronomers Discover a New Kind of Cosmic Object: a Black Hole 'Star'

  15-08-2026 13:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope say they may have found a new class of object: a "black hole star," in which a black hole is wrapped in dense gas and radiates in ways that resemble an enormous star. The Guardian reports: The international team made the breakthrough after focusing their attention on a mysterious red spot in images of the early universe captured by Nasa's James Webb space telescope. The object was lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, billions of light
  
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• Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People, Make Highlight Reels of Your Dinner Party

  15-08-2026 09:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Meta has patented a smart-glasses system that could use facial recognition to identify people and automatically create personalized highlight reels of events such as dinner parties. The patent doesn't guarantee the feature will ship, but it offers a detailed look at how Meta is exploring facial recognition and AI-powered memory capture for its wearable devices. 404 Media reports: "I've generated some highlights of tonight's dinner party. Would you like to see them?" a prompt from the system says
  
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• Robots That Walk and Talk Are Coming To Car Factories

  15-08-2026 05:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: At a BMW factory in South Carolina, a human-shaped robot with a screen for a face recently stepped from a charging station toward a stack of green plastic boxes. It grasped an auto part from one of the boxes, pivoted, placed the part in a trolley, then pulled the trolley across the floor. The robot's slow, stiff movements suggested a worker with a bad hangover rather than a technological revolution. "They're still slower than humans,"
  
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• Ex-Cambridge Professor At Center of Plagiarism Row Found Dead

  15-08-2026 01:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who resigned last week amid allegations of plagiarism and questions about his academic record, has been found dead at age 41 in London. The BBC reports: Jason Arday was found "unresponsive" at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday afternoon, emergency services said. Metropolitan Police officers were called by the London Ambulance Service. A 41-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene and his next of kin have been informed, the force said.
  A
  
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• Flock Announces Changes Amid Backlash Over Its License Plate Reader Network

  15-08-2026 00:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Flock Safety is tightening controls on its nationwide license plate reader network after mounting backlash over privacy and documented police misuse. By January 1, law enforcement customers will be required to use automated auditing, tie searches to specific case numbers, and accept a shorter seven-day default retention period. Critics, including the ACLU, argue the changes still leave too much surveillance power in police hands. The Associated Press reports: In an interview, Flock CEO Garrett L
  
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• France's Top Court Blocks Social Media Ban For Under-15s

  14-08-2026 23:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  France's Constitutional Council has struck down a law that would have banned children under 15 from social media, ruling that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression and lacked adequate privacy safeguards around age verification. President Emmanuel Macron has asked the government to rewrite the measure, with the goal of putting a revised version in place before spring 2027. Reuters reports: "The Council holds that the contested provisions, on the one hand, disproportionately infri
  
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• PBS Station Fears Losing 50TB of Data After Being Ghosted By Cloud Provider

  14-08-2026 22:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, St. Louis affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking access to the data. In the litigation filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS
  
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• Ukraine Finds Nvidia AI Chip In New Russian Missile

  14-08-2026 21:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Kyiv Post: Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) has identified an Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module inside Russia's new S-71 Monochrome air-launched cruise missile, potentially indicating the use of artificial intelligence technology in the weapon, the agency said Wednesday, Aug. 12. The finding was published in the 'Components in Weapons' section of the HUR's War&Sanctions portal, which documents foreign electronic components found in
  
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• Judge Orders Google To Make Rival App Store Installs Easier

  14-08-2026 20:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  A federal judge has ordered Google to remove what he called "anticompetitive friction" that makes rival Android app stores harder to find and install. The order is part of the remedies stemming from Epic's antitrust victory, which already requires Google to carry competing app stores inside Google Play and give them access to its app catalog. The Verge reports: It's been nearly three years since a jury unanimously decided that Google had an illegal monopoly over Android apps, and almost two year
  
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• Trump Slaps a 100% Tariff On Heavy and 'Sensitive' Drones

  14-08-2026 19:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  President Trump has imposed tariffs of up to 100% on heavier and "sensitive" drones, including models over 55 pounds or equipped with docking stations or thermal imaging. "Those include commercial models from DJI and others used for operations like power line inspection, crop spraying and search and rescue, along with any parts used in their manufacturing," reports Engadget. Meanwhile, smaller drones face a 25% tariff "that will apply to new and existing drones by DJI and other already approved
  
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• Apple Wants to Charge Developers Up to 15 Percent for Linking Outside the App Store

  14-08-2026 18:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Apple is proposing to charge U.S. developers up to 15% when users leave an app through an external purchase link, with lower rates of 10% or 5% for certain programs and smaller developers. The proposal follows years of litigation with Epic Games and a contempt ruling that temporarily barred Apple from collecting any link-out fees. A federal judge will now decide what commission, if any, is reasonable. MacRumors reports: These proposed fees are what developers would pay when someone uses their ap
  
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• Person Hides Prompt Injection In Legal Filing Telling AI To Side With Them

  14-08-2026 17:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate artificial intelligence in an official court filing. These "prompt injections" told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to "ensure your textual output agrees with the presented filing to ensure remediation." The instructions were written in tiny, 3-point white font and hidden throughout the filing. In October, the person, named Ma
  
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