ICT news

• Epic's New Program Lets Developers Keep Their Revenue In Exchange For Exclusivity

  25-08-2023 00:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Epic Games will let developers keep 100 percent of their net revenues from the Epic Games Store for six months if they choose to make their games or apps exclusives for that time through its new First Run program, the company announced on Wednesday. Typically, Epic lets developers keep 88 percent of their revenues, with the company taking a 12 percent cut. For developers who launch a product through First Run, the split will return to 88 / 12 o
  
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• The World's First Sodium-Ion Battery in Commercial EVs - Great at Low Temperatures

  08-02-2026 02:17 via tech.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis shared this report from InsideEVs:
  Chinese battery giant CATL and automaker Changan Automobile are preparing to put the world's first passenger car powered by sodium-ion batteries on public roads by mid-2026. And if the launch is successful, it could usher in an era where electric vehicles present less of a fire risk and can better handle extreme temperatures.
  The CATL Naxtra sodium-ion battery will debut in the Changan Nevo A06 sedan, delivering an esti
  
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• Is the 'Death of Reading' Narrative Wrong?

  08-02-2026 00:12 via news.slashdot.org
  Has the rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies really shattered our attention spans and driven books out of our culture? Maybe not, argues social psychologist Adam Mastroianni (author of the Substack Experimental History):
  As a psychologist, I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for "bad thing go up" than we do for "bad thing go down." Unsurprisingly, then, stories about
  
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• Waymo Reveals Remote Workers In Philippines Sometimes Advise Its Driverless Cars

  07-02-2026 22:41 via tech.slashdot.org
  Waymo surprised U.S. lawmakers Wednesday during a hearing on autonomous vehicles and their safety and oversight. Newsweek reports:During questioning, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked what happens when a Waymo vehicle encounters a driving situation it cannot independently resolve. "The Waymo phones a human friend for help," Markey explained, adding that the vehicle communicates with a "remote assistance operator." Markey criticized the lack of public information about these workers
  
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• Good News: We Saved the Bees. Bad News: We Saved the Wrong Ones.

  07-02-2026 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are.""Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video
  
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• Bitcoin Dropped Nearly 30% This Week. But Why?

  07-02-2026 20:34 via slashdot.org
  Last Sunday, Bitcoin had dropped 13% in three days, to $76,790.
  By Thursday it had dropped another 21%, to $60,062.
  This morning it's at $69,549 — up from Thursday, down from Sunday, but 44% lower than its all-time high in October of $123,742. In short, Bitcoin "is down almost 30% this week alone," reports CNBC:
  "This steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are losing interest, and overall pessimism about crypto is growing," Deutsche Bank analyst Marion Laboure said W
  
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• Firefox Announces 'AI Controls' To Block Its Upcoming AI Features

  07-02-2026 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The Mozilla executive in charge of Firefox says that while some people just want AI tools that are genuinely useful, "We've heard from many who want nothing to do with AI...""Listening to our community, alongside our ongoing commitment to offer choice, led us to build AI controls."Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you'll find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. It provides a single place to block current and future generative AI features in Firefox
  
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• Apple Plans to Allow Outside Voice-Controlled AI Chatbots in CarPlay

  07-02-2026 18:34 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple "is preparing to allow voice-controlled AI apps from other companies in CarPlay," reports Bloomberg, citing "people familiar with the matter."
  Bloomberg calls it "a move that will let users query AI chatbots through its vehicle interface for the first time."
  The company is working to support the apps in CarPlay within the coming months, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan hasn't been announced. The change marks a strategic shift for Apple, which until now has o
  
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• Free Bi-Directional EV Chargers Tested to Improve Massachusetts Power Grid

  07-02-2026 17:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Somewhere on America's eastern coast, there's an economic development agency in Massachusetts promoting green energy solutions. And Monday the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (or MassCEC) announced "a first-of-its-kind" program to see what happens when they provide free electric vehicle chargers to selected residents, school districts, and municipal projects.
  The catch? The EV chargers are bi-directional, able "to both draw power from and return power to the grid..." The program hopes to "acce
  
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• Moltbook, Reddit, and The Great AI-Bot Uprising That Wasn't

  07-02-2026 16:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Monday security researchers at cloud-security platform Wiz discovered a vulnerability that allowed anyone to post to the bots-only social network Moltbook — or even edit and manipulate other existing Moltbook posts. "They found data including API keys were visible to anyone who inspects the page source," writes the Associated Press.But had it been discovered by advertisers, wondered a researcher from the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute. "A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fak
  
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• Claude Code is the Inflection Point

  07-02-2026 13:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  About 4% of all public commits on GitHub are now being authored by Anthropic's Claude Code, a terminal-native AI coding agent that has quickly become the centerpiece of a broader argument that software engineering is being fundamentally reshaped by AI.
  SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor and AI research firm, published a report on Friday projecting that figure will climb past 20% by the end of 2026. Claude Code is a command-line tool that reads codebases, plans multi-step tasks and executes them auton
  
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• New Bill in New York Would Require Disclaimers on AI-Generated News Content

  07-02-2026 11:01 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: A new bill in the New York state legislature would require news organizations to label AI-generated material and mandate that humans review any such content before publication. On Monday, Senator Patricia Fahy (D-Albany) and Assemblymember Nily Rozic (D-NYC) introduced the bill, called The New York Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Requirements in News Act -- The NY FAIR News Act for short.
  "At the center of the news industry, New York has a strong interest
  
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• Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites

  07-02-2026 08:30 via it.slashdot.org
  Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft's automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.
  Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought it was resolved, but a second complete block went into effect in January, cratering Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero. He submitted nearly a do
  
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• Waymo is Having a Hard Time Stopping For School Buses

  07-02-2026 06:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Waymo's robotaxis have racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem.
  Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop for buses during loading and unloading -- illegal in all 50 states -- prompting NHTSA to open a probe. At least four more violations
  
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• Hollywood's AI Bet Isn't Paying Off

  07-02-2026 03:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Hollywood's recent attempts to build entertainment around AI have consistently underperformed or outright flopped, whether the AI in question is a plot device or a production tool. The horror sequel M3GAN 2.0, Mission: Impossible -- The Final Reckoning, and Disney's Tron: Ares all disappointed at the box office in 2025 despite centering their narratives on AI.
  The latest casualty is Mercy, a January 2026 crime thriller in which Chris Pratt faces an AI judge bot played by Rebecca Ferguson; one re
  
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• Amazon's Tax Bill Plunges 87% After Tax Cuts

  07-02-2026 01:01 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Republicans' tax cuts shaved billions off Amazon's tax bill, new government filings show. The company says it ran a $1.2 billion tax bill last year, down from $9 billion the previous year, and even as its profits jumped by 45% to nearly $90 billion.
  That's largely because of the generous new depreciation breaks GOP lawmakers included in their One Big Beautiful Bill, something that's particularly important to Amazon which -- in addition to maintaining a vast i
  
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• Memory Prices Have Nearly Doubled Since Last Quarter

  06-02-2026 23:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Memory prices across DRAM, NAND and HBM have surged 80 to 90% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 2026, according to Counterpoint Research's latest Memory Price Tracker. The price of a 64GB RDIMM has jumped from a Q4 2025 contract price of $450 to over $900, and Counterpoint expects it to cross $1,000 in Q2.
  NAND, relatively stable last quarter, is tracking a parallel increase. Device makers are cutting DRAM content per device, swapping TLC SSDs for cheaper QLC alternatives, and shifting orders from the
  
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• Salesforce Shelves Heroku

  06-02-2026 21:40 via it.slashdot.org
  Salesforce is essentially shutting down Heroku as an evolving product, moving the cloud platform that helped define modern app deployment to a "sustaining engineering model" focused entirely on stability, security and support.
  Existing customers on credit card billing see no changes to pricing or service, but enterprise contracts are no longer available to new buyers. Salesforce said it is redirecting engineering investment toward enterprise AI.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Hidden Cameras in Chinese Hotels Are Livestreaming Guests To Thousands of Telegram Subscribers

  06-02-2026 20:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  An investigation has uncovered a sprawling network of hidden cameras in Chinese hotel rooms that livestream guests -- including couples having sex -- to paying subscribers on Telegram. Over 18 months, the BBC identified six websites and apps on the messaging platform that claimed to operate more than 180 spy cams across Chinese hotels, not just recording but broadcasting live.
  One site, monitored for seven months, cycled through 54 different cameras, roughly half active at any given time. Subscr
  
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• AI.com Sells for $70 Million, the Highest Price Ever Disclosed for a Domain Name

  06-02-2026 19:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Kris Marszalek, the co-founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com, has paid $70 million for the domain AI.com -- the highest price ever publicly disclosed for a website name, according to the deal's broker Larry Fischer of GetYourDomain.com.
  The entire sum was paid in cryptocurrency to an undisclosed seller. Marszalek plans to debut the site during a Super Bowl ad this weekend, offering a personal "AI agent" that lets consumers send messages, use apps and trade stocks. The previous do
  
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• Big Tech's $1.1 Trillion Cloud Computing Backlog

  06-02-2026 18:50 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) -- signed contracts for cloud computing services that can't yet be filled and haven't yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• KPMG Pressed Its Auditor To Pass on AI Cost Savings

  06-02-2026 17:31 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: KPMG, one of the world's largest auditors of public and private companies, negotiated lower fees from its own accountant by arguing that AI will make it cheaper to do the work, according to people familiar with the matter. The Big Four firm told its auditor, Grant Thornton UK, it should pass on cost savings from the rollout of AI and threatened to find a new accountant if it did not agree to a significant fee reduction, the people said.
  The discussions last y
  
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• The Bizarre Enhancement Claims Rocking Ski Jumping

  06-02-2026 16:34 via science.slashdot.org
  German newspaper Bild reported in January that some ski jumpers have been injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid ahead of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics -- the theory being that temporarily enlarged genitalia would yield looser-fitting suits when measured by 3D scanners, and those looser suits could act like sails to produce longer jumps.
  A study published last October in the scientific journal Frontiers found that a 2cm suit change translated to an extra 5.8 metres in jump distance. No
  
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• Europe Accuses TikTok of 'Addictive Design' and Pushes for Change

  06-02-2026 15:31 via tech.slashdot.org
  TikTok's endless scroll of irresistible content, tailored for each person's tastes by a well-honed algorithm, has helped the service become one of the world's most popular apps. Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful are likely illegal. From a report: On Friday, the regulators released a preliminary decision that TikTok's infinite scroll, auto-play features and recommendation algorithm amount to an "addictive design" that violated European Union laws
  
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• Canada Unveils Auto Industry Plan in Latest Pivot Away From US

  06-02-2026 13:30 via news.slashdot.org
  Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has announced a sweeping plan to shore up the country's auto industry and accelerate its electric vehicle transition, the latest in a series of moves to reduce Canada's deep economic dependence on the United States as American tariffs continue to batter the sector.
  The plan includes financial incentives for carmakers to invest in Canada, a new tariff credit scheme for manufacturers like General Motors and Toyota, and the reintroduction of EV buyer rebates. Can
  
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• Why This Is the Worst Crypto Winter Ever

  06-02-2026 11:30 via slashdot.org
  Bitcoin has fallen roughly 44% from its October peak, and while the drawdown isn't crypto's deepest ever on a percentage basis, Bloomberg's Odd Lots newsletter lays out a case that this is the industry's worst winter yet. The macro backdrop was supposed to favor Bitcoin: public confidence in the dollar is shaky, the Trump administration has been crypto-friendly, and fiat currencies are under perceived stress globally. Yet gold, not Bitcoin, has been the safe haven of choice.
  The "we're so early"
  
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• CIA Has Killed Off The World Factbook After Six Decades

  06-02-2026 09:01 via news.slashdot.org
  The CIA has shut down The World Factbook, one of its oldest and most recognizable public-facing intelligence publications, ending a run that began as a classified reference document in 1962 and evolved into a freely accessible digital resource that drew millions of views each year.
  The agency offered no explanation for the decision. Originally titled The National Basic Intelligence Factbook, the publication first went unclassified in 1971, was renamed a decade later, and moved online at CIA.gov
  
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• Google Confirms AirDrop Sharing is Coming To Android Phones Beyond Pixels

  06-02-2026 06:01 via it.slashdot.org
  Google's Quick Share-AirDrop interoperability, which has been exclusive to the Pixel 10 series since its surprise launch last year, is headed to a much broader set of Android devices in 2026.
  Eric Kay, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android platform, confirmed the expansion during a press briefing at the company's Taipei office, saying Google is "working with our partners to expand it into the rest of the ecosystem" and that announcements are coming "very soon." Nothing is the on
  
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• The European Commission Is Testing an Open Source Alternative To Microsoft Teams

  06-02-2026 03:00 via slashdot.org
  The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.
  Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.Read
  
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• Court Rules That Ripping YouTube Clips Can Violate the DMCA

  06-02-2026 00:30 via news.slashdot.org
  A federal court in California has ruled that YouTube creators who use stream-ripping tools to download clips for reaction and commentary videos may face liability under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions -- a decision that could reshape how one of the platform's most popular content genres operates.
  U.S. Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi of the Northern District of California denied a motion to dismiss in Cordova v. Huneault, a creator-versus-creator dispute, finding that YouTube's "ro
  
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