ICT news

• Google Restores Nextcloud Users' File Access on Android

  18-05-2025 03:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Ars Technica:Nextcloud, a host-your-own cloud platform that wants to help you "regain control over your data," has had to tell its Android-using customers for months now that they cannot upload files from their phone to their own servers. Months of emails and explanations to Google's Play Store representatives have yielded no changes, Nextcloud .That blog post — and media coverage of it — seem to have moved the needle. In an update to the p
  
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• OpenAI in Talks With Amazon About Investment That Could Exceed $10 Billion

  17-12-2025 15:09 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI is in discussions with Amazon about a potential investment and an agreement to use its AI chips, CNBC confirmed on Tuesday. From the report: The details are fluid and still subject to change but the investment could exceed $10 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the talks are confidential. The discussions come after OpenAI completed a restructuring in October and formally outlined the details of its partnership with Microsoft, giving i
  
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• Uber and DoorDash Try To Halt NYC Law That Encourages Tipping

  17-12-2025 14:00 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Two of the largest food-delivery app companies have made a last-ditch effort to overturn tipping laws in New York City that go into effect in January just as its next mayor, who has been highly critical of the companies and the app industry, takes office. Tips to delivery workers have plummeted since some food-delivery apps switched to showing the tipping option only after a purchase had been completed; that change came after New York
  
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• Senators Count the Shady Ways Data Centers Pass Energy Costs On To Americans

  17-12-2025 11:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  U.S. senators are probing whether Big Tech data centers are driving up local electricity bills by socializing grid upgrade costs onto residents. Some of the tactics they're using include NDAs, shell companies, and lobbying. Ars Technica reports: In letters (PDF) to seven AI firms, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) cited a study estimating that "electricity prices have increased by as much as 267 percent in the past five years" in "are
  
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• The Arctic Is in Dire Straits, 20 Years of Reporting Show

  17-12-2025 08:00 via news.slashdot.org
  A new Arctic Report Card recap shows how the Arctic has transformed in just 20 years, warming about twice as fast as the global average and losing most of its oldest sea ice. It's also triggering cascading impacts from "Atlantification" to permafrost-driven "rusting rivers" and more destructive storms. Scientific American reports: The first Arctic Report Card was released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2006. Since then the region has warmed twice as fast as the global
  
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• Breach At South Korea's Equivalent of Amazon Exposed Data of Almost Every Adult

  17-12-2025 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: The alleged perpetrator had improper access to virtually every South Korean adult's personal information: names, phone numbers and even the keycode to enter residential buildings. It was one of the biggest data breaches of recent years and it has sent the company it targeted -- Coupang, South Korea's equivalent of Amazon -- reeling, generating lawsuits, government investigation and calls to toughen penalties against such leaks. Th
  
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• EU Moves To Ease 2035 Ban On Internal Combustion Cars

  17-12-2025 02:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  The EU is moving to soften its planned 2035 ban on internal combustion cars by allowing a small share of low-emission engines. "The less stringent limit would leave room for automakers to continue selling some plug-in hybrids, which have both electric and internal combustion engines and can use the combustion engine to recharge the battery without the need to find a charging station," reports the Associated Press. From the report: The proposal from the EU's executive commission would change prov
  
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• Meta Tolerates Rampant Ad Fraud From China To Safeguard Billions In Revenue

  17-12-2025 01:50 via meta.slashdot.org
  A Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in revenue. Reuters reports: Though China's authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta's advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company's glob
  
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• Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt

  17-12-2025 01:10 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. "Holy crap, it's working," exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom's Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The headlining claims are that Quilter's AI facilitated the design of a new Linux SBC, using 843 parts and dual-PCBs, taking just one week to finish, then successfully booting Debian the first
  
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• Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents

  17-12-2025 00:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mark Carney says that amid a fundamental shift to the nature of globalization, his government will catalyze the growth in both the public and private sector. But Canadian linguists say that's a problem. Language experts have called out the Canadian prime minister's growing "utilization" of British spellings in key documents -- including the recent federal budget and a press release issued following a meeting with Donald Trump.Carney, who ser
  
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• Intel Quietly Discontinues Its Open-Source User-Space Gaudi Driver Code

  16-12-2025 23:50 via news.slashdot.org
  Intel has quietly stopped maintaining its open-source user-space driver stack for Gaudi accelerators. Phoronix reports: It turns out earlier this year Intel archived the SynapseAI Core open-source code and is no longer maintained by Intel. The open-source Synapse AI Core GitHub repository was archived in February and README updated with: "This project will no longer be maintained by Intel. Intel has ceased development and contributions including, but not limited to, maintenance, bug fixes, new r
  
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• Reporter Suggests Half-Life 3 Will Be a Steam Machine Launch Title

  16-12-2025 23:10 via games.slashdot.org
  A veteran games journalist claims Half-Life 3 is real and still planned as a Spring 2026 launch title tied to Valve's next Steam Machine push. Ars Technica reports: On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that "everybody I've talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine."Straw -- who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources -- said this Half-Life 3 information
  
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• Volkswagen To End Production At German Plant, a First In Company History

  16-12-2025 22:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The last vehicle will roll off the assembly line at Volkswagen's plant in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday, marking the first time in the automaker's 88-year history that it has closed a plant in its home country. Volkswagen warned of potential production cuts last year, as it faced shaky demand in Europe and China, its biggest market, as well as higher tariffs that have crimped sales in the United States.After 24 years of vehicle producti
  
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• Utah Leaders Hinder Efforts To Develop Solar Energy Supply

  16-12-2025 21:50 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed two bills this year that ended solar development tax credits and imposed a new tax on solar generation despite solar power accounting for two-thirds of the new projects waiting to connect to the state's power grid. The legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature has already had an impact.
  Since May, when the laws took effect, 51 planned solar projects withdrew their applications to connect to the grid. That represents more than a quarter of all projec
  
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• MI6 Chief: We'll Be as Fluent in Python As We Are in Russian

  16-12-2025 21:10 via developers.slashdot.org
  The new chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service told officers this week that they must become as fluent in programming languages like Python as they are in foreign languages like Russian as the spy agency adapts to what she described as a space between peace and war. Blaise Metreweli, MI6's first female chief and previously the service's director general of technology and innovation, said in her first public speech that mastery of technology is now required across the organization.
  She wa
  
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• Racks of AI Chips Are Too Damn Heavy

  16-12-2025 20:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  The weight of AI server racks has reached a point where legacy data centers cannot accommodate them even with significant retrofitting efforts, The Verge reports. Chris Brown, chief technical officer at Uptime Institute, said most retrofitting attempts would require "bulldozing the building and starting over from scratch."
  AI racks are projected to reach 5,000 pounds compared to the 400 to 600 pounds that racks weighed three decades ago. The dramatic increase stems from hundreds to 1,000 GPUs pa
  
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• US Threatens Penalties Against European Tech Firms Amid Regulatory Fight

  16-12-2025 19:50 via news.slashdot.org
  U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in a social media post on Tuesday. From a report: The pronouncement appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to finalize a trade framework they announced this year. The United States has been pushing Europe to open up its tech sector to American firms. But U.S. officials have compl
  
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• Texas Sues TV Makers For Taking Screenshots of What People Watch

  16-12-2025 19:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  mprindle writes: The Texas Attorney General sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users' data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology.
  The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and China-based companies Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation. Attorney General Ken Paxton's office also highlighted "serious concerns" about the two Chinese companies being required to follow China's National Security
  
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• McKinsey Plots Thousands of Job Cuts in Slowdown for Consulting Industry

  16-12-2025 18:27 via slashdot.org
  McKinsey, the consulting giant that has spent a century advising companies on how to cut costs and restructure operations, is now turning that advice inward as it plans to eliminate thousands of jobs across its non-client-facing departments over the next 18 to 24 months.
  The firm's leadership has discussed a roughly 10% headcount reduction in support functions, according to Bloomberg. McKinsey's revenue has hovered around $15 billion to $16 billion for the past five years after a decade of rapid
  
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• High-Speed Traders Are Feuding Over a Way To Save 3.2 Billionths of a Second

  16-12-2025 17:40 via it.slashdot.org
  A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world's quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world's largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombard Frankfurt-based Eurex with useless data. The idea is to keep their connections to the exchange warm so they can react fractionally faster to market-moving information. The b
  
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• Tech Giants Can't Agree On What To Call Their AI-Powered Glasses

  16-12-2025 17:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  The glasses-shaped face computers that tech companies have been building for years now face an identity crisis, and their makers can't agree on what to call them. Meta has asked a journalist to refer to its Ray-Ban glasses as "AI glasses" to distinguish them from Google Glass. Google, whose Project Aura is a collaboration with Xreal, calls the product "wired XR glasses" because the company views it as more aligned with headsets in a glasses form factor.
  Xreal's CEO Chi Xu laughed when asked abou
  
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• The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down

  16-12-2025 16:22 via news.slashdot.org
  The traditional signals that employers used to evaluate entry-level job candidates -- college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance -- have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless, writes The Atlantic.
  The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's, a reversal from historical norms where new college graduates were more likely to be employed than the average worker. Job postings
  
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• Mozilla's New CEO Bets Firefox's Future on AI

  16-12-2025 15:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Mozilla has named Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its new chief executive, promoting the executive who has spent the past year leading the Firefox browser team and who now plans to make AI central to the company's future.
  Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an "AI Mode" is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a single provider. Some options will be open-source models, others will be private "Mozilla-hosted cloud options," a
  
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• Google's Real Estate Listings 'Experiment' Sends Zillow Shares Down More Than 8%

  16-12-2025 15:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google's data partner HouseCanary has begun displaying home listings directly in search results in select markets, sending Zillow's shares tumbling more than 8% yesterday as investors weighed whether the search giant might eventually cut into the portal business that Zillow dominates.
  The experiment places property details, prices, images and a "Request a tour" button at the top of mobile search results. HouseCanary, a full-service brokerage licensed in all 50 states and Washington D.C., said it
  
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• SoundCloud Confirms Breach After Member Data Stolen, VPN Access Disrupted

  16-12-2025 14:00 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Audio streaming platform SoundCloud has confirmed that outages and VPN connection issues over the past few days were caused by a security breach in which threat actors stole a database containing user information. The disclosure follows widespread reports over the past four days from users who were unable to access SoundCloud when connecting via VPN, with attempts resulting in the site displaying 403 "forbidden" errors.In a statement sha
  
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• PayPal Applies To Become a Bank As US Loosens Regulatory Reins

  16-12-2025 11:00 via news.slashdot.org
  PayPal has applied to become a US bank by forming a Utah-chartered industrial loan company, signaling a push to deepen its financial services "as companies rush to capitalize on a friendly regulatory environment under the Trump administration," reports Reuters. From the report: If approved, the move will help PayPal to strengthen its lending offerings to small businesses in the U.S. as well as reduce its reliance on third parties. "Securing capital remains a significant hurdle for small business
  
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• Glaciers To Reach Peak Rate of Extinction In the Alps In Eight Years

  16-12-2025 08:00 via news.slashdot.org
  A new study warns that glaciers in the European Alps will hit their peak extinction rate within eight years, with global glacier loss accelerating toward thousands per year unless emissions are rapidly cut. "Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 disappearing each year by then," adds the Guardian. From the report: About 200,000 glaciers remain worldwide, with about 750 disappearing each year. However, the r
  
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• Microsoft Will Finally Kill Obsolete Cipher That Has Wrecked Decades of Havoc

  16-12-2025 04:30 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow adminis
  
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• Microsoft Will Finally Kill Obsolete Cipher That Has Wreaked Decades of Havoc

  16-12-2025 04:30 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow adminis
  
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• Lidar-Maker Luminar Files For Bankruptcy

  16-12-2025 02:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  Once a star of the self-driving hype cycle, lidar maker Luminar has filed for bankruptcy amid legal turmoil, layoffs, and a cooling autonomous-vehicle market. It plans to sell off its assets before shutting down entirely. The Verge reports: As part of its bankruptcy, Luminar is seeking permission to sell both its lidar and semiconductor businesses, the latter of which it has already agreed to sell to Quantum Computing for $110 million. The company plans to continue to operate during the bankrupt
  
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