ICT news

• Google's Bard AI Chatbot Can Now Help You Code and Create Functions For Google Sheets

  21-04-2023 16:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google is updating its Bard AI chatbot to help developers write and debug code. Rivals like ChatGPT and Bing AI have supported code generation, but Google says it has been "one of the top requests" it has received since opening up access to Bard last month. From a report: Bard can now generate code, debug existing code, help explain lines of code, and even write functions for Google Sheets. "We're launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascr
  
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• China Hacked Downing Street Phones For Years

  27-01-2026 04:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: China hacked the mobile phones of senior officials in Downing Street for several years, The Telegraph can disclose. The spying operation is understood to have compromised senior members of the government, exposing their private communications to Beijing. State-sponsored hackers are known to have targeted the phones of some of the closest aides to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak between 2021 and 2024. It is unclear whether the hack
  
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• Reddit Lawyers Force Founder to Redact 'WallStreetBets' From Miami Event

  27-01-2026 02:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  Reddit has forced Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of infamous r/WallStreetBets, to strip the WallStreetBets name from an upcoming Miami conference after legal threats citing trademark rights. According to a press release, it's the "first known case of a social media company enforcing trademark control over a user-created community." From the report: After years of litigation, courts ultimately sided with Reddit in a decision now referred to as the "Rogozinski Ruling," a precedent that grants platf
  
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• Apple Launches AirTag 2 With Improved Range, Louder Speaker

  27-01-2026 02:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple has launched a new AirTag 2 that features improved range, a speaker that's 50% louder, and expanded Apple Watch-based tracking. Pricing stays the same at $29 (or $99 for four). 9to5Mac reports: The new AirTag comes with an upgraded second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for improved range, including when using Precision Finding. From Apple Newsroom: "Apple's second-generation Ultra Wideband chip -- the same chip found in the iPhone 17 lineup, iPhone Air, Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Apple Watch
  
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• TikTok Alternative 'Skylight' Soars To 380K+ Users After TikTok US Deal Finalized

  27-01-2026 02:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Skylight, an open-source, TikTok-style video app built on the AT Protocol, surged past 380,000 users after last week's shake-up around TikTok's U.S. ownership and privacy concerns. TechCrunch reports: Launched last year and backed by Mark Cuban and other investors, Skylight's mobile app is built on the AT Protocol, the technology that also powers the decentralized X rival Bluesky, which now has north of 42 million users. Skylight, co-founded by CEO Tori White and CTO Reed Harmeyer, offers a buil
  
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• Microsoft's Latest AI Chip Claims Performance Edge Over Amazon and Google

  27-01-2026 01:20 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it's the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon's latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google's most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others. The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft's data center near Des Moines, Iowa. M
  
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• California Tech CEO and EV Pioneer Arrested, Accused of Murder

  27-01-2026 00:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  California tech executive Gordon Abas Goodarzi has been arrested and charged with murder in the death of his estranged wife, Aryan Papoli, whose body was found last November down an embankment off Highway 138 in San Bernardino County. Authorities initially believed the injuries were consistent with a fall, but the case was later ruled a homicide following a months-long investigation by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. "Arrest records show that Goodarzi is currently in custody with
  
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• Gemini In Google Calendar Now Helps You Find the Best Meeting Time For All Attendees

  27-01-2026 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google is adding Gemini-powered "Suggested times" to Google Calendar, automatically scanning attendees' calendars to surface the best meeting slots based on availability, work hours, and conflicts. The feature also streamlines rescheduling with one-click alternatives when invitees decline. Digital Trends reports: According to a recent post on the Workspace Updates blog, Gemini in Google Calendar can now help you quickly identify optimal meeting times when creating an event, as long as you have a
  
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• Google Settles $68 Million Lawsuit Claiming It Recorded Private Conversations

  26-01-2026 23:25 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Google has agreed to pay $68 million to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly listened to people's private conversations through their phones. [...] the lawsuit claimed Google Assistant would sometimes turn on by mistake -- the phone thinking someone had said its activation phrase when they had not -- and recorded conversations intended to be private. They alleged the recordings were then sent to advertisers for the purpose of creating targeted a
  
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• DOT Plans To Use Google Gemini AI To Write Regulations

  26-01-2026 22:22 via news.slashdot.org
  The Trump administration is planning to use AI to write federal transportation regulations, ProPublica reported on Monday, citing the U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. From the report: The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI's "potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings," agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase "exciting new AI tools available to
  
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• Valve Facing UK Lawsuit Over Pricing and Commissions

  26-01-2026 21:45 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Video game developer and distributor Valve must face a 656 million-pound ($897.7 million) lawsuit in Britain, which alleges it charged publishers excessive commissions for its Steam online store, after a tribunal ruled on Monday the case could continue. Valve was sued in 2024 on behalf of up to 14 million people in the United Kingdom who bought games or additional content through Steam or other platforms since 2018.
  Lawyers representing children's welfare adv
  
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• New California Law Means Big Changes For Photos of Homes in Real Estate Listings

  26-01-2026 21:05 via news.slashdot.org
  California house hunters now have legal protection against the kind of real estate photo trickery that has long plagued the home-buying process, as a new state law requiring disclosure of digitally altered listing images took effect on January 1.
  Assembly Bill 723 mandates that real estate agents and brokers include a "reasonably conspicuous" statement whenever photos have been altered using editing software or AI to add, remove, or change elements like furniture, appliances, flooring, views or
  
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• GTA 6's Physical Release Could Be Delayed To 2027 Because of Leaks

  26-01-2026 20:28 via games.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: An insider who correctly leaked information about Oblivion: Remastered and other titles is warning that GTA 6's physical release could be pushed back. GTA 6 is set to finally launch on November 19, 2026, but fans hoping to get their hands on a physical copy could be stuck waiting even longer.
  According to a report from Polish site PPE, insider Graczdari says Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, isn't planning to release a physical edition of GTA 6 at launch.
  
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• Nike Says It's Investigating Possible Data Breach

  26-01-2026 19:53 via it.slashdot.org
  Nike says it is investigating a potential data breach, after a group known for cyber attacks reportedly claimed to have leaked a trove of data related to its business operations. From a report: "We always take consumer privacy and data security very seriously," Nike said in a statement. "We are investigating a potential cyber security incident and are actively assessing the situation."
  The ransomware group World Leaks said on its website that it had published 1.4 terabytes of data from Nike.Read
  
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• Television Turns 100

  26-01-2026 19:10 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Television marks its centenary today, exactly 100 years after Scottish inventor John Logie Baird first demonstrated his electro-mechanical system to journalists and members of the Royal Institution in a cramped attic workshop above what is now Bar Italia in London's Soho.
  On January 26, 1926, small groups of visitors climbed to 22 Frith Street and watched fuzzy images of a ventriloquist's dummy called Stooky Bill appear on screen, followed by each other's faces transmitted from a separate room.
  
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• How a 15,000-Person Island Stumbled Into a $70 Million AI Windfall

  26-01-2026 18:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: From Sandisk shareholders to vibe coders, AI is making -- and breaking -- fortunes at a rapid pace. One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the ".ai" top-level domain in the mid-1990s. Indeed, since ChatGPT's launch at the end of 2022, the gold rush for websites to associate themselves with the burgeonin
  
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• Fixing Retail With Land Value Capture

  26-01-2026 17:50 via slashdot.org
  The independent coffee shops and quirky boutiques that make neighborhoods like Hayes Valley in San Francisco or Williamsburg in Brooklyn desirable are caught in a frustrating economic trap: they create value that ends up in the pockets of nearby homeowners rather than their own cash registers.
  An essay in Works in Progress magazine argues that when an interesting new store or restaurant opens, commercial and residential property values rise in the surrounding area, but the retailer itself captur
  
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• World Not Ready For Rise In Extreme Heat, Scientists Say

  26-01-2026 17:12 via news.slashdot.org
  Nearly 3.8 billion people could face extreme heat by 2050 and while tropical countries will bear the brunt cooler regions will also need to adapt, scientists said Monday. From a report: Demand for cooling will "drastically" increase in giant countries like Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria, where hundreds of millions of people lack air conditioning or other means of beating the heat. But even a moderate increase in hotter days could have a "severe impact" in nations not used to such conditions like
  
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• Saudi Arabia To Scale Back Neom Megaproject

  26-01-2026 16:28 via news.slashdot.org
  Saudi Arabia is preparing to significantly scale back Neom, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's flagship development that sprawls across a Belgium-sized stretch of Red Sea coastline and was once billed as the world's largest construction site. Financial Times is reporting that Prince Mohammed, who chairs the project, now envisions something "far smaller" as a year-long review nears completion. The Line, a futuristic 170-kilometer linear city that served as Neom's centerpiece, will be radically re
  
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• AI is Hitting UK Harder Than Other Big Economies, Study Finds

  26-01-2026 15:40 via news.slashdot.org
  The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of AI and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests. From a report: British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% -- the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, according to a study by the investment bank Morgan Stanley. The research surveyed companies using AI for at least a year across five industries: consume
  
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• Angry Gamers Are Forcing Studios To Scrap or Rethink New Releases

  26-01-2026 15:00 via games.slashdot.org
  The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content.
  Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, recently scrapped a title after players accused its trailer of containing AI-generated graphics. Goonswarm Games, the developer behind the canceled project, su
  
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• Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?

  26-01-2026 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how "I despise DRM...I don't want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I never want it so badly that I would bow down to DRM." (So he doesn't use Spotify or Netflix...)
  This led to an interesting moment wh
  
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• Is Google Prioritizing YouTube and X Over News Publishers on Discover?

  26-01-2026 09:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Earlier this month, the media site Press Gazette reported that now Google "is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos" on its "Discover" feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage).
  "The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily on Discover for referral traffic. And it looks set to accelerate a global trend of declining traffic to publishers from both Google search and Discover."Xavi Beuma
  
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• Startup Uses SpaceX Tech to Cool Data Centers With Less Power and No Water

  26-01-2026 06:44 via hardware.slashdot.org
  California-based Karman Industries "says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers," reports the Los Angeles Times, "chilling them with less space, less power and no water."
  Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps in the average home, except its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans. The company's efficient pum
  
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• New Linux/Android 2-in-1 Tablet 'Open Slate' Announced by Brax Technologies

  26-01-2026 05:24 via news.slashdot.org
  Brax Technologies just announced "a privacy-focused alternative to locked-down tablets" called open_slate that can double as a consumer tablet and a Linux-capable workstation on ARM.
  Earlier Brax Technologies built the privacy-focused smartphone BraX3, which co-founder Plamen Todorov says proved "a privacy-focused mobile device could be designed, crowdfunded, manufactured, and delivered outside the traditional Big Tech ecosystem."
  Just as importantly, BraX3 showed us the value of building with t
  
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• KDE's 'Plasma Login Manager' Stops Supporting FreeBSD - Because Systemd

  26-01-2026 03:04 via bsd.slashdot.org
  KDE's "Plasma Login Manager" is apparently dropping support for FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, reports the blog It's FOSS. They cite a recently-accepted merge request from a KDE engineer to drop the code supporting FreeBSD, since the login manager relies on systemd/logind:systemd and logind look like hard dependencies of the login manager, which means the software is built to work exclusively with these components and cannot function without them... logind is a component of systemd tha
  
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• Washington State May Mandate 'Firearm Blueprint Detection Algorithms' For 3D Printers

  26-01-2026 02:04 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) writes: Washington State lawmakers are proposing bills (HB 2320 and HB 2321) that would require 3D printers and CNC machines to block certain designs using software-based "firearms blueprint detection algorithms." In practice, this means scanning every print file, comparing it against a government-maintained database, and preventing "skilled users" from bypassing the system. Supporters frame this as a response
  
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• Google Discover Replaces News Headlines With Sometimes Inaccurate AI-Generated Alternatives

  26-01-2026 01:04 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge:
  In early December, I brought you the news that Google has begun replacing Verge headlines, and those of our competitors, with AI clickbait nonsense in its content feed [which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage]. Google appeared to be backing away from the experiment, but now tells The Verge that its AI headlines in Google Discover are a feature, one that "performs well for user satisf
  
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• Gasoline Out of Thin Air? It's a Reality!

  25-01-2026 22:56 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Can Aircela's machine "create gasoline using little more than electricity and the air that we breathe"? Jalopnik reports...The Aircela machine works through a three-step process. It captures carbon dioxide directly from the air... The machine also traps water vapor, and uses electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen... The oxygen is released, leaving hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the building blocks of hydrocarbons. This mixture then undergoes a process known as direct hydrogenati
  
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• Richard Stallman Critiques AI, Connected Cars, Smartphones, and DRM

  25-01-2026 20:36 via news.slashdot.org
  Richard Stallman spoke Friday at Atlanta's Georgia Institute of Technology, continuing his activism for free software while also addressing today's new technologies.
  Speaking about AI, Stallman warned that "nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren't intelligent at all..." He makes a point of calling large language models "generators" because "They generate text and they don't understand really what that text means." (And they also make mistakes "without ba
  
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