ICT news

• How Private Equity Debt Left a Leading VPN Open To Chinese Hackers

  20-02-2026 14:00 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early 2024, the agency that oversees cybersecurity for much of the US government issued a rare emergency order -- disconnect your Connect Secure virtual private network software immediately. Chinese spies had hacked the code and infiltrated nearly two dozen organizations. The directive applied to all civilian federal agencies, but given the product's customer base, its impact was more widely felt. The software, which is made by Ivanti Inc.,
  
  Read more

• Xbox Game Exclusivity Will Be Decided on a 'Case-by-Case' Basis, Microsoft Says

  08-06-2026 23:00 via games.slashdot.org
  Microsoft executive Matt Booty says future Xbox exclusivity will be decided "case-by-case," with Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution remaining Xbox console exclusives while major multiplayer, live-service, and previously promised PlayStation releases stay multiplatform. But IGN's Tom Phillips says Microsoft's announcement still leaves numerous questions unanswered, like "why just Gears and Clockwork Revolution?" and "how will this policy be enforced in future?" From the report: Last nig
  
  Read more

• Apple Announces macOS 27 'Golden Gate', Drops Support For Intel Macs

  08-06-2026 22:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider: Apple has unveiled its next Mac operating system, macOS Golden Gate, with Apple promising better performance, the improved Siri, and more. [...] On the surface, macOS Golden Gate is not as significant an upgrade as macOS Big Sur, or even macOS Tahoe with its Liquid Glass redesign. But under the surface, it is much more significant than it seems. Apple has chosen this release to draw a line in the sand. For the first time, the new macOS Golde
  
  Read more

• Apple Announces Siri AI, Next Generation of Apple Intelligence

  08-06-2026 21:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  At WWDC 2026, Apple announced a new "Siri AI," describing it as a more conversational, personalized, and systemwide assistant that can understand on-screen context and interact with apps while relying on on-device processing or Private Cloud Compute. The relaunch comes two years after Apple's original Apple Intelligence promises stumbled and "never fully materialized," reports The Verge. MacRumors reports: Siri is now embedded directly in the Dynamic Island, accessible by swiping down from it, p
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• WhatsApp Catches Spyware Firm NSO Defying No-Hacking Court Order

  08-06-2026 20:00 via it.slashdot.org
  wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Meta-owned communications app WhatsApp says it recently detected and disrupted a spear-phishing attempt linked to spyware company NSO Group. The attack is allegedly in defiance of a court order that bars the spyware maker from targeting WhatsApp. WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against NSO in 2019, after it came to light that a zero-day vulnerability had been exploited to deliver spyware to users. [...] NSO has been seeking to overturn the order blocking it
  
  Read more

• Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding

  08-06-2026 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Firefox has merged initial support for Vulkan Video decoding, giving the browser a more cross-platform path for GPU-accelerated video playback beyond Linux's long-running reliance on VA-API. Phoronix reports: Firefox on Linux has long been focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that isn't universally supported by Linux graphics drivers. This has left to efforts like NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver to layer VA-API atop NVIDIA NVDEC interfaces to enjoy GPU-accelerated video playback in Firefox. Smalle
  
  Read more

• Italy's Bending Spoons, Owner of AOL and Vimeo, Files For Nasdaq IPO

  08-06-2026 18:25 via slashdot.org
  Bending Spoons, the Italian app studio behind acquisitions like Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Evernote, and AOL, has filed to go public in the U.S. after growing into a subscription-heavy app conglomerate with more than 500 million monthly active users. TechCrunch reports: In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bending Spoons said it ended the year with $1.31 billion in revenue and has generated $601 million in Q1, a 132% year-on-year jump. The company gets the majority of i
  
  Read more

• Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain's 'Core Algorithm'

  08-06-2026 17:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Jeff Bezos is backing Flourish, a new "neuro AI" startup with $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, that aims to reinvent AI by studying the brain's architecture and building systems that learn continuously while using far less power than today's large language models. The company's long-term bet is that neuroscientists and AI researchers working together can uncover the brain's "core algorithm" and eventually create brain-inspired AI that runs on a tiny fraction of curr
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Ruby Fights Supply-Chain Attacks With Filter Offering 'Cooldown' Before Installing New Packages

  08-06-2026 13:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  Most supply-chain attacks using Ruby's package hosting site "exploit a narrow window," according to a new blog post form Ruby core maintainer Hiroshi Shibata.
  So its packaging-managing Bundler tool now offers a filter that blocks new version until it's been public "for at least N days. Releases too new to have been scrutinized are passed over in favor of ones that have aged past the window."The feature was designed in the open, drawing on how other ecosystems approach the same problem. It is opt
  
  Read more

• A San Francisco Burglar Escaped in a Robotaxi - and Police Still Can't Find Him

  08-06-2026 09:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  A burglar took a self-driving Waymo taxi to rob a San Francisco yoga studio this past January, reports TechCrunch — "and police have still not caught them."
  Even the police officer assigned to the case thought it would be easier to solve, notes The San Francisco Chronicle, since Waymos are outfitted with multiple high-definition cameras and require users to make accounts with their credit card numbers:
  It's common for officers to seek video footage of a crime from any of the Waymos, Teslas
  
  Read more

• Texas Grid Flags Risks As Data Centers, Crypto Sites Fail Voltage Tests

  08-06-2026 06:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Reuters reports:
  Several large data centers and crypto facilities planning to connect to the Texas power grid ahead of peak summer demand have failed key reliability tests, raising the risk of power outages just as electricity use hits its seasonal high, according to the state grid operator... Unlike traditional industrial customers, which tend to draw electricity steadily and predictably, data centers are engineered to cut their connection to the grid at the first sign of trouble to protect the
  
  Read more

• Police Sued After Imprisoning Innocent Man Placed Near Violent Crime By Flock License Plate Reader

  08-06-2026 03:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  "When Hugo Parra was arrested last year on felony charges, his pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears," reports the Times of San Diego:
  San Diego police had a description of the Alfa Romeo car he was riding in [but no license plate number] and a witness who identified him during a curbside lineup as the man who brandished a handgun in Golden Hill. They had also checked the city's automatic license plate camera system, run by the private company Flock, and got a "hit," substantiating the claim. The
  
  Read more

• Prada Unveils 'Liquid Cooling' Inner-Layer Garment for NASA's Moon Astronauts with Knitted-In Ventilation Tubes

  08-06-2026 01:27 via science.slashdot.org
  Italian fashion house Prada "unveiled on Sunday the inner-layer garment set to be worn by NASA astronauts heading to the moon," reports Reuters.
  "The body-hugging suit, created in collaboration with Houston-based space infrastructure developer Axiom Space, features ventilation tubes knitted into the garment."
  Expertise for developing space exploration products "can come from lots of seemingly unrelated industries," said Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space... The new product follows Prada's spla
  
  Read more

• Black Market Tinkerers on Facebook Marketplace Offer to Hide 'Recording Lights' on Meta Smartglasses

  08-06-2026 00:17 via yro.slashdot.org
  People are disabling the "recording light" on Meta's Ray-Ban smartglasses — "by my count, thousands of people," says tech journalist Joanna Stern in a new video report:STERN: "They're hiring people on Facebook Marketplace to drill out the light for as much as $100. According to our reporting, folks are offering this service in at least 30 states — despite Meta's attempts to stop it... In most states, we found multiple listings. In the New York and New Jersey area alone there were 23
  
  Read more

• New Fortune 500 Rankings: Texas Overtakes California, But Amazon is #1, Beating Walmart

  07-06-2026 22:29 via slashdot.org
  "Texas has dethroned California as the state with the most Fortune 500 companies," reports the Los Angeles Times:The Fortune 500 list ranks the largest U.S. companies by revenue. This year, 57 of the top companies are headquartered in Texas, compared with California's 56. It's a reversal from two years ago when the Golden State had the pole position...
  California's corporate haters say they try to avoid the state's high costs, income taxes and strict regulations, but the western state is still a
  
  Read more

• The Gamer-Rights Group Fighting to Make the Industry Stop Killing Games (Servers)

  07-06-2026 21:10 via games.slashdot.org
  "Can a company take away something you've already paid for?" asks the BBC. "In the world of online video games, some already do."Publishers can decide to switch off a game's servers, often leaving it effectively unplayable. Stop Killing Games, a growing consumer rights campaign started by American YouTuber Ross Scott in 2024, is challenging that practice. In January, the group submitted a petition featuring nearly 1.3 million signatures to the European Commission, triggering a public hearing in
  
  Read more

• Winners Announced in 2026's 'International Obfuscated C Code Competition'

  07-06-2026 19:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  Yesterday 2026's International Obfuscated C Code Contest concluded, with 22 new winners announced in a special three-hour livestreamed ceremony! Started 42 years ago, it's been described as the internet's longest-running contest, with entrants concocting convoluted programs glorying in the C programming language's subtleties, all while having some fun. And "For IOCCC29, the volume and quality of submissions were at near-historic heights," explains its home page.There's a "Tetris-optimized" GameB
  
  Read more

• James Bond Videogame '007 First Light' Sells 3M Copies, Earns $150M

  07-06-2026 18:34 via games.slashdot.org
  The new James Bond-themed videogame 007 First Light had a budget of 1.3 billion Danish krone — a little more than USD $202 million, reports IGN, citing a report from Denmark's public service broadcaster. "Denmark's TV 2 said that makes 007 First Light the most expensive entertainment product in the country's history" — and the game "still has some way to go before breaking even."
  007 First Light is estimated to have sold 2.2 million copies, generating $150 million in revenue... [Satu
  
  Read more

• James Bond Videogame '007 First Light' Sells 2.2M Copies, Earns $150M

  07-06-2026 18:34 via games.slashdot.org
  The new James Bond-themed videogame 007 First Light had a budget of 1.3 billion Danish krone — a little more than USD $202 million, reports IGN, citing a report from Denmark's public service broadcaster. "Denmark's TV 2 said that makes 007 First Light the most expensive entertainment product in the country's history" — and the game "still has some way to go before breaking even."
  007 First Light is estimated to have sold 2.2 million copies, generating $150 million in revenue... The o
  
  Read more

• After Empty Promises, Will String Theory Find New Uses?

  07-06-2026 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  Science magazine reports:
  For decades, string theory promised a "theory of everything" that described all particles and forces as tiny vibrating strings. Physicists hoped it could also solve one of the field's deepest problems: reconciling quantum mechanics with gravity. But as string theory grew increasingly elaborate — and experimentally unreachable — many physicists lost hope.
  Now, some researchers are revisiting the theory from first principles. In a paper in press at Physical Re
  
  Read more

• Reddit Ads Impersonate BBC and The Guardian to Push Fake AI Investment Schemes

  07-06-2026 16:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  A "growing wave" of Reddit's "promoted posts" are sending U.S. and European audiences to money-stealing scams that impersonate major news organizations including the BBC, the Financial Times, and The Guardian, according to new findings from Bitdefender Labs.
  "Domains are short-lived and rapidly rotated to evade detection," they write, noting that the impersonating sites apparently even use language "to falsely imply that the investment platform had been reviewed, approved, or vetted" by the legi
  
  Read more

• Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders And Sam Altman Are All Talking About Public Ownership In AI

  07-06-2026 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders announced a plan for the public to take a 50% ownership stake in AI companies, remembers the Associated Press.
  And then OpenAI's Sam Altman "told Sanders that he, too, wants the public to have equity in AI companies."
  Though the CEO said he couldn't support Sanders' threshold of 50%, he nonetheless wanted to work with him to advocate for the general idea, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. The nearly hourlong meeting in Sanders' Senate office this
  
  Read more

• 'Steve Jobs In Exile' Remembers the Birth of the Web and 'Making Unix Taste Sweet'

  07-06-2026 09:34 via apple.slashdot.org
  Ars Technica shares some anecdotes from Steve Jobs in Exile, a new book released last month:[Author Geoffrey] Cain reminds us, in stunning detail, that Jobs' "exile" era at NeXT was not only critical to his evolution as a man and an entrepreneur, but that it mattered for the rest of us, too. The technological innovations that came out of NeXT — notably, the NeXTSTEP OS — continue to live on in what we now call both macOS and iOS. As Cain puts it, "NeXTSTEP was Steve's attempt to make
  
  Read more

• Scientists Edited Human Embryo Genes. But Questions Remain

  07-06-2026 06:41 via science.slashdot.org
  "A DNA-editing feat involving editing the genes of early stage embryos was announced this week," reports the Wall Street Journal.
  They describe the feat as "a far cry from designer babies, but nevertheless a step in that direction."Dieter Egli, an associate professor of developmental cell biology at Columbia University and his co-authors, including Nathan Treff of Nucleus Genomics, a New York-based DNA-testing startup, say the technology could help fix disease-causing mutations in embryos. "We'r
  
  Read more

• Failing CS Grades Soar At UC Berkeley As Professors See Greater AI Usage

  07-06-2026 04:41 via developers.slashdot.org
  The University of California at Berkeley discovered the percentage of failing grades in multiple CS classes this spring "is significantly higher than past semesters," reports the campus's student newspaper."Instructors point to students' increased reliance on AI, lack of mathematical preparedness and understaffing as potential contributing factors."
  According to [coursework platform] Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F's in spring 2026. In spring 2025 an
  
  Read more

• Cheaper EVs Sales are Increasing

  07-06-2026 02:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Sales have increased for Hyundai's under-$35,000 IONIQ 5, totalling 18,395 for the first five months of 2026, reports Electrek, "up 16% from the same period last year."But meanwhile BYD's overseas sales surpassed 160,000 for the first time last month, "up 80% from May 2025 and 19% from the previous record of 135,098 set in April."
  Through the first five months of 2026, BYD sold 616,263 vehicles overseas. In May, overseas sales accounted for over 41% of BYD's total sales. In several major markets
  
  Read more

• Cheaper EV Sales are Increasing

  07-06-2026 02:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Sales have increased for Hyundai's under-$35,000 IONIQ 5, totalling 18,395 for the first five months of 2026, reports Electrek, "up 16% from the same period last year."But meanwhile BYD's overseas sales surpassed 160,000 for the first time last month, "up 80% from May 2025 and 19% from the previous record of 135,098 set in April."
  Through the first five months of 2026, BYD sold 616,263 vehicles overseas. In May, overseas sales accounted for over 41% of BYD's total sales. In several major markets
  
  Read more

• EU's Tech Sovereignty Package Includes 29 Pages on Open Source, Says Open Source Initiative

  07-06-2026 00:40 via news.slashdot.org
  Friday the Open Source Initiative welcomed the EU's new tech sovereignty package, noting that "over a third of the 29-page document is devoted to Open Source."
  The nonprofit OSI — maintainers of the Open Source definition — submitted their official feedback in February, and notes that "many" of their key requests were addressed, "as well as some exciting new announcements!"One of the biggest barriers to Open Source adoption has been public procurement. Too often, tenders have been de
  
  Read more

• Hospital Ordered to Pay $13M Over 2022 Death of Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols

  06-06-2026 23:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  The Root reports:A New Mexico jury has found the Gila Regional Medical Center negligent in the death of Nichelle Nichols, who famously played Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the hit television series "Star Trek."
  According to KRQE News 13, Nichols' family filed a lawsuit against the hospital last year following her 2022 admission for shortness of breath. Nichols' family claimed that she should have received a full cardiac examination, but the medical personnel sent her to the observation unit, and she
  
  Read more

• 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
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!