ICT news

• Iceland Deems Possible Atlantic Current Collapse A Security Risk

  13-11-2025 14:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Iceland has formally classified the potential collapse of a major Atlantic Ocean current system a national security threat, warning that a disruption could trigger a modern-day ice age in Northern Europe and destabilize global weather systems. The move elevates the risk across government and enables it to strategize for worst-case scenarios. Reuters reports: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, current brings warm water from the tropics northward toward the Arctic, and the f
  
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• Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI

  28-12-2025 09:37 via it.slashdot.org
  "I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don't yet realize," says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that "could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced...""I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being
  
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• Military Planners Dread the Arctic, 'Where Drones Drop Dead and GPS Goes Haywire'

  28-12-2025 05:44 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures drain batteries or freeze equipment in minutes; navigation systems lack reference points on snowfields.D
  
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• OpenAI is Hiring a New 'Head of Preparedness' to Predict/Mitigate AI's Harms

  28-12-2025 02:34 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:
  OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy.
  It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledgedthat the "potential i
  
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• Researchers Show Some Robots Can Be Hijacked Just Through Spoken Commands

  28-12-2025 00:44 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering:Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems.In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a commercially available humanoid robot could be hijacked with nothing more than spoken commands, exposing how voice-based interaction can serve as an attack vector rather than a safe
  
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• New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows' 'Modern Standby'

  27-12-2025 23:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  Phoronix reports on "an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list" proposing "a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the 'Modern Standby' functionality found with Microsoft Windows..."
  Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear "sleeping" but will allow for instant wake-up for notifications, music playback, and other functionality. The display is off, the network remains online, a
  
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• Is Russia Developing an Anti-Satellite Weapon to Target Starlink?

  27-12-2025 22:34 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
  Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called "zone-effect" weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousand
  
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• NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux

  27-12-2025 21:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  NVIDIA has been "gradually dropping support for older videocards," notes Hackaday, "with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed.""What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?"On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back
  
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• Waymo Updates Vehicles to Better Handle Power Outages - But Still Faces Criticism

  27-12-2025 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Waymo explained this week that its self-driving car technology is already "designed to handle dark traffic signals," and successfully handled over 7,000 last Saturday during San Francisco's long power outage, properly treating those intersections as four-way stops. But while during the long outage their cars sometimes experienced a "backlog" when waiting for confirmation checks (leading them to freeze in intersections), Waymo said Tuesday they're implementing "fleet-wide updates" to provide thei
  
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• Open Source Initiative Estimates the 'Top Open Source Licenses in 2025'

  27-12-2025 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support".
  So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:mit(1.5M)apache-2-0(344k)bsd-3-clause(214k)bsd-2-clause(128k)gpl-2-0(76k)gpl-3-0(55k)isc-license-txt(35k)lgpl-3-0(34k)OFL-1.1(31k)lgpl-2-1(24k) . .
  From the Open Source Initiative's announcement:
  Please not
  
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• Japan Votes to Restart World's Biggest Nuclear Plant 15 Years After Fukushima Meltdown

  27-12-2025 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.
  But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster."
  Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata prefectural assembly, home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, approved a bill on Monday that clears the
  
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• Japan Votes to Restart Fukushima Nuclear Plant 15 Years After Its Meltdown

  27-12-2025 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.
  But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster."
  Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata prefectural assembly, home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, approved a bill on Monday that clears the
  
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• Should Physicists Study the Question: What is Life?

  27-12-2025 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that "many" of his colleagues in physics "have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human." And it's a mystery that:
  - "Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries"
  - "May even help redefine the field for the next generation"
  - "Could answer essential questions about AI."
  In short, while physicists have favored a "reductionist" philosophy about the fundamental laws controlling the uni
  
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• Free Software Foundation Receives 'Historic' Donations Worth Nearly $900K - in Monero

  27-12-2025 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.
  The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement.
  "The donors wish to remain anonymous," according to the FSF's statement:The organization is in its annual winter fundraising drive, currently at three-quarters of its $400,000 USD winter goal, and wil
  
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• Video Call Glitches Evoke Uncanniness, Damage Consequential Life Outcomes

  27-12-2025 13:00 via slashdot.org
  Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances of being granted parole.
  Researchers from Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City conducted ten studies examining glitches across thousands o
  
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• Taiwan's iPass Releases Floppy Disk Pre-Paid Cash Card

  27-12-2025 11:01 via it.slashdot.org
  Taiwan's iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: "This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing."
  The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale starting Christmas Eve and comes in black or yellow finishes at 1:1 scale. It works across Taiwan's public transport network -- buses, tr
  
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• Toll Roads Are Spreading in America

  27-12-2025 09:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June.
  The federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it collected from fuel taxes, and at state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spend
  
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• Rocket Crashes in Brazil's First Commercial Launch

  27-12-2025 06:01 via science.slashdot.org
  The first-ever commercial rocket launched at Brazil's Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff late earlier this week, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace. From a report: The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff [Monday] at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT) but fell to the ground after something went wrong 30 seconds into its flight, Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong said in a letter to shareholde
  
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• Mesh Networks Are About To Escape Apple, Amazon and Google Silos

  27-12-2025 03:00 via mobile.slashdot.org
  After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network.
  Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group's only certified standard, bringing a crucial new capability called credential sharing. Devices from different manufacturers can now securely join the same mesh network -- a
  
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• Driverless Future Gains Momentum With Global Robotaxi Deployments

  27-12-2025 01:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
  WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in November and began offering robotaxi passenger rides on Uber's platform in Dubai the following month. Amazon's Zoox started offering free rides to select early u
  
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• NASA Chief Says US Will Return To Moon Within Trump's Second Term

  27-12-2025 00:40 via science.slashdot.org
  NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed by the Senate just last week after a turbulent nomination process that stretched across most of 2025, said Friday that the United States will return to the moon within President Donald Trump's second term. Isaacman made the comments during an interview on CNBC, calling Trump's recommitment to lunar exploration key to unlocking what he described as an "orbital economy." He said: "We want to have that opportunity to explore and realize the scien
  
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• New York To Require Social Media Platforms To Display Mental Health Warnings

  27-12-2025 00:07 via news.slashdot.org
  Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users' mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: "Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taking office, and that includes protecting our kids from the potential harms of social media features that encourage excessive use," Hochul said in a statement.
  This month Austra
  
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• FFmpeg Developer Files DMCA Against Rockchip After Two-Year Wait for License Fix

  26-12-2025 21:00 via it.slashdot.org
  GitHub has disabled Rockchip's Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's libavcodec library -- including decoders for H.265, AV1, and VP9 formats -- stripped the original copyright notices, falsely claimed authorship and redistributed the cod
  
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• Indian IT Was Supposed To Die From AI. Instead It's Billing for the Cleanup.

  26-12-2025 19:40 via it.slashdot.org
  Two years after generative AI was supposed to render India's $250 billion IT services industry obsolete, the sector is finding that enterprises still need someone to handle the unglamorous plumbing work that large-scale AI deployment demands. Less than 15% of organizations are meaningfully deploying the new technology, according to investment bank UBS, and Indian IT firms are positioning themselves to capture the preparatory work -- data cleanup, cloud migration, system integration -- that chann
  
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• As AI Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary

  26-12-2025 18:37 via news.slashdot.org
  While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon -- roughly 3.75% above similarly rated companies, or about 70% more in interest costs. The pattern has repeated across several deals.
  Wulf Compute, a subsidiary
  
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• The Economic Divide Between Big and Small Companies Is Growing

  26-12-2025 17:24 via news.slashdot.org
  While America's largest corporations are riding a wave of surging profits and AI-fueled stock market enthusiasm to record highs, small businesses across the country are cutting staff and scaling back operations as years of high inflation, cautious consumers and tariff confusion take their toll.
  Private firms with fewer than 50 workers have steadily shed jobs over the past six months, according to payroll processor ADP, cutting 120,000 positions in November alone. Midsize and large firms continue
  
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• Retreating From EVs Could Be Hazardous For Western Carmakers

  26-12-2025 16:08 via tech.slashdot.org
  Western carmakers retreating from electric vehicles amid softening government mandates could find themselves in a precarious position as Chinese rivals continue gaining ground in the EV market they're choosing to de-prioritize. The EU on December 16th dropped its earlier plan to ban petrol car sales outright from 2035, instead requiring carmakers to cut emissions from new vehicles by 90% from 2021 levels. The day before, Ford announced a $19.5 billion asset writedown as it rethinks its EV strate
  
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• AI's Hunger For Memory Chips Could Shrink Smartphone and PC Sales in 2026, IDC Says

  26-12-2025 15:05 via it.slashdot.org
  The global smartphone and PC markets face potential contractions of up to 5.2% and 8.9% respectively in 2026, according to downside risk scenarios from IDC that trace the problem to memory chip manufacturers shifting production capacity away from consumer electronics toward AI data centers. Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology have pivoted their limited cleanroom space toward high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, restricting supply of the conventional DRAM and NAND used in phones
  
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• China Launches $21 Billion Venture Capital Funds To Invest in 'Hard Technology'

  26-12-2025 13:31 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: China on Friday launched three venture capital funds to invest in "hard technology" areas, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The capital contribution plans for the funds have been finalised, each with more than 50 billion yuan ($7.14 billion), according to the report. The funds will primarily invest in early-stage startups and the targets should be valued at less than 500 million yuan, an official said on Friday, adding that no single investment would amount t
  
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