ICT news

• Illinois Facebook Users Can Claim Up To $400 In Class-Action Suit

  25-09-2020 02:02 via rss.slashdot.org
  
  Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit that claimed the company collected and stored facial templates for its users between June 7, 2011, and Aug. 19, 2020, when the settlement was approved. "Individuals could be eligible for cash payouts of $200 to $400," reports Patch. From the report: In 2015, lawsuits were filed against Facebook over its use of "face tagging" feature. Plaintiffs claimed that Facebook was collecting biometric information ("face prints") without getting proper consent req
  
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• Ask Slashdot: Are Movies Becoming More Derivative?

  16-04-2024 17:20 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Film data researcher Stepehen, writing on his blog: This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. The most common source for adapted screenplays was real-life events, accounting for almost a fifth of movies made between 2000 and 2023. (Typically, in these cases, the filmmakers will have paid for the rights to a nonfiction book or two that covered those events, but we will classify that as 'based on real-life events' in this analysis
  
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• NASA Says New Plan Needed To Return Rocks From Mars; Current Mission Design Can't Deliver Before 2040

  16-04-2024 16:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  SonicSpike shares a report: The quest to return rock materials from Mars to Earth to see if they contain traces of past life is going to go through a major overhaul. The US space agency says the current mission design can't return the samples before 2040 on the existing funds and the more realistic $11bn needed to make it happen is not sustainable. Nasa is going to canvas for cheaper, faster "out of the box" ideas. It hopes to have a solution on the drawing board later in the year.
  Returning roc
  
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• Baidu Says AI Chatbot 'Ernie Bot' Has Attracted 200 Million Users

  16-04-2024 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  China's Baidu says its AI chatbot "Ernie Bot" has amassed more than 200 million users as it seeks to remain China's most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot amid increasingly fierce competition. From a report: The number of users has roughly doubled since the company's last update in December. The chatbot was released to the public eight months ago. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's API is being used 200 million times everyday, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that
  
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• Alleged Cryptojacking Scheme Consumed $3.5 Million of Stolen Computing To Make Just $1 Million

  16-04-2024 15:00 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal prosecutors indicted a Nebraska man on charges he perpetrated a cryptojacking scheme that defrauded two cloud providers -- one based in Seattle and the other in Redmond, Washington -- out of $3.5 million. The indictment, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and unsealed on Monday, charges Charles O. Parks III -- 45 of Omaha, Nebraska -- with wire fraud, money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary tr
  
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• YouTube's Ad Blocker Crackdown Now Includes Third-Party Apps

  16-04-2024 12:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  YouTube has updated its policies to no longer allow "third-party apps to turn off ads." The Verge reports: This appears to target mobile ad blockers like AdGuard, which lets you open YouTube within the ad blocking app, where you'll get to view videos interruption-free. "We only allow third-party apps to use our API when they follow our API Services Terms of Service," YouTube says. "When we find an app that violates these terms, we will take appropriate action to protect our platform, creators, a
  
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• World's Coral Reefs Hit By a Fourth Mass Bleaching Event, NOAA Says

  16-04-2024 09:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday declared that Earth is in the midst of a "4th global coral bleaching event" that's been documented over the last 14 months in every major ocean basin, including off Florida in the United States, in Australia's Great Barrier Reef and in the South Pacific. "As the world's oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe," said Derek Manzello, a coral reef ecologist who coordinates NOAA's Coral Reef Watch Pro
  
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• California Exceeds 100% of Energy Demand With Renewables Over a Record 30 Days

  16-04-2024 05:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California's main grid for 30 of the past 38 days. Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California's renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for "0.25-6 h per day," and that's an important fact. The
  
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• T-Mobile Employees Across The Country Receive Cash Offers To Illegally Swap SIMs: Report

  16-04-2024 03:30 via it.slashdot.org
  
  T-Mobile employees from around the country are reportedly receiving text messages offering them cash in exchange for swapping SIMs. SIM swapping is when cybercriminals trick a cellular service provider into switching a victim's service to a SIM card that they control, essentially hijacking the victim's phone number and gaining access to two-factor authentication codes. From the Mobile Report: The texts offer the employee $300 per SIM swap, and asks the worker to contact them on telegram. The tex
  
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• Meta To Close Threads In Turkey To Comply With Injunction

  16-04-2024 02:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Meta plans to "temporarily" shut down Threads in Turkey from April 29, in response to an interim injunction prohibiting data sharing with Instagram. TechCrunch reports: The Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), known as Rekabet Kurumu, noted on March 18 that its investigations found that Meta was abusing its dominant market position by combining the data of users who create Threads profiles with that of their Instagram account -- without giving users the choice to opt in. [...] In the buildup to
  
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• Adobe Premiere Pro Is Getting Generative AI Video Tools

  16-04-2024 02:10 via slashdot.org
  
  Adobe is using its Firefly machine learning model to bring generative AI video tools to Premiere Pro. "These new Firefly tools -- alongside some proposed third-party integrations with Runway, Pika Labs, and OpenAI's Sora models -- will allow Premiere Pro users to generate video and add or remove objects using text prompts (just like Photoshop's Generative Fill feature) and extend the length of video clips," reports The Verge. From the report: Unlike many of Adobe's previous Firefly-related annou
  
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• The IRS's New Tax Software: Rave Reviews, But Low Turnout

  16-04-2024 01:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: The Biden administration marked the close of tax season Monday by announcing it had met a modest goal of getting at least 100,000 taxpayers to file through the Internal Revenue Service's new tax software, Direct File -- an alternative to commercial tax preparers. Although the government had billed Direct File as a small-scale pilot, it still represents one of the most significant experiments in tax filing in decades -- a free platform
  
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• Roku Makes 2FA Mandatory For All After Nearly 600K Accounts Pwned

  16-04-2024 00:50 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Roku has made two-factor authentication (2FA) mandatory for all users following two credential stuffing attacks that compromised approximately 591,000 customer accounts and led to unauthorized purchases in fewer than 400 cases. The Register reports: Credential stuffing and password spraying are both fairly similar types of brute force attacks, but the former uses known pairs of credentials (usernames and passwords). The latter simply spams common passwords at known usernames in the hope one of t
  
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• Linus Torvalds Injects Tabs To Thwart Kconfig Parsers Not Correctly Handling Them

  16-04-2024 00:10 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Within yesterday's Linux 6.9-rc4 release is an interesting little nugget by Linus Torvalds to battle Kconfig parsers that can't correctly handle tabs but rather just assume spaces for whitespace for this kernel configuration format. Due to a patch having been queued last week to replace a tab with a space character in the kernel tracing Kconfig file, Linus Torvalds decided to take matters into his own hand for Kconfig parsers that can't deal with tabs... Tor
  
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• A D&D Actual Play Show Is Going To Sell Out Madison Square Garden

  15-04-2024 23:30 via games.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Dropout's Dungeons & Dragons actual play show, Dimension 20, is getting pretty close to selling out a 19,000-seat venue just hours after ticket sales opened to the general public. To the uninitiated, it may seem absurd to go to a massive sports arena and watch people play D&D. As one Redditor commented, "This boggles my mind. When I was playing D&D in the early eighties, I would have never believed that there was a future where peo
  
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• Crickets From Chirp Systems in Smart Lock Key Leak

  15-04-2024 22:50 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. Krebs on SecurityL: The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents. On Mar
  
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• Stanford Releases AI Index Report 2024

  15-04-2024 22:10 via slashdot.org
  
  Top takeaways from Stanford's new AI Index Report [PDF]: 1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.2. Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research. In 2023, industry produced 51 notable machine learning models, while acad
  
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• Ubisoft Revokes Access To Purchased Game, Sparking Digital Ownership Debate

  15-04-2024 21:30 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Ubisoft has come under fire from players who claim the company has revoked access to a game they had previously purchased. Users attempting to launch "The Crew" on Ubisoft Connect are met with a message stating, "You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?" The game has also been moved to a separate "inactive games" section in players' libraries.
  While the game can still be launched, it reportedly only plays a limited demo version. Ubisoft has yet t
  
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• UK Starts Drafting AI Regulations for Most Powerful Models

  15-04-2024 20:50 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The UK is starting to draft regulations to govern AI, focusing on the most powerful language models which underpin OpenAI's ChatGPT, Bloomberg News reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Policy officials at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology are in the early stages of devising legislation to limit potential harms caused by the emerging technology, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing undeveloped proposals. No bil
  
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• Song Lyrics Have Become Simpler and More Repetitive Over the Last Five Decades

  15-04-2024 20:05 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Abstract of a paper on Nature: Music is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, and lyrics play an integral role when we listen to music. The complex relationships between lyrical content, its temporal evolution over the last decades, and genre-specific variations, however, are yet to be fully understood. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of English lyrics of Western, popular music over five decades and five genres, using a wide set of lyrics descriptors, including lyrical complexity, structur
  
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• Security Engineer Jailed For 3 Years For $12M Crypto Hacks

  15-04-2024 19:25 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Shakeeb Ahmed, a cybersecurity engineer convicted of stealing around $12 million in crypto, was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison. In a press release, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the sentence. Ahmed was accused of hacking into two cryptocurrency exchanges, and stealing around $12 million in crypto, according to prosecutors.
  Adam Schwartz and Bradley Bondi, the lawyers representing Ahmed, did not immediately res
  
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• Senator Warren Claims TurboTax 'Relentlessly' Upsells Customers in Letter To FTC

  15-04-2024 18:45 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, saying that TurboTax "continues to relentlessly upsell" customers while also directing them away from services that would otherwise be free. From a report: As noted in the letter, Warren's staff analyzed TurboTax's services using a sample taxpayer and found that the company attempted to upsell the customer eight times during the tax filing process. Warren writes that in "several cases," these solicitations "app
  
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• Sony's PS5 Pro is Real and Developers Are Getting Ready For It

  15-04-2024 18:10 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Sony is getting ready to release a more powerful PS5 console, possibly by the end of this year. After reports of leaked PS5 Pro specifications surfaced recently, The Verge has obtained a full list of specs for the upcoming console. From the report: Sources familiar with Sony's plans tell me that developers are already being asked to ensure their games are compatible with this upcoming console, with a focus on improving ray tracing. Codenamed Trinity, the PlayStation 5 Pro model will include a mo
  
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• iOS App Store's First Game Boy Emulator Taken Down Just Days Later

  15-04-2024 17:37 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple's rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of source code from a different emulator project.
  iOS 8.1 plugs security hole that made it easy to install emulators
  Shortly
  
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• Telecom Fights Price Caps as US Spends Billions on Internet Access

  15-04-2024 16:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon are quietly trying to weaken a $42.5 billion federal program to improve internet access across the nation, aiming to block strict new rules that would require them to lower their poorest customers' monthly bills in exchange for a share of the federal aid. From a report: In state after state, the telecom firms have blasted the proposed price cuts as illegal -- forcing regulators in California, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and elsewhere to re
  
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• Apple Loses Mantle as World's Biggest Phone Seller To Samsung as China Sales Drop

  15-04-2024 16:03 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple has lost its spot as the world's biggest mobile phone seller after a steep sales drop as South Korean rival Samsung retook the lead in the global market share. From a report: Samsung had been the biggest seller of mobile phones for 12 years until the end of 2023, when sales of Apple's iPhone models overtook it. Global smartphone shipments increased by 8% to 289.4m units during January-March, according to research firm IDC. Samsung won a 20.8% market share, beating Apple's 17.3% share, whic
  
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• Joint Guidance on Deploying AI Systems Securely

  15-04-2024 14:00 via cisa.gov
  Today, the National Security Agency’s Artificial Intelligence Security Center (NSA AISC) published the joint Cybersecurity Information Sheet Deploying AI Systems Securely in collaboration with CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ASD ACSC), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS), the New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ), and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Cent
  
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• Emissions Dropped 1.8% Every Year in California's Bay Area. Researchers Credit EVs

  15-04-2024 13:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:
  A network of air monitors installed in Northern California has provided scientists with some of the first measurable evidence quantifying how much electric vehicles are shrinking the carbon footprint of a large urban area. Researchers from UC Berkeley set up dozens of sensors across the Bay Area to monitor planet-warming carbon dioxide, the super-abundant greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuels are burned. Between 2018 and 2022
  
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• Disneyland Adds 'Stars Wars' Touches (and New Droids) for 'Season of the Force' Event

  15-04-2024 09:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  A monthslong "Star Wars"-themed festival called Season of the Force is now happening at Disneyland — including John Williams compositions in the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge land during the park's fireworks. SFGate reports:Before the show starts, a voice rings through the land. "Black Spire Outpost has a long and colorful history of heroes and legends, Jedi and Sith, royalty and resistance," it says. "Those who would rule and those who refuse to bow. Here we celebrate that fiery spirit tonight
  
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• California Replaces Gas Plant with Giant, Billion-Dollar Grid Battery

  15-04-2024 06:15 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Meanwhile, in Southern California, nonprofit news site Canary Media reports that an old gas combustion plant is being replaced by a "power bank" named Nova.
  It's expected to store "more electricity than all but one battery plant currently operating in the U.S."The billion-dollar project, with 680 megawatts and 2,720 megawatt-hours, will help California shift its nation-leading solar generation into the critical evening and nighttime hours, bolstering the grid against the heat waves that have pus
  
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