ICT news

• Intel Plans To IPO Programmable Chip Unit Within Three Years

  04-10-2023 15:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Intel said it will treat its programmable chip unit as as a standalone business, with an aim to spin it out through an IPO in the next two to three years. Intel's Programmable Solutions Group will have its own balance sheet as it heads toward independence. The company will continue to support the business and retain a majority stake, and could also seek private investment. Sandra Rivera, who leads Intel's broader Data Center and AI group, will becom
  
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• Dates with AI Companions Plagued by Lag, Miscommunications - and General Creepiness

  14-02-2026 22:52 via slashdot.org
  To celebrate Valentine's Day, EVA AI created a temporary "pop-up" restaurant at a wine bar in Manhattan's "Hell's Kitchen" district where patrons can date AI personas.
  The Verge notes that looking around the restaurant, "Of the 30-some-odd people in attendance, only two or three are organic users. The rest are EVA AI reps, influencers, and reporters hoping to make some capital-C Content..."But their reporter actually tried a date with "John Yoon", an AI companion pretending to be a psychology pr
  
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• Social Networks Agree to Be Rated On Their Teen Safety Efforts

  14-02-2026 21:52 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta, TikTok, Snap and other social neteworks agreed this week to be rated on their teen safety efforts, reports the Los Angeles Times, "amid rising concern about whether the world's largest social media platforms are doing enough to protect the mental health of young people."The Mental Health Coalition, a collective of organizations focused on destigmatizing mental health issues, said Tuesday that it is launching standards and a new rating system for online platforms. For the Safe Online Standa
  
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• ByteDance's Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt

  14-02-2026 20:34 via slashdot.org
  1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance's new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.But while ByteDance gushes their tool "delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards," the cinema industry isn't happy, reports the Los Angeles Times reports:Charles Rivkin, chief executive of the Motion Picture Assn., wrote in a statement that the company "should immediately cease its infringing activity."
  "In
  
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• Earth is Warming Faster Than Ever. But Why?

  14-02-2026 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  "Global temperatures have been rising for decades," reports the Washington Post. "But many scientists say it's now happening faster than ever before."According to a Washington Post analysis, the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years. The Post used a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025. "We're not continuing on the same path we had before," said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth. "Something has changed...." Temper
  
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• The EU Moves To Kill Infinite Scrolling

  14-02-2026 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world's most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing its recommender systems. The demand follows the Commission's declaration that TikTok's design is addic
  
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• Sudden Telnet Traffic Drop. Are Telcos Filtering Ports to Block Critical Vulnerability?

  14-02-2026 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register:
  Telcos likely received advance warning about January's critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise. Global Telnet traffic "fell off a cliff" on January 14, six days before security advisories for CVE-2026-24061 went public on January 20. The flaw, a decade-old bug in GNU InetUtils telnetd with a 9.8 CVSS score, allows trivial root access exploitation. GreyNoise data shows Teln
  
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• Anthropic's Claude Got 11% User Boost from Super Bowl Ad Mocking ChatGPT's Advertising

  14-02-2026 16:34 via slashdot.org
  Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after Sunday's Super Bowl ad mocking ChatGPT's advertising, reports CNBC (citing data analyzed by French financial services company BNP Paribas).
  The Claude gain, which took it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, beat out chatbot and AI competitors OpenAI, Google Gemini and Meta. Daily active users also saw an 11% jump post-game, the most significant within the firm's AI coverage. [Just in the U.S., 125 million people were watching Sunday'
  
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• Israeli Soldiers Accused of Using Polymarket To Bet on Strikes

  14-02-2026 13:00 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Israel has arrested several people, including army reservists, for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations on Polymarket. Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency, said Thursday the suspects used information they had come across during their military service to inform their bets.
  One of the reservists and a civilian were indicted on a charge of committing serious security offenses, bribery and obstruction of
  
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• Autonomous AI Agent Apparently Tries to Blackmail Maintainer Who Rejected Its Code

  14-02-2026 09:30 via news.slashdot.org
  "I've had an extremely weird few days..." writes commercial space entrepreneur/engineer Scott Shambaugh on LinkedIn. (He's the volunteer maintainer for the Python visualization library Matplotlib, which he describes as "some of the most widely used software in the world" with 130 million downloads each month.) "Two days ago an OpenClaw AI agent autonomously wrote a hit piece disparaging my character after I rejected its code change."
  "Since then my blog post response has been read over 150,000 t
  
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• 600% Memory Price Surge Threatens Telcos' Broadband Router, Set-Top Box Supply

  14-02-2026 06:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem -- DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research.
  Routers, gateways and set-top boxes have been hit hardest, far worse than smartphones; prices for "consumer memory" used in broadband equipment jumped nearly 7x over the last nin
  
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• Anna's Archive Quietly 'Releases' Millions of Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Pushback

  14-02-2026 03:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Anna's Archive, the shadow library that announced last December it had scraped Spotify's entire catalog, has quietly begun distributing the actual music files despite a federal preliminary injunction signed by Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16 that explicitly barred the site from hosting or distributing the copyrighted works.
  The site's backend torrent index now lists 47 new torrents added on February 8, containing roughly 2.8 million tracks across approximately 6 terabytes of audio data. Anna's Ar
  
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• Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit

  14-02-2026 00:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  The Detroit Big Three -- General Motors, Ford and Stellantis -- have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.
  U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth quarter of 2025 once the credit expired in September, and Congress also eliminated federal fuel-efficien
  
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• Meta's New Patent: an AI That Likes, Comments and Messages For You When You're Dead

  13-02-2026 22:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta was granted a patent in late December that describes how a large language model could be trained on a deceased user's historical activity -- their comments, likes, and posted content -- to keep their social media accounts active after they're gone.
  Andrew Bosworth, Meta's CTO, is listed as the primary author of the patent, first filed in 2023. The AI clone could like and comment on posts, respond to DMs, and even simulate video or audio calls on the user's behalf. A Meta spokesperson told B
  
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• Google Warns EU Risks Undermining Own Competitiveness With Tech Sovereignty Push

  13-02-2026 21:31 via tech.slashdot.org
  Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google's president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a "competitive paradox" as it seeks to spur growth while restricting the technologies needed to achieve that goal.
  He warned against erecting walls that make it harder to use some of the best technology i
  
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• Spotify Says Its Best Developers Haven't Written a Line of Code Since December, Thanks To AI

  13-02-2026 20:30 via developers.slashdot.org
  Spotify's best developers have stopped writing code manually since December and now rely on an internal AI system called Honk that enables remote, real-time code deployment through Claude Code, the company's co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom said during a fourth-quarter earnings call this week.
  Engineers can fix bugs or add features to the iOS app from Slack on their phones during their morning commute and receive a new version of the app pushed to Slack before arriving at the office. The system has help
  
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• FTC Ratchets Up Microsoft Probe, Queries Rivals on Cloud, AI

  13-02-2026 19:31 via slashdot.org
  The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete with Microsoft in the business software and cloud computing markets, according to people familiar with the matter. The demands feature an a
  
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• EPA Reverses Long-Standing Climate Change Finding, Stripping Its Own Ability To Regulate Emissions

  13-02-2026 18:30 via news.slashdot.org
  President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories. From a report: The repeal of that landmark determination, known as the endangerment finding, will upend most U.S. policies aimed at curbing climate change. The finding -- which the EPA issued in 2009 -- said the global warming caused by g
  
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• OpenAI Claims DeepSeek Distilled US Models To Gain an Edge

  13-02-2026 17:30 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that its Chinese rival DeepSeek is using unfair and increasingly sophisticated methods to extract results from leading US AI models to train the next generation of its breakthrough R1 chatbot, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg News.
  In the memo, sent Thursday to the House Select Committee on China, OpenAI said that DeepSeek had used so-called distillation techniques as part of "ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabil
  
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• Waymo is Asking DoorDash Drivers To Shut the Doors of Its Self-Driving Cars

  13-02-2026 16:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  Waymo's autonomous vehicles can transport passengers across six cities without a human driver, but the Alphabet-owned company has discovered that its cars become completely inert if a passenger accidentally leaves a door open. The company confirmed that it is now paying DoorDash drivers in Atlanta to close these doors as part of a pilot program.
  A Reddit post from a DoorDash driver showed an offer of $6.25 to drive less than one mile to a Waymo vehicle and close its door, plus an additional $5 a
  
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• Bill Introduced To Replace West Virginia's New CS Course Graduation Requirement With Computer Literacy Proficiency

  13-02-2026 15:30 via news.slashdot.org
  theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI
  
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• Meta Plans To Let Smart Glasses Identify People Through AI-Powered Facial Recognition

  13-02-2026 14:36 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, New York Times reported Friday, five years after the social giant shut down facial recognition on Facebook and promised to find "the right balance" for the controversial technology.
  The feature, internally called "Name Tag," would let wearers identify people and retrieve information about them through Meta's AI assistant, the report added. An internal memo from May acknowledged the feature carries
  
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• Ring Cancels Its Partnership With Flock Safety After Surveillance Backlash

  13-02-2026 10:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration. From a report: In a statement published on Ring's blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint de
  
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• Russia Fully Blocks WhatsApp

  13-02-2026 07:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. messenger app WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, has been completely blocked in Russia for failing to comply with local law, the Kremlin said on Thursday, suggesting Russians turn to a state-backed "national messenger" instead. "Due to Meta's unwillingness to comply with Russian law, such a decision was indeed taken and implemented," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, proposing that Russians switch to MAX, Russia's state-owned messenger.Read
  
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• Windows 11 Notepad Flaw Let Files Execute Silently via Markdown Links

  13-02-2026 04:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11's Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.
  The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday update, stemmed from Notepad's relatively new Markdown support -- a feature Microsoft added after discontinuing WordPad and rewriting Notepad to serve as both a plain
  
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• CIA Makes New Push To Recruit Chinese Military Officers as Informants

  13-02-2026 02:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China's top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military. The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military officer, in the latest U.S. step in a campaign to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington's strategic rival.
  It follows a similar effort last May that
  
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• IBM Plans To Triple Entry-Level Hiring in the US

  12-02-2026 23:30 via slashdot.org
  IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers. From a report: While the company declined to disclose specific hiring figures, it said the expansion will be "across the board," affecting a wide range of departments. "And yes, it's for all these jobs that we're being told AI can do," said Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's chief human resources officer, speaking at a conference this week in New York.
  LaMoreaux said s
  
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• WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties

  12-02-2026 22:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark.
  The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, th
  
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• Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year

  12-02-2026 21:00 via slashdot.org
  Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed.
  The San Francisco-based
  
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• Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing

  12-02-2026 20:10 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources said that Palo Alto's findings that China was tied to the sprawling hacking spree were dialed back following last month's news, first reported by Reuters, that Palo Alto was one of about 15 U.S. and
  
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