ICT news

• Judge Hints Vizio TV Buyers May Have Rights To Source Code Licensed Under GPL

  18-12-2025 23:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  A California judge signaled support for forcing Vizio to provide the full source code for its SmartCast TV software after finding a contractual obligation under the GPL. If upheld, the case could strengthen users' rights to modify GPL-licensed software embedded in consumer electronics. The Register reports: The legal complaint from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) seeks access to the SmartCast source code so that Vizio customers can make changes and improvements to the platform, something
  
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• Parrot OS Switches to KDE Plasma Desktop

  20-12-2025 22:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  "Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop," writes Linux magazine.
  "Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta."
  Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS's goal is a shift toward "modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system." One big under-the-hood change is that the/tmpdirectory is now automatically mounted astmpfs(in RAM), as opposed to the physical dr
  
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• Flock Executive Says Their Camera Helped Find Shooting Suspect, Addresses Privacy Concerns

  20-12-2025 21:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  During a search for the Brown shoogin suspect, a law enforcement press conference included a request for "Ring camera footage from residents and businesses near Brown University," according to local news reports.
  But in the end it was Flock cameras according to an article in Gizmodo, after a Reddit poster described seeing "odd" behavior of someone who turned out to be the suspect:
  The original Reddit poster, identified only as John in the affidavit, contacted police the next day and came in for
  
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• Military Satellites Now Maneuver, Watch Each Other, and Monitor Signals and Data

  20-12-2025 20:34 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights: two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space. Like any good tactical fighter, the American spacecraft, known as USA 270, approached from behind, so that the sun would be at its back, illuminating the quarry.But then one of the Chinese satellites countered by slowing down. As USA 270 zipped by
  
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• 'Subscription Captivity': When Things You Buy Own You

  20-12-2025 19:34 via slashdot.org
  A reporter at Mother Jones writes about a $169 alarm clock with special lighting and audio effects. But to use the features, "you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity."
  "Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you."What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and subsequently demand more money to keep using items already in your possession. This encompasses those glo
  
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• EV Battery-Swapping Startup That Raised $330 Million Files for Bankruptcy

  20-12-2025 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  In 2023 Slashdot covered a battery-swapping startup that promised to give EVs a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas.
  They just filed for bankruptcy, reports Inc:
  Ample was founded in 2014 with a goal of "solving slow charging times and infrastructure incompatibility" for commercial EV fleets such as those in logistics, ride-hailing, and delivery, the filing states. To-date, Ample has raised more than $330 million across five rounds of funding to finance research and
  
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• Firefox Will Ship With an 'AI Kill Switch' To Completely Disable All AI Features

  20-12-2025 17:34 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux:After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla's new CEO that Firefox will evolve into "a modern AI browser," the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser...
  What was not made clear [in Tuesday's comments by new Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo] is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Fi
  
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• Pro-AI Group Launches First of Many Attack Ads for US Election

  20-12-2025 16:34 via politics.slashdot.org
  "Super PAC aims to drown out AI critics in midterms," the Washington Post reported in August, noting its intial funding over $100 million from "some of Silicon Valley's most powerful investors and executives" including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, his wife, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. The group's goal was "to quash a philosophical debate that has divided the tech industry on the risk of artificial intelligence overpowering humanity," according to the article — and to support "pro-A
  
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• Trump Dismantling National Center For Atmospheric Research In Colorado

  20-12-2025 11:00 via news.slashdot.org
  echo123 shares a report from PBS: The Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, moving to dissolve a research lab that a top White House official described as "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country." White House budget director Russ Vought criticized the lab in a social media post Tuesday night and said a comprehensive review of the lab is underway. "Vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another enti
  
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• James Webb Space Telescope Confirms 1st 'Runaway' Supermassive Black Hole

  20-12-2025 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home, a
  
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• Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data

  20-12-2025 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:-Circumvented Google's security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
  -Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
  -Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to s
  
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• Airbus Moving Critical Systems Away From AWS, Google, and Microsoft Citing Data Sovereignty Concerns

  20-12-2025 02:40 via slashdot.org
  Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to move mission-critical systems like ERP, manufacturing, and aircraft design data onto a digitally sovereign European cloud, citing national security concerns and fears around U.S. extraterritorial laws like the CLOUD Act. "I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective," Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital, told The Register. "We want to ensure thi
  
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• Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs

  20-12-2025 02:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already "elite" or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs" with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. "I think that's crazy." While the rapidly
  
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• Ten Mistakes Marred Firewall Upgrade At Australian Telco, Contributing To Two Deaths

  20-12-2025 01:20 via it.slashdot.org
  An independent review found that at least ten technical and process failures during a routine firewall upgrade at Australia's Optus prevented emergency calls from reaching Triple Zero for 14 hours, during which 455 calls failed and two callers died. The Register reports: On Thursday, Optus published an independent report (PDF) on the matter written by Dr Kerry Schott, an Australian executive who has held senior management roles at many of the country's most significant businesses. The report fou
  
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• Strava Puts Popular 'Year In Sport' Recap Behind an $80 Paywall

  20-12-2025 00:40 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual "Year in Sport" wrap-up -- a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user's athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ($80 per year), rather than making it free to everyone, as it had been historically since the review's debut in 2016. This decision has roiled numer
  
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• TikTok Owner Signs Deal To Avoid US Ban

  20-12-2025 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  TikTok's owner ByteDance has signed a deal creating a U.S.-focused joint venture majority-owned by American and global investors, allowing the app to avoid a U.S. ban while ByteDance retains a minority stake. The BBC reports: Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executive Shou Zi Chew. The deal, which is set to close on January 22, would end years of efforts by Washingt
  
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• YouTuber's Livestream Appears On White House Website

  19-12-2025 23:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  The White House says it's investigating how a personal-finance YouTuber's livestream briefly appeared on the White House's official live video page. The creator says he has no idea how his video ended up there. The Associated Press reports: The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking. It's unclear if the website was breached or the video was linked accidentally by someone in th
  
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• Riot Games Is Making an Anti-Cheat Change That Could Be Rough On Older PCs

  19-12-2025 22:40 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we've written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like Secure Boot, a TPM 2.0
  
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• Microsoft Made Another Copilot Ad Where Nothing Actually Works

  19-12-2025 21:41 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft's latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines -- none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and found that Copilot repeatedly hallucinated interface elements that didn't exist, claimed to highlight on-screen buttons when it hadn't, and abandon
  
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• All That Cheap Chinese Stuff Is Now Europe's Problem

  19-12-2025 21:02 via slashdot.org
  President Trump's closure of the de minimis customs loophole in May -- which previously allowed Chinese packages valued under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free -- has redirected a flood of cheap goods toward Europe, where similar exemptions for packages under $175.8 in the EU and $180 in the UK remain intact.
  The shift has been swift: exports of low-value Chinese packages to the U.S. have dropped more than 40% since May, according to Chinese customs data, and the EU has this year overtaken the U.
  
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• FTC: Instacart To Refund $60M Over Deceptive Subscription Tactics

  19-12-2025 20:30 via news.slashdot.org
  alternative_right writes: Grocery delivery service Instacart will refund $60 million to settle FTC claims that it misled customers with false advertising and unlawfully enrolled them in paid subscriptions. Instacart partners with over 1,800 retailers to provide online shopping, delivery, and pickup services from nearly 100,000 stores across North America. Its platform serves millions of customers and is also used by roughly 600,000 independent shoppers across thousands of cities in Canada and th
  
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• Microsoft AI Chief: Staying in the Frontier AI Race Will Cost Hundreds of Billions

  19-12-2025 19:52 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman estimates that staying competitive in frontier AI development will require "hundreds of billions of dollars" over the next five to ten years, a sum that doesn't even account for the high salaries companies are paying individual researchers and technical staff. Speaking on a podcast, Suleyman compared Microsoft to a "modern construction company" where hundreds of thousands of workers are building gigawatts of CPUs and AI accelerators. There's "a structural advant
  
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• 2025 Was the Beginning of the End of the TV Brightness War

  19-12-2025 19:11 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  The television industry's brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, the year TCL and Hisense released the first consumer TVs capable of 5,000 nits under specific settings -- a figure that would have seemed absurd not long ago when manufacturers struggled to reach 2,000 nits. LG introduced Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, moving from a three-stack panel design to a four-stack red-blue-green-blue configuration that the company claims can achieve 4,000 nits. The technology appear
  
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• Uber is Hiring More Engineers Because AI is Making Them More Valuable, CEO Says

  19-12-2025 18:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  Uber is hiring more engineers rather than fewer because AI tools have made them "superhumans," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, pushing back against the industry trend of using productivity gains to justify headcount cuts. Speaking on the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast, Khosrowshahi noted that other tech executives see AI making engineers 20% to 30% more productive and conclude they need 20% to 30% fewer engineers. His view: every engineer has become more valuable. Between 80% and 90% of Uber's devel
  
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• 'How Lina Khan Killed iRobot'

  19-12-2025 17:54 via slashdot.org
  iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner into American homes over its 35-year history, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer that also produces competing household devices.
  The Wall Street Journal's editorial board placed blame for the company's demise on the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan, which opposed Amazon's $1.7 billion bid to acquire iRobot. That deal collapsed in Janua
  
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• ACM To Make Its Entire Digital Library Open Access Starting January 2026

  19-12-2025 17:08 via news.slashdot.org
  The Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that all publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available to everyone starting January 2026. Authors will retain full copyright to their published work under the new arrangement, and ACM has committed to defending those works against copyright and integrity-related violations.
  The transition follows what ACM described as extensive dialogue with auth
  
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• Food Becoming More Calorific But Less Nutritious Due To Rising Carbon Dioxide

  19-12-2025 16:33 via science.slashdot.org
  More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious -- and also potentially more toxic, a study has found. From a report: Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on plants' responses to increased CO2 levels. The results, she said, were a shock: although crop yields increase, they become less nutrient-dense. While zinc levels in particular drop, l
  
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• Apple Becomes a Debt Collector With Its New Developer Agreement

  19-12-2025 15:42 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple released an updated developer license agreement this week that gives the company permission to recoup unpaid funds, such as commissions or any other fees, by deducting them from in-app purchases it processes on developers' behalf, among other methods. From a report: The change will impact developers in regions where local law allows them to link to external payment systems. In these cases, developers must report those payments back to Apple to pay the required commissions or fees.
  The chan
  
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• Denmark Says Russia Was Behind Two 'Destructive and Disruptive' Cyberattacks

  19-12-2025 15:01 via news.slashdot.org
  The Danish government has accused Russia of being behind two "destructive and disruptive" cyberattacks in what it describes as "very clear evidence" of a hybrid war. From a report: The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyberattack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November.
  The first, it said, was
  
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• Most Parked Domains Now Serving Malicious Content

  19-12-2025 14:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Direct navigation -- the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser -- has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of "parked" domains -- mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites -- are now configured to redirect visitors to sites that foist scams and malware. When Internet users try to visit expired domain names or accidentally navigate to a lookal
  
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