ICT news

• JWST Discovers a Supermassive Black Hole is 'Far Larger Than Expected'

  28-05-2023 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The Guardian reports that a supermassive black hole discovered at the center of an ancient galaxy "is five times larger than expected for the number of stars it contains, astronomers say."Researchers spotted the immense black hole in a galaxy known as GS-9209 that lies 25bn light-years from Earth, making it one of the most distant to have been observed and recorded. The team at Edinburgh University used the James Webb space telescope (JWST) to observe the galaxy and reveal fresh details about it
  
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• Microsoft May Soon Allow IT Admins To Uninstall Copilot

  10-01-2026 01:45 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installed, the Microsoft Copilot app was not installed by the user, and the Microsoft Copilot app was not launched in the last 28 days. "Adm
  
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• Google: Don't Make 'Bite-Sized' Content For LLMs If You Care About Search Rank

  10-01-2026 01:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called "content chunking" may fall into that category. In the latest installment of Google's Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller and Danny Sullivan say that breaking content down into bite-sized chunks for LLMs like Gem
  
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• CES Worst In Show Awards Call Out the Tech Making Things Worse

  10-01-2026 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn't just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards -- including Repair.org, iFixit, EFF, PIRG, Secure Repairs, and others -- put the spotlight on products that miss the point of innovation and make life worse for users.2026 Wors
  
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• Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver

  09-01-2026 23:40 via games.slashdot.org
  Valve has added the NTSYNC kernel driver to the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, laying the groundwork for improved Windows game synchronization performance via Wine and Proton. Phoronix reports: For gearing up for that future Proton NTSYNC support, SteamOS 3.7.20 enables the NTSYNC kernel driver and loads the module by default. Most Linux distributions are at least already building the NTSYNC kernel module though there's been different efforts on how to handle ensuring it's loaded when needed. The presence
  
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• Italy Fines Cloudflare 14 Million Euros For Refusing To Filter Pirate Sites On Public 1.1.1.1 DNS

  09-01-2026 23:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Italy's communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking 14.2 million-euro fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would be "impossible" without hurting overall performance. AGCOM disagreed, noting that Cloudflare is not necessarily a neutral intermediary either.[...] "The measure, in addition to being one of the f
  
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• Microsoft Windows Media Player Stops Serving Up CD Album Info

  09-01-2026 22:25 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how... by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more.
  Sometime before Christmas, the metadata servers stopped working and on Windows 10 or 11, the result is the same: album not found. We tried this
  
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• Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom

  09-01-2026 21:41 via news.slashdot.org
  The abstract of a paper on NBER: School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members -- i.e., their ideologies -- forcing researchers to conduct tests based on demographic and professional characteristics -- i.e., identities -- with which ideology is presu
  
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• The Golden Age of Vaccine Development

  09-01-2026 21:01 via science.slashdot.org
  Microbiology had its golden age in the late nineteenth century, when researchers identified the bacterial causes of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, and a dozen other diseases in rapid succession. Antibiotics had theirs in the mid-twentieth century. Both booms eventually slowed. Vaccine development, by contrast, appears to be speeding up -- and the most productive era may still lie ahead, Works in Progress writes in a story.
  In the first half of the 2020s alone, researchers delivered the first ef
  
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• America Is Falling Out of Love With Pizza

  09-01-2026 20:25 via news.slashdot.org
  The restaurant industry is trying to figure out whether America has hit peak pizza. From a report: Once the second-most common U.S. restaurant type, pizzerias are now outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican food eateries, according to industry data. Sales growth at pizza restaurants has lagged behind the broader fast-food market for years, and the outlook ahead isn't much brighter.
  "Pizza is disrupted right now," Ravi Thanawala, chief financial officer and North America president at Papa John's
  
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• Amazon's New Manager Dashboard Flags 'Low-Time Badgers' and 'Zero Badgers'

  09-01-2026 19:44 via slashdot.org
  Amazon has begun equipping managers with a dashboard that tracks not just whether corporate employees show up to the office but how long they stay once they're there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The system, which started rolling out in December, flags "Low-Time Badgers" who average less than four hours daily over an eight-week period and "Zero Badgers" who don't badge into any building during that span.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Torvalds Tells Kernel Devs To Stop Debating AI Slop - Bad Actors Won't Follow the Rules Anyway

  09-01-2026 19:05 via linux.slashdot.org
  Linus Torvalds has weighed in on an ongoing debate within the Linux kernel development community about whether documentation should explicitly address AI-generated code contributions, and his position is characteristically blunt: stop making it an issue. The Linux creator was responding to Oracle-affiliated kernel developer Lorenzo Stoakes, who had argued that treating LLMs as "just another tool" ignores the threat they pose to kernel quality. "Thinking LLMs are 'just another tool' is to say eff
  
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• Craigslist at 30: No Algorithms, No Ads, No Problem

  09-01-2026 18:24 via tech.slashdot.org
  Craigslist, the 30-year-old classifieds site that looks virtually unchanged since the dial-up era, continues to draw more than 105 million monthly users and remains enormously profitable despite never spending a cent on advertising or marketing. The site ranks as the 40th most popular website in the United States, according to Internet data company Similarweb.
  University of Pennsylvania associate professor Jessa Lingel called it the "ungentrified" Internet. Unlike Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, or
  
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• iOS 26 Shows Unusually Slow Adoption Months After Release

  09-01-2026 17:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Apple's iOS 26 appears to be witnessing the slowest adoption rate in recent memory, with third-party analytics from StatCounter indicating that only 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running the operating system nearly four months after its September release. The figures stand in stark contrast to iOS 18, which had reached approximately 63% adoption by January 2025, and iOS 17, which hit 54% by January 2024. iOS 16 had surpassed 60% by January 2023.
  StatCounter's breakdown for January 20
  
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• Amazon Wants To Know What Every Corporate Employee Accomplished Last Year

  09-01-2026 17:05 via slashdot.org
  Amazon is now requiring its corporate employees to submit a list of three to five accomplishments that represent their best work as part of an overhauled performance review process, according to Business Insider, which cites internal documents.
  The company's internal Forte review system previously asked employees softer questions like "When you're at your best, how do you contribute?" but the new standards place greater emphasis on individual productivity and specific deliverables. Amazon's roug
  
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• Send To Kindle from Microsoft Word is Discontinued

  09-01-2026 16:30 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft is discontinuing its Send to Kindle integration in Word, ending a feature that allowed Microsoft 365 subscribers to send documents directly to their Kindle e-readers and preserve complex formatting through fixed layouts.
  The company updated its documentation to announce that beginning February 9th, 2026, the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work across Web, Win32, and Mac platforms. Microsoft has not disclosed why it's killing the integration but recommends users switch to Amazon'
  
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• Why Care About Debt-to-GDP?

  09-01-2026 15:59 via slashdot.org
  Abstract of a paper on NBER: We construct an international panel data set comprising three distinct yet plausible measures of government indebtedness: the debt-to-GDP, the interest-to-GDP, and the debt-to-equity ratios. Our analysis reveals that these measures yield differing conclusions about recent trends in government indebtedness. While the debt-to-GDP ratio has reached historically high levels, the other two indicators show either no clear trend or a declining pattern over recent decades. W
  
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• Record Ocean Heat is Intensifying Climate Disasters, Data Shows

  09-01-2026 15:07 via news.slashdot.org
  The world's oceans absorbed yet another record-breaking amount of heat in 2025, continuing an almost unbroken streak of annual records since the start of the millennium and fueling increasingly extreme weather events around the globe. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity's carbon emissions ends up in the oceans, making ocean heat content one of the clearest indicators of the climate crisis's trajectory.
  The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, drew on tem
  
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• Fusion Physicists Found a Way Around a Long-Standing Density Limit

  09-01-2026 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: At the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), physicists successfully exceeded what is known as the Greenwald limit, a practical density boundary beyond which plasmas tend to violently destabilize, often damaging reactor components. For a long time, the Greenwald limit was accepted as a given and incorporated into fusion reactor engineering. The new work shows that precise control over how the plasma is created and interacts wit
  
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• Ultimate Camouflage Tech Mimics Octopus In Scientific First

  09-01-2026 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Researchers at Stanford University have created a programmable synthetic "skin" that can independently change color and texture, "a feat previously only available within the animal kingdom," reports the Register. From the report: The technique employs electron beams to write patterns and add optical layers that create color effects. When exposed to water, the film swells to reveal texture and colors independently, depending on which side of the material is exposed, according to a paper published
  
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• Some Super-Smart Dogs Can Learn New Words Just By Eavesdropping

  09-01-2026 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: [I]t turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight -- as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this stud
  
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• YouTube Will Now Let You Filter Shorts Out of Search Results

  09-01-2026 03:10 via news.slashdot.org
  YouTube is updating search filters so users can explicitly choose between Shorts and long-form videos. The change also replaces view-count sorting with a new "Popularity" filter and removes underperforming options like "Sort by Rating." The Verge reports: Right now, a filter-less search shows a mix of longform and short form videos, which can be annoying if you just want to see videos in one format or the other. But in the new search filters, among other options, you can pick to see "Videos," wh
  
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• Lawsuit Over OpenAI For-Profit Conversion Can Head To Trial, US Judge Says

  09-01-2026 02:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Reuters: Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk persuaded a judge on Wednesday to allow a jury trial on his allegations that ChatGPT maker OpenAI violated its founding mission in its high-profile restructuring to a for-profit entity. Musk was a cofounder of OpenAI in 2015 but left in 2018 and now runs an AI company that competes with it.U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, said at a hearing that there was "plenty of
  
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• Illinois Health Department Exposed Over 700,000 Residents' Personal Data For Years

  09-01-2026 01:50 via yro.slashdot.org
  Illinois Department of Human Services disclosed that a misconfigured internal mapping website exposed sensitive personal data for more than 700,000 Illinois residents for over four years, from April 2021 to September 2025. Officials say they can't confirm whether the publicly accessible data was ever viewed. TechCrunch reports: Officials said the exposed data included personal information on 672,616 individuals who are Medicaid and Medicare Savings Program recipients. The data included their add
  
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• Google Is Adding an 'AI Inbox' To Gmail That Summarizes Emails

  09-01-2026 01:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Google is putting even more generative AI tools into Gmail as part of its goal to further personalize user inboxes and streamline searches. On Thursday, the company announced a new "AI Inbox" tab, currently in a beta testing phase, that reads every message in a user's Gmail and suggests a list of to-dos and key topics, based on what it summarizes. In Google's example of what this AI Inbox could look like in Gmail, the new tab takes context from a u
  
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• French Court Orders Google DNS to Block Pirate Sites, Dismisses 'Cloudflare-First' Defense

  09-01-2026 00:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  Paris Judicial Court ordered Google to block additional pirate sports-streaming domains at the DNS level, rejecting Google's argument that enforcement should target upstream providers like Cloudflare first. "The blockade was requested by Canal+ and aims to stop pirate streams of Champions League games," notes TorrentFreak. From the report: Most recently, Google was compelled to take action following a complaint from French broadcaster Canal+ and its subsidiaries regarding Champions League piracy
  
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• Microsoft Turns Copilot Chats Into a Checkout Lane

  08-01-2026 23:50 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer's website. "If checkout happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships -- while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage," reports Axios. From the report: Microsoft unveiled new agentic AI tools for retailers at the NRF 2026 retail conference, including Copilot Checkout, which lets shoppers complete purchases inside Copilot w
  
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• Wi-Fi Advocates Get Win From FCC With Vote To Allow Higher-Power Devices

  08-01-2026 23:10 via mobile.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission plans to authorize a new category of wireless devices in the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band that will be permitted to operate at higher power levels than currently allowed. The FCC will also consider authorizing higher power levels for certain wireless devices that are only allowed to operate indoors. The FCC said it scheduled a vote for its January 29 meeting on an order "to create a new category of unlicensed device
  
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• The Gap Between Premium and Budget TV Brands is Quickly Closing

  08-01-2026 22:30 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  The long-standing hierarchy in the TV market -- Sony, Samsung and LG at the top, TCL and Hisense fighting it out in the midrange -- is eroding as the budget brands close the performance gap and increasingly lead on technology innovation, The Verge writes. Hisense debuted the first RGB LED TV last year, and TCL's X11L announced at CES 2026 is the first TV to use reformulated quantum dots and a new color filter. TCL's QM9K release last year was "a pretty clear statement that they're ready to fight
  
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• Iran in 'Digital Blackout' as Tehran Throttles Mobile Internet Access

  08-01-2026 21:44 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard widely used for mobile infrastructure, was affected.
  "IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with
  
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