ICT news

• Kevin Mitnick, Hacker Who Once Eluded Authorities, is Dead at 59

  20-07-2023 07:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Kevin Mitnick, once the so-called "most wanted computer criminal in US history," died on Sunday. He was 59. The New York Times adds: The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer. He had been undergoing treatment at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center following his diagnosis more than a year ago, according to the King David Memorial Chapel & Cemetery in Las Vegas. After serving prison time for breaking into and tampering with corporate computer networks, he was released in 2000
  
  Read more

• Developer Abandons 'PS5 Linux' Project After Sony Patches AI-Discovered Exploit

  20-09-2026 00:05 via games.slashdot.org
  "In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC,"
  writes the blog It's FOSS.
  It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5's on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he's "stopping all my work on PS5 Linux" and "stepping away from the PS5 scene."
  stopping work on porting the project to the PS5 Pro, which would've shipped sometime in 2027.Andy Nguyen: After pouring my heart and months of my life into it, including plans to finish PS5 Pro support and
  
  Read more

• Fake AI Intelligence Almost Made the US Military Start a War With China

  19-09-2026 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program, reports CNN.
  "The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode."Armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship [according to two of the sources]. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incid
  
  Read more

• US Air Force F-16 Crashes in Michigan After Pentagon Orders More Flyovers

  19-09-2026 15:04 via news.slashdot.org
  The F-16 "experienced an incident," the Texas Military Department said in a statement, adding that "The pilot successfully ejected the aircraft and is receiving care at a nearby hospital."
  ABC News reports:A Texas Air National Guard F-16 crashed in Michigan during a training mission on Thursday afternoon, sparking an hourslong evacuation near the crash site, according to officials.The incident prompted the evacuation of homes and businesses within 1 mile of the crash site due to a "hazardous che
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Gemini Breached Three Outside Systems, and Claude-Using Researchers Breached OpenAI

  19-09-2026 10:34 via slashdot.org
  "Software security researchers used Anthropic's Claude AI platform to hack OpenAI's ChatGPT tool," reports CBS News.Using Claude, "On July 25, 2026, we chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts," write researchers at security platform Hacktron AI. "With these accounts, we could then access internal OpenAI repositories, and potentially many other connectors... Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI's own help foru
  
  Read more

• Has the James Web Space Telescope Discovered a New 'Black Hole Star'?

  19-09-2026 06:04 via science.slashdot.org
  The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image,
  writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they're looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core.
  But Quanta adds that "not everyone agrees with this bold interpretation."[Two Webb telescope surveys of distant objects included little red dots] for hours at a time. They tabulated precisely
  
  Read more

• AI Insiders Issue New Warnings - Including Former Anthropic Engineer Jacob Coxon

  19-09-2026 01:34 via slashdot.org
  Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted "For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I'm honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be good for us to have an answer to 'What would a successful pace look like?'"
  CNN noted Wednesday they're just some of the many AI insiders who are now concerned about the speed of re
  
  Read more

• Will California Gut Its Net Neutrality Law to Comply with Trump Admin Demands?

  18-09-2026 21:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  In 2021, America approved $65 billion to fund broadband internet services as part of President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But Trump's administration announced they'd withhold funds from states with net neutrality protections...States could object and sue the government, Ars Technica reported last October, "but even a successful lawsuit could take years and leave unserved homes without broadband for the foreseeable future." So where does that leave California's net neutrality laws? Ar
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Rust is Now a 'Tier One' Language at Microsoft

  18-09-2026 16:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  The Register reports:When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. "Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company," explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for the Rust tooling team, during a keynote talk today at this year's annual RustConf,
  
  Read more

• Journalist Calls Out 'Collective Amnesia' of Schools' Romance With Big Tech Over AI

  18-09-2026 12:04 via news.slashdot.org
  "Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by
  New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools tells "the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi," acco
  
  Read more

• America Acknowledges for the First Time: It Has Deployed Weapons In Space

  18-09-2026 07:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Tuesday U.S. Space Force chief Douglas Schiess said his branch of the U.S. military operates "on-orbit weapons," reports Reuters, to defend "against space-enabled attacks." He promised "disciplined and responsible choices" when scaling America's orbital defense arsenal in the coming years.NPR calls this week's reveleations "remarkable... after previous warnings about countries such as Russia possibly weaponizing a global frontier long agreed in treaties to be used for only peaceful purposes."
  Th
  
  Read more

• Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could 'Kill All Humans'. But Meta's Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company

  18-09-2026 03:04 via slashdot.org
  Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee "became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could 'kill all humans', saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon's
  
  Read more

• Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data

  17-09-2026 22:34 via slashdot.org
  Ars Technica reports:Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
  Amazon Web Services was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian
  
  Read more

• Hackers Stole Flock's Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

  17-09-2026 18:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED," according to an article published on both sites.
  Though Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, "The hackers were able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections."
  The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the
  
  Read more

• 'Zuckoff' App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions

  17-09-2026 13:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  The New York Post reports:A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta's creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski says tales of dirtbags recording themselves perving on women or harassing strangers prompted him to launch the app...
  Zuckoff — which detects Bluetooth signatures broadcast by smart glasses and can estimate their distance — has gained som
  
  Read more

• OpenAI Admits Six More Instances of AI Models Acting Deceptively

  17-09-2026 09:04 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI announced Wednesday that "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer."But along with the announcement, OpenAI announced it "found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training," reports CNN.
  And they add that OpenAI is also "introducing a new process for the company to publicly report such instances."Under the new sy
  
  Read more

• Adafruit's New CircuitPython 'Turbo' Brings Native Code To Tiny Boards

  17-09-2026 04:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released "CircuitPython" in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language).
  Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) brings this update:
  Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards.
  It builds on MicroPython's Native and V
  
  Read more

• As Part of California's Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste?

  17-09-2026 00:04 via hardware.slashdot.org
  "As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind," reports the Los Angeles Times.
  He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant.""Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height ... these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre
  
  Read more

• Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower Development. Nvidia's CEO Wants It 'As Fast as You Can'

  16-09-2026 19:34 via slashdot.org
  "Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run as fast as you can."Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to i
  
  Read more

• Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)

  16-09-2026 15:04 via news.slashdot.org
  Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images:In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20Ã-- less memory used during very large ima
  
  Read more

• America's Cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act' Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying

  16-09-2026 10:34 via news.slashdot.org
  "The crypto industry's top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in spectacular fashion," reports Barron's.
  A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn't expected to pick the bill back up this year. Among other provisions, the bill would have taken most crypto trading out of the purview of securities regula
  
  Read more

• Ubuntu's 'Rust-ification' Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete

  16-09-2026 06:04 via news.slashdot.org
  "Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack," reports the blog It's FOSS.The last three utilities — cp, mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust).Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases... Canonical started "oxidizing" Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship [ the uutils project's] coreutils as the default. That release
  
  Read more

• While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China's Film Industry is Embracing It

  16-09-2026 01:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  The Los Angeles Times reports:
  Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen's role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of surprise. Using artificial intelligence, the studio will use images of Chen's face to generate an ava
  
  Read more

• Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects 'Unlike Any They Have Seen Before'

  15-09-2026 21:04 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (
  
  Read more

• Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' 'Hehe,' And 'Asdfg'

  15-09-2026 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  404 Media reports:Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was "LMAO."
  The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock's "reason" box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerfu
  
  Read more

• Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish 'Pointless'

  15-09-2026 12:04 via science.slashdot.org
  The New York Post wrote that OpenAI "stunned the mathematics world" last week when it announced its AI model "cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours."
  But a New York University professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company's scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused."
  [P]rofessor Tristan Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who tr
  
  Read more

• ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court

  15-09-2026 07:34 via slashdot.org
  Reuters reports:
  A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program... and said they will refer him to an attorney disciplinary
  
  Read more

• Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?

  15-09-2026 03:04 via games.slashdot.org
  Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," reports CNET, "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it."
  Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, "with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes."CNET's editor at large even argues that the Steam Frame "isn't necessarily the future of XR, as muc
  
  Read more

• A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast

  14-09-2026 22:34 via slashdot.org
  Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free".Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets peopl
  
  Read more

• No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage

  14-09-2026 18:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020.
  Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage."These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as d
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!