ICT news

• Mandiant Says China-backed Hackers Exploited Barracuda Zero-Day To Spy on Governments

  15-06-2023 20:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Security researchers at Mandiant say China-backed hackers are likely behind the mass-exploitation of a recently discovered security flaw in Barracuda Networks' email security gear, which prompted a warning to customers to remove and replace affected devices. From a report: Mandiant, which was called in to run Barracuda's incident response, said the hackers exploited the flaw to compromise hundreds of organizations likely as part of an espionage campaign in support of the Chinese government. Almo
  
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• 'Forget Coders. the Real AI Threat Is In the Back Office'

  13-07-2026 00:29 via it.slashdot.org
  Which jobs are most threatened by AI? "Programmers, software engineers and other tech industry employees," goes one common answer.
  "But many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers," reports the New York Times: customer service reps, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and HR specialists, "who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs..."They are spread across the country and throughout the economy, working in every industry,
  
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• Linus Torvalds on AI, Junk Patches, Humans, and Godzilla

  12-07-2026 22:55 via linux.slashdot.org
  Linus Torvalds once said LLMs might bring a 10X increase to programmer productivity. But speaking at Open Source Summit India 2026, he now says that number was "not scientific,"
  reports ZDNet. "That was pulled out of my ass number, obviously."
  Today, he continued, "we're at the point where hopefully it creates more productivity than it takes away," but "we certainly saw more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until the like early this year.... it can actually be a huge drain
  
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• Elon Musk And Sam Altman Spar On X After Apple Files OpenAI Lawsuit

  12-07-2026 20:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  "Elon Musk and Sam Altman criticized each other in new posts on X," reports CNBC, "highlighting the billionaires' long-standing tussle over OpenAI's evolution."This week, SpaceX released the Grok 4.5 generative AI model, while OpenAI debuted its own GPT-5.6 Sol. For days, Musk and Altman have hyped up their respective releases, but on Saturday the rivalry got personal. In response to a post about Apple filing suit against OpenAI on Friday over alleged theft of trade secrets, Musk wrote, "Scam Al
  
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• SK Hynix CEO Warns 2027 Will Be Memory's 'Worst Year' Ever. Shortages May Outlast the Decade

  12-07-2026 19:50 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The CEO of SK Hynix, one of the three largest DRAM producers, predicted to Reuters that the memory industry will see its "worst-ever" supply shortages in 2027, reports the hardware/gaming news site Wccftech:SK Hynix has also forecasted that, given the current market demand, they will fall way short of fulfilling the market demand, and that will continue beyond 2030. The comments from SK Hynix are in line with what Samsung and Micron executives have already said. Samsung has warned of 2027 being
  
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• WSJ Reports on 'Hard-line Activists Ramping Up for the War With AI'

  12-07-2026 18:34 via slashdot.org
  The Wall Street Journal says "an intense 27-year-old activist who had been leading sit-ins at OpenAI to protest the dangers of AI" was just part of a larger movement.
  "The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups."Their cause is now riding a surge of anti-AI backlash. Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, dat
  
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• Is the COSMIC Desktop Getting Better Than KDE and GNOME?

  12-07-2026 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  "While KDE and GNOME dominate the landscape, a relative newcomer is starting to make waves with features other desktops still don't fully support," argues XDA Developers:
  Linux 7.0 was the first release of the kernel to officially support Rust, but COSMIC has been all-in on Rust since the very beginning, and COSMIC 1.1 finally stripped all the leftovers of C language from the desktop. It no longer has any traces of Nautilus (the GNOME file manager), and then there's now a COSMIC-native system mo
  
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• AI-driven Datacenter Builds Increased Microsoft's Emissions 25% In One Year

  12-07-2026 16:34 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft released its 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report showing that last year it matched its entire electricity consumption with renewable energy, reports The Register."The bad news is it also increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25%" — mostly due to datacenter construction and a decision to stop purchasing some renewable energy certificates:In 2020, Microsoft set itself the goal of becoming "carbon-negative" by 2030. Its own figures show emissions heading only upwards, fro
  
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• Id Co-founders Carmack and Romero Respond to Microsoft's Layoffs

  12-07-2026 13:34 via games.slashdot.org
  "I have been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Id Software layoffs," John Carmack posted Thursday to his 2.8 million followers on X.com:My "Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand" statement isn't aging well, and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month.
  I'm saddened, but I can't muster anger or outrage over it. I don't have access to the books, but I suspect that Id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft'
  
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• Facial Recognition in UK Shops Will Soon Instantly Alert Police About Offenders

  12-07-2026 09:52 via news.slashdot.org
  Facial recognition technology in U.K. shops "will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders," reports The Guardian, "with civil liberties groups warning of a 'dangerous escalation' towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector."Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury's, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves, said it was launching a UK-first feature to "alert police instantly when the most serious offender
  
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• 10 Million Cubans Suffer Nationwide Blackout - For The Second Time This Week

  12-07-2026 05:52 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The Associated Press reports:An islandwide blackout struck Cuba on Friday for the second time this week as the nation of nearly 10 million people grapples with a crumbling power grid and fuel shortages stemming from a U.S. energy blockade...
  Authorities reported that they have already begun restoring power to some areas. On Monday, another massive blackout affected nearly 10 million people nationwide. Authorities reported during the week that service was gradually being restored from that outage
  
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• Meta Removes Controversial AI Feature On Instagram After Backlash

  12-07-2026 03:52 via tech.slashdot.org
  "Meta has axed a controversial feature that allowed users to modify photos from public Instagram accounts using AI," reports TechCrunch:The feature, which wasn't designed to alert a user if their photos were used in this way, prompted immediate backlash... The company issued a blog post Friday announcing that it was removing the feature. Puck News founding partner Dylan Byers was the first to share the company's decision... Byers notes that the decision to do away with the feature came "amid scr
  
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• People Keep Sneaking Into an Empty IBM Campus - and Then Getting Arrested

  12-07-2026 00:47 via slashdot.org
  Since February, New York state police have arrested 48 people for trespassing on a former IBM campus in Somers, New York, reports the Wall Street Journal. 30 of the arrests were teenagers.The long-vacant site has become a magnet for so-called urban explorers, who prowl abandoned malls, hospitals, power plants, amusement parks, factories and any other disused structure they can breach... [I]t's been turbocharged by artsy videos on Instagram and TikTok that spur others to create their own posts, l
  
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• How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction

  11-07-2026 23:47 via news.slashdot.org
  For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks.
  How are they fighting back?
  We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the reg
  
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• DuckDuckGo's Browser Now Blocks Most YouTube Ads

  11-07-2026 22:47 via news.slashdot.org
  Nerds.xyz reports:
  DuckDuckGo just gave its browser a feature that a lot of people have been waiting for. The privacy-focused browser can now block most video ads on YouTube, letting users watch videos without sitting through the pre-roll and mid-roll interruptions that have become part of everyday life on the platform. The feature is already enabled by default for iPhone, Windows, and Mac users running the latest version of the browser. Android users can turn it on manually... with DuckDuckGo p
  
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• Orbital Datacenter Plans Need an Environmental Review, FCC Told

  11-07-2026 21:34 via science.slashdot.org
  Environmental groups want America's FCC "to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters," writes The Register.They're arguing for an environmental impact assessment for what could be 1 million satellites:Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this week... The filing doesn't target any single company. Instead, it asks the regulator to put the entire emerging orbital datacenter sector o
  
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• This Factory Was Severely Short On Workers. Then It Offered Flexible Work.

  11-07-2026 20:34 via it.slashdot.org
  "Flexible, app-based scheduling lets large pools of part-time workers choose four-hour shifts and even select the type of work they prefer," writes long-time Slashdot reader Tony Isaac. While the system started during the pandemic when factories faced severe labor shortages, the model is now "supplying hundreds of trained workers each week... while giving people — from retirees to sidejob hustlers to longtime employees — control over their hours."
  NPR says it's attracting "people who
  
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• China's AI Companies May Be 'Distilling' America's AI Models

  11-07-2026 19:34 via slashdot.org
  In March, Anthropic's Claude "quietly deployed software to spy on China-based customers," reports the Washington Post — apparently to unmask Chinese rivals "suspected of hijacking its technology to make their own AI tools smarter."Last week Anthropic removed the spyware "after a software developer revealed its existence and privacy advocates criticized Anthropic, saying it had surveilled its own users."Anthropic's tracking code was designed in part to catch Chinese firms "distilling" its A
  
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• EFF Celebrates 36th Anniversary, Says 'We Need You in the Fight'

  11-07-2026 18:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  "We need you in the fight," says the American legal expert in privacy, surveillance, AI, and Internet freedom of speech who became the EFF's new executive director in March.
  As EFF celebrates the anniversary of its founding 1990, "Each headline is different, but they tell one story: Many of the threats that once seemed hypothetical are now reality, and EFF's work to ensure technology supports rights, justice, freedom, and innovation for all people has never been more critical."Governments and la
  
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• Meta Says US States Seek $1.4 Trillion In Penalties In August's Youth Safety Trial

  11-07-2026 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta "said in a court filing on Monday that four states were seeking $1.4 trillion in penalties," reports Reuters, "over accusations the company designed its Facebook and Instagram platforms to addict young users and misled the public about their safety."Meta put forward the figure in its response to the attorneys general's filings on how penalties should be calculated if the states prevailed at trial. The number, which has not previously been disclosed and is close to Meta's market capitalizati
  
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• How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked a Journalist for Days, Then Sent Police to Arrest Him

  11-07-2026 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Are you armed?!" the police officer screamed. "Get out of the car!"A writer for the car-news site The Drive describes how "a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement... led to me and my wife being surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl's parking lot in suburban Minnesota."
  After dropping off our Amazon returns, we'd just gotten back in the Range Rover and reversed maybe two feet out of the spot when four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxe
  
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• FCC Approves Reflect Orbital's Space Mirror Satellite That Astronomers Hate

  11-07-2026 13:00 via science.slashdot.org
  The FCC has approved (PDF) Reflect Orbital's Earendil-1 test satellite, which will use a 60-by-60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark. "The reflected light from the satellite is supposed to span an area about 3 miles wide on the ground," reports PCMag. It comes despite objections from astronomers and environmental groups who are concerned that the satellites will unleash intrusive light pollution. From the report: The approval is only for one satellite, dubbed Earendil-1, wh
  
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• China Lands Rocket During an Orbital Launch For First Time

  11-07-2026 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  China successfully recovered an orbital rocket booster for the first time, landing the Long March 10B's first stage into a net-equipped sea platform after its maiden launch. "This mission marks my country's first successful controlled recovery of a launch vehicle and the world's first network-based recovery of a launch vehicle," the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced via social media shortly after the launch. (Translation by Google.) "It signifies a historic brea
  
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• Apple Sues OpenAI, Accusing It of Stealing Company Secrets

  11-07-2026 05:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing secrets about products still in development, setting up a legal face-off between two of the world's biggest tech companies. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the consumer tech giant said that OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence that has a new hardware business, had asked job candidates from Apple to share details about secret projects an
  
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• Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI To Cheat

  11-07-2026 01:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Inside Higher Ed: For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so "it was appropriate," he said, to allow stude
  
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• Russia Hacks Doorbell Cameras To Spy On NATO Bases

  11-07-2026 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Dutch intelligence agencies say Russian hackers have been hijacking unsecured internet-connected cameras, including likely doorbell and security cameras, to spy on NATO military bases and transport routes used to move weapons to Ukraine. "Organisations with IP [internet protocol] cameras on these routes have now been warned so that they could take action," said the AIVD domestic security and MIVD military intelligence agencies. Targeted NATO member states include the Netherlands and Ukraine. The
  
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• Feds Demand Autonomous Vehicle Companies Stop Interfering With First Responders

  10-07-2026 23:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  NHTSA is ordering autonomous vehicle developers to explain by the end of the month how they will stop driverless cars from interfering with police, firefighters, and paramedics. TechCrunch reports: [NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison] noted in the letter (PDF) that the agency has "identified a clear pattern of driverless AVs interfering with law enforcement and other first responders," citing instances in which these vehicles drove into active emergency scenes, blocked the paths of ambulances
  
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• NYC To Become First In US To Ban Deceptive Subscription Practices

  10-07-2026 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  On October 1st, New York City will become the first U.S. city to ban deceptive subscription practices, requiring companies to offer simple cancellation options or face fines of $525 per user subscription, back fees, and additional penalties. The Mamdani administration is also proposing a junk-fee rule requiring sellers, landlords, hotels, and other businesses to "advertise the total price for any good or service, including all mandatory additional charges and fees, up front." The Guardian report
  
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• Disable Autoplay and Infinite Scroll Or Risk Massive Fines, EU Tells Meta

  10-07-2026 21:00 via meta.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Union is ramping up pressure on Meta to make big changes to Facebook and Instagram after the European Commission preliminarily found that features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and highly personalized content recommendations were addictive. On Thursday, the EC said its investigation indicated that "Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors a
  
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• Disney+ Explores a Free Tier As YouTube Draws TV Viewers

  10-07-2026 20:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Disney is exploring a free tier for Disney+ that would make some content available without a subscription. According to Nielsen data, the three largest free streamers accounted for 18.7% of watch time on U.S. TVs in April, up from 16.8% a year earlier and 12.7% in April 2024. Business Insider reports: Product and tech chief Adam Smith spoke about enabling free-tier content during a streaming town hall on Thursday afternoon, one staffer said. Smith didn't share a timeline for this initiative or a
  
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