ICT news

• Microsoft Accidentally Breaks Replying To an Email On Outlook

  23-06-2026 01:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has accidentally introduced a bug in Outlook for Mac that omits the original message from email replies, making it difficult for recipients to follow conversation history. Until Microsoft releases a fix, its suggested workaround is to roll back from version 16.110 and disable automatic updates, which is "great for users in full control of their devices -- not so good for anyone with a managed device," notes The Register. "Administrators with fleets of Macs running Outlook should brace
  
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• NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Arrives In Florida

  23-06-2026 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has arrived at Kennedy Space Center ahead of a Falcon Heavy launch targeted for no earlier than August 30. The observatory will survey the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble with a field of view at least 100 times wider, helping scientists study dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets. Spaceflight Now reports: NASA's next great observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, arrived at the Kennedy Space Center aboard the agency's massive Pegasu
  
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• GM Installs Robots At Flagship EV Factory After Laying Off 1,300 Workers

  23-06-2026 05:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dozens of new robot arms have been installed at General Motors' flagship electric vehicle factory in Detroit -- even as 1,300 workers remain out of work following what was supposed to be a temporary layoff. The latest automation push has spurred union pushback over a potentially existential issue for automakers and their workers. General Motors installed approximately 50 robot arms at GM's Factory Zero plant in Detroit, Michigan, according t
  
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• Following User Outcry, AMD Reinstates Memory Encryption In Consumer CPUs

  23-06-2026 00:00 via it.slashdot.org
  Last week, AMD was found to have stripped memory encryption from its consumer CPUs without any warning or notice. Now, following a wave of backlash on social media, the chipmaker has now reinstated the protection, though it still hasn't explained why the safeguard was disabled in the first place. Ars Technica reports: Following the revelation, social media was deluged by comments from AMD consumers decrying the move. They noted that AMD's quiet removal of TSME after supporting it for so long see
  
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• Valve Will Finally Let You Build Your Own Steam Machine With SteamOS For Desktop

  22-06-2026 23:00 via games.slashdot.org
  With the price of the new Steam Machine starting at $1,049, you might want to consider making your own Steam Machine instead. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve says that "starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want." SteamOS 3.8.10 launched last week with a slew of updates, including "improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms." Alongside that improved compatibility, Valve is giving ga
  
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• Google Invests $75 Million In A24 To Develop AI-Powered Filmmaking Tools

  22-06-2026 22:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Google is investing roughly $75 million in A24 as part of a research partnership with DeepMind to develop AI-powered filmmaking tools and workflows. "The deal represents the latest marriage between a Hollywood studio and AI in an era where companies have oscillated between partnerships and lawsuits," reports Variety. From the report: A24 partner Scott Belsky, who leads the studio's technology division A24 Labs, told the Journal the studio's Google partnership differed from other deals because AI
  
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• Some Electricians Think Building Data Centers Is For Sellouts

  22-06-2026 21:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As Big Tech dumps billions of dollars into America's data center buildout, a slew of opportunities have opened up to the electricians wiring these massive facilities. In some cases, the scale of the projects and the demanding construction timelines are fueling talent wars for the industry's best and brightest. The US-based International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has argued that its workers are "powering the AI Revolution," and a set
  
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• Valve Prices the Steam Machine At $1,049

  22-06-2026 20:00 via games.slashdot.org
  Valve's new Steam Machine will launch June 29 starting at $1,049 and go up from there depending on the configuration. Although it costs considerably more than the PS5 ($599.99) and Xbox Series X ($649.99), "the value proposition for the Steam Machine is that it can play your library of Steam games you may have accumulated over years (or even decades), rather than just PlayStation games, and it's also a full Linux PC that you can customize to your heart's content," reports The Verge. "Valve also
  
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• AI Law Firm Wins UK Court Case For First Time

  22-06-2026 19:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Garfield AI, the UK's first regulator-approved AI law firm, has won its first court case after helping a freelancer recover 7,000 pounds in unpaid fees. "I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming," said Tamires Camal Taquidir, a freelancer who had provided HR-related services to a hospitality business. "Garfield made it possible for me to pursue the claim and keep going. When the counterclaim was broug
  
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• 2,000 Retired Google Pixel Phones Get a Second Life As a Private Cloud

  22-06-2026 18:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  UC San Diego researchers are working with Google to build a private cloud from 2,000 retired Pixel Fold motherboards, demonstrating how discarded smartphones could provide useful, low-cost computing capacity. "The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall," reports The Register. "Depending on how well the initial phase goes, we're told the cluster could grow even larger." From the report Once the phone's motherboards have been extracted from their shells, the researchers say that t
  
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• Ubisoft Co-Founder Claude Guillemot Dies In Plane Crash

  22-06-2026 17:00 via games.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Claude Guillemot, co-founder of French video game company Ubisoft, died Friday at the age of 69. According to French media (via Bloomberg), Guillemot died in a plane crash in the French resort town of La Baule. He was one of two people aboard the plane, both of whom died.Guillemot founded Ubisoft with his four brothers in 1986. Since then, the company has published the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, and Tom Clancy video game fran
  
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• Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their Prison Recidivism Crisis

  22-06-2026 13:34 via news.slashdot.org
  America's state prison systems need ways "to keep people from returning to prison," reports the Wall Street Journal, "when an estimated 40% end up back behind bars within three years."Part of the problem comes in the form of filing cabinets, manila folders and legacy digital databases. In other words, records for a single prisoner might be kept in a dozen places... Now a group of 19 prison systems are tackling the problem with digital tools and artificial intelligence in some cases. They are con
  
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• 'Tutor' Who Took Online Tests for 124 Students Jailed for Three Years

  22-06-2026 09:34 via news.slashdot.org
  A private tutor who charged money to take dozens of exams for students and submit coursework for them "has been jailed for three years," reports the BBC, "after his scam earned him £300,000."Shahid Adnan completed assignments and online tests for more than 120 students at Liverpool John Moore's University, the Crown Prosecution Service said. The 43-year-old, of Lysander Close, Liverpool, was caught in February 2023 after a student handed in a USB drive containing suspicious coursework to D
  
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• TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds

  22-06-2026 05:48 via tech.slashdot.org
  "About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account's For You feed are AI slop," writes Search Engine Journal, "according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That's roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube."The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, counting AI-generated content in the first 500 For You videos. Kapwing ran the same fresh-account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the f
  
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• Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field

  22-06-2026 03:48 via linux.slashdot.org
  The blog Linuxiac reports:
  A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd's recently added support for storing a user's birth date in JSON user records.
  The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverting the change that added the new optional birthDate field.
  Importantly, this is not a new init system, a wider redesign of systemd
  
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• The Secret Revolution in Battery Technology: 3-D Printing

  22-06-2026 01:27 via hardware.slashdot.org
  "There's a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device.
  "This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots."
  Almost all the innovations we regularly hear about — from cheaper, tougher electric-vehicle batteries to "Holy Grail" solid-state batteries — are about changing the chemistry of
  
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• Is Tesla Planning To Sell Modular AI Data Center Hardware?

  21-06-2026 23:55 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Electrek reports:Tesla wants to sell modular AI data center hardware, according to a new trademark application for a product called "Megapod." The filing describes a complete, self-contained computing system for AI workloads...
  Tesla filed the "Megapod" trademark (serial number 99893717) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month, through its longtime IP counsel. It's an intent-to-use application, meaning Tesla is claiming the name for a product it hasn't launched yet. The goods-and-se
  
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• UK Official Promises Statements 'Around VPNs' and Further Teen Restrictions on Chatbots and Social Media

  21-06-2026 22:54 via news.slashdot.org
  PC Gamer reports:The UK government is considering an Australia-style ban on social media for under-16s, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying that the ban could take effect as soon as spring next year. As for the much nearer future, Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told BBC Breakfast earlier this week, "We will make further statements in July about VPNs and further restrictions."
  To be clear, no specific restrictions have yet been announced and Kendall sounded somewhat cautious abo
  
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• Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock's Cameras to Stalk People

  21-06-2026 21:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  404 Media remembers how a Florida police office looked up his ex-girlfriend's license plate in the Flock automated license plate reader system at least 69 times in 2024 — even searching for her mom's license plate at least 24 times. The police office was charged with stalking and hacking-related offenses, serving one day in prison with five years of probation — but his case "was not a one-off." [Alternate link via Bruce Schneier]Local news reports from around the country repeatedly d
  
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• After Six Years Of Work and Over 360 Patches, Linux 7.2 Finally Removes Bug-Prone strncpy

  21-06-2026 20:12 via linux.slashdot.org
  Tech Times reports:Linux 7.2's merge window closed out a cleanup campaign on Friday that most kernel developers had stopped expecting to see end: the complete removal of strncpy(), a C string-copy function that the kernel's own documentation labels "actively dangerous," from every subsystem, driver, and architecture-specific file in the kernel source tree.
  The merge landed June 20, 2026. After around 362 commits spread across six years of incremental work, no call site using the function remaine
  
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• US Bill Would Mandate AI Chip Location Tracking to Thwart China and Other Adversaries

  21-06-2026 18:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  NBC News reports:
  A group of companies that specialize in tracking international shipments of sensitive technologies is backing a Capitol Hill bill that would require America's most powerful AI chips to incorporate stronger security mechanisms aimed at preventing the chips from reaching China and other adversaries. The letter, signed by six companies, says the Chip Security Act (CSA) would increase American chip companies' competitiveness and close key loopholes in the U.S. export control regime
  
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• The Rust Ecosystem Gets an AI Security Engineer in Residence

  21-06-2026 17:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  While the Rust Foundation has a Security Initiative to protect its ecosystem, "the threats have expanded," they announced this week, "and so has the kind of help maintainers need."Much of this comes back to a single shift: Automated tooling (much of it now built on large language models) has gotten good enough to surface real vulnerabilities in open source code quickly and at scale. That is useful, and several large Rust projects have already received and fixed credible issues found this way. Th
  
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• Canonical's Upcoming AI Tool: Talk to Ubuntu Instead of Typing

  21-06-2026 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  This week the Ubuntu desktop's director of engineering announced they're bringing speech-to-text dictation to Ubuntu Desktop, aiming for an experience "that feels like a natural part of the desktop while respecting user privacy and running entirely on local hardware."
  "Speech recognition has become a common feature on modern platforms, and we think it should be a first-class experience on Ubuntu Desktop as well."
  More details from the blog It's FOSS:
  For Ubuntu 26.10, the initial version of Myna
  
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• New Super PAC Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI: 'the Guardrails Alliance'

  21-06-2026 13:34 via politics.slashdot.org
  "A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers who are demanding their companies develop and deploy AI responsibly," reports TechCrunch.
  Hoping to leverage that discontent is a new super PAC called the Guardrails Alliance. The New York Times reports that it launched Thursday with backers that included tech employees and labor unions:Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom. The PAC has abou
  
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• Facial Recognition on Public Buses? Kansas City Says Yes

  21-06-2026 09:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
  Officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are preparing to equip cameras on some public buses with facial recognition software capable of identifying passengers who appear on a list of banned riders or missing persons. Supporters and opponents alike view the effort as a major litmus test for tapping the AI-powered software on a U.S. public transportation system, positioning Kansas City as the latest epicenter of a fierce debate over whe
  
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• Polymarket Paid Dozens to Post Videos of Themselves 'Winning' With Fake Bets

  21-06-2026 06:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  In January a college student posted a video showing him winning $100,000 on Polymarket — one of 145 that appeared to show bets adding up to almost $410,000, reports the Wall Street Journal. "But none of those bets were real."
  Instead its creator was "one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins," the Journal reports, citing interviews with the creators an an analysis of more than 1,100 of their videos:Pol
  
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• Gamers Sue PlayStation: It's Not Clear They're Selling Licenses Rather Than Ownership of Games

  21-06-2026 03:34 via games.slashdot.org
  The gaming news site Aftermath reports:Four gamers are suing Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking a California law that requires digital storefronts selling games to make it clear people are buying licenses, not actually owning the games.
  Sony Interactive Entertainment's PlayStation store uses language like "Buy Now" and "Confirm Purchase," lawyers wrote in a complaint filed on Thursday... "In reality, consumers who 'purchase' digital games through PlayStation do not obtain owne
  
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• How Millions of Digital Home Devices Are Secretly Powering Cyberattacks

  21-06-2026 01:23 via it.slashdot.org
  The Wall Street Journal reports on internet-connected devices — and how every year millions of them "can contain a secret digital backdoor that opens up access to your home internet, so that anyone... can surf the web as if they were you." (And this is especially true for "knockoffs that you buy online"...)
  In a video report this week they tested two digital picture frames from Amazon and three streaming devices from Walmart "because we heard that they often ship with backdoor software use
  
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• OpenAI Announces Benchmarks for AI Life Sciences Research. Its Best Model Failed 63.9% of the Test

  20-06-2026 23:34 via science.slashdot.org
  This week OpenAI announced a 750-task test to to measure "whether AI systems can support realistic life science research tasks, not just answer biology questions."
  But while OpenAI's top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, Slashdot reader BrianFagioli notes that "it achieved a pass rate of just 36.1 percent, failing nearly two-thirds of benchmark tasks." Nerds.xyz points out that means "the best-performing model failed nearly two-thirds of the benchmark's tasks."
  The benchmark also r
  
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• Remembering When Alan Turing Developed a Portable Voice Encryption Device

  20-06-2026 22:34 via it.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording. "Weighing j
  
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