ICT news

• Microsoft Disables MSIX Protocol Handler Abused in Malware Attacks

  29-12-2023 22:20 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has again disabled the MSIX ms-appinstaller protocol handler after multiple financially motivated threat groups abused it to infect Windows users with malware. From a report: The attackers exploited the CVE-2021-43890 Windows AppX Installer spoofing vulnerability to circumvent security measures that would otherwise protect Windows users from malware, such as the Defender SmartScreen anti-phishing and anti-malware component and built-in browser alerts cautioning users against executable
  
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• US Particle Accelerators Turn Nuclear Waste Into Electricity, Cut Radioactive Life By 99.7%

  21-02-2026 08:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. "The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce additional electricity for the grid," reports Interesting Engineering. The projects are supported by $8.17 million in grants from the Department of Energy's NEWTON (Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimi
  
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• NASA Eyes March 6 To Launch 4 Astronauts To the Moon On Artemis II Mission

  21-02-2026 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That's the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida."This is really getting real," says Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator of NASA's exploration systems development mission directorate
  
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• Fury Over Discord's Age Checks Explodes After Shady Persona Test In UK

  21-02-2026 03:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  Backlash intensified against Discord's age verification rollout after it briefly disclosed a UK age-verification test involving vendor Persona, contradicting earlier claims about minimal ID storage and transparency. Ars Technica explains: One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that Discord would be so bold so soon after a third-party breach of a former age check partner's services recentl
  
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• Pinterest Is Drowning in a Sea of AI Slop and Auto-Moderation

  21-02-2026 02:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  Users say Pinterest has become flooded with AI-generated images and heavy-handed automated moderation, with artists reporting wrongful takedowns and their hand-drawn work mislabeled as "AI modified." As the company doubles down on AI features and layoffs, longtime users argue the platform's creative ecosystem is being undermined. 404 Media reports: "I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest]," artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. "Along
  
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• Meta's Metaverse Leaves Virtual Reality

  21-02-2026 01:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta is pivoting Horizon Worlds away from its original VR-centric metaverse vision and toward a mobile-first strategy, "explicitly separating" its Quest VR platform from the virtual world. TechCrunch reports: By going mobile-first, Horizon Worlds is positioning itself to compete with popular platforms like Roblox and Fortnite. "We're in a strong position to deliver synchronous social games at scale, thanks to our unique ability to connect those games with billions of people on the world's bigges
  
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• Cyber Stocks Slide As Anthropic Unveils 'Claude Code Security'

  21-02-2026 01:02 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint shed 6.8%, and Okta declined 5.7%. The Global X Cybersecurity ETF fell as much as 3.8%, extending its losses on the year to 14%.Anthropic said th
  
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• Goldman Sachs Launches AI-Free Index

  21-02-2026 00:20 via news.slashdot.org
  Goldman Sachs has launched an "S&P ex-AI" index (SPXXAI) that tracks the S&P 500 stocks not related to AI, offering investors a way to "hedge their exposure to the AI trade," reports Axios. From the report: "Excluding 'AI enablers' from the passive benchmark would eliminate the noise introduced by the AI hype," Louis Miller, head of the firm's equity custom basket desk, wrote in a note to clients about the new index.The ex-AI index is a compilation of all the stocks in the S&P 500 th
  
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• Wikipedia Blacklists Archive.today, Starts Removing 695,000 Archive Links

  20-02-2026 23:40 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog. In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations we
  
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• Phil Spencer Retiring After 38 Years At Microsoft

  20-02-2026 23:00 via games.slashdot.org
  Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the company. "Meanwhile, Xbox President Sarah Bond, "long thought by many both inside and outside of Microsoft to be Spencer's heir apparent, has resigned," reports IGN. From the report: The new CEO of Microsoft Gaming will be Asha Sharma, currently the President of Microsoft's CoreAI product. Finally, Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty is being promoted to Chief Content Officer and will work closely wi
  
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• Microsoft Deletes Blog Telling Users To Train AI on Pirated Harry Potter Books

  20-02-2026 22:20 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset -- incorrectly marked as public domain -- and use them to train AI models on the company's Azure platform.
  The blog, written in November 2024 by senior product manager Pooja Kamath, walked users through building Q&A systems and generating fan fiction using the copyrighted texts, and even included a Microsoft-brande
  
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• OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns

  20-02-2026 21:44 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy.
  The company claims 800-900 million weekly active user
  
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• Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves 'AI Builders'

  20-02-2026 21:05 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote.
  Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and s
  
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• AMC Theatres Will Refuse To Screen AI Short Film After Online Uproar

  20-02-2026 20:25 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content.
  The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize p
  
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• How Streaming Became Cable TV's Unlikely Life Raft

  20-02-2026 19:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Cable TV providers have spent the past decade losing tens of millions of households to streaming services, but companies like Charter Communications are now slowing that exodus by bundling the very apps that once threatened to replace them.
  Charter added 44,000 net video subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first growth in that count since 2020, after integrating Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ directly into Spectrum cable packages -- a deal that grew out of a contentious 2023 contract disput
  
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• PayPal Discloses Data Breach That Exposed User Info For 6 Months

  20-02-2026 19:00 via slashdot.org
  PayPal is notifying customers of a data breach after a software error in a loan application exposed their sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, for nearly 6 months last year. From a report: The incident affected the PayPal Working Capital (PPWC) loan app, which provides small businesses with quick access to financing. PayPal discovered the breach on December 12, 2025, and determined that customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, business addresses, Social Sec
  
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• HSBC To Investors: If India Couldn't Build an Enterprise Software Challenger, Neither Can AI

  20-02-2026 18:20 via it.slashdot.org
  India's IT services giants have spent decades deploying, customizing, and maintaining the world's largest enterprise software platforms, putting hundreds of thousands of engineers in daily contact with the business logic and proprietary architectures of vendors like SAP and Oracle. None of them have built a competing product that gained meaningful traction against the U.S. incumbents, HSBC said in a note to clients, using this history to argue AI-generated code faces the same structural barriers
  
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• Email Blunder Exposes $90 Billion Russian Oil Smuggling Ring

  20-02-2026 17:05 via it.slashdot.org
  schwit1 writes: An IT blunder has revealed an apparent smuggling ring that has moved at least $90bn of Russian oil and is playing a central role in funding the Kremlin's war in Ukraine. Financial Times has identified 48 seemingly independent companies working from different physical addresses that appear to be operating together to disguise the origin of Russian oil, particularly from Kremlin-controlled Rosneft. The network was discovered because they all share a single private email server. The
  
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• US Supreme Court Rejects Trump's Global Tariffs

  20-02-2026 16:29 via yro.slashdot.org
  The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on Friday President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs that he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies, rejecting one of his most contentious assertions of his authority in a ruling with major implications for the global economy. From a report: The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld a lower court's decision that the Republican president's use of this 1977 law exceeded his authority.
  The court rul
  
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• Amazon Service Was Taken Down By AI Coding Bot

  20-02-2026 15:40 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools [non-paywalled source], leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants.
  Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.
  The pe
  
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• How Private Equity Debt Left a Leading VPN Open To Chinese Hackers

  20-02-2026 14:00 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In early 2024, the agency that oversees cybersecurity for much of the US government issued a rare emergency order -- disconnect your Connect Secure virtual private network software immediately. Chinese spies had hacked the code and infiltrated nearly two dozen organizations. The directive applied to all civilian federal agencies, but given the product's customer base, its impact was more widely felt. The software, which is made by Ivanti Inc.,
  
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• New York Drops Plan To Legalize Robotaxis Outside NYC

  20-02-2026 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  New York Governor Kathy Hochul has dropped a proposal that would have allowed limited commercial robotaxi deployments outside New York City, citing a lack of support among state legislators. "The move is a blow to Waymo and other robotaxi companies who saw New York, and especially New York City, as a potential goldmine," reports The Verge. From the report: The plan, which was introduced by Hochul as part of the state's budget proposal last month, would have allowed limited robotaxi deployment in
  
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• NASA Chief Classifies Starliner Flight As 'Type A' Mishap, Says Agency Made Mistakes

  20-02-2026 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  NASA has officially classified Boeing Starliner's 2024 crewed flight as a "Type A" mishap, acknowledging serious technical failures and leadership shortcomings that nearly left astronauts unable to safely return. Administrator Jared Isaacman released (PDF) a 311-page internal report citing flawed decision-making and cultural issues, with the next Starliner flight now planned as uncrewed pending major fixes. Ars Technica reports: As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent
  
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• Trump Directs US Government To Prepare Release of Files on Aliens and UFOs

  20-02-2026 06:00 via news.slashdot.org
  US President Donald Trump says he will direct US agencies, including the defence department, to "begin the process of identifying and releasing" government files on aliens and extraterrestrial life. From a report: Trump made the declaration in a post on Truth Social, after he accused Barack Obama earlier in the day of revealing classified information when the former president said "aliens are real" on a podcast last week. "He's not supposed to be doing that," Trump told reporters aboard Air Forc
  
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• Newborn Chicks Connect Sounds With Shapes Just Like Humans, Study Finds

  20-02-2026 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Why does "bouba" sound round and "kiki" sound spiky? This intuition that ties certain sounds to shapes is oddly reliable all over the world, and for at least a century, scientists have considered it a clue to the origin of language, theorizing that maybe our ancestors built their first words upon these instinctive associations between sound and meaning. But now a new study adds an unexpected twist: baby chickens make these same sound-
  
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• US Plans Online Portal To Bypass Content Bans In Europe and Elsewhere

  20-02-2026 03:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, "including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda," reports Reuters. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. Reuters reports: One source said officials had discussed including a virtual private network function to make a user's traffic appear to originate in the U.S. and added that user activity on the site w
  
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• California's New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves

  20-02-2026 02:25 via hardware.slashdot.org
  California's recently-proposed AB-2047 would require 3D printers sold in the state to be DOJ-approved models equipped with "firearm blocking technology," banning non-certified machines after 2029 and criminalizing efforts to bypass the software. Adafruit notes that unlike similar legislation proposed in Washington State and New York, California's version "adds a certification bureaucracy on top: state-approved algorithms, state-approved software control processes, state-approved printer models,
  
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• Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro For 'Complex Problem-Solving'

  20-02-2026 01:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro "represents a step forward in core reasoning." The "upgraded core intelligence" that debuted last week with Gemini 3 Deep Think is now available in Gemini 3.1
  
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• OpenClaw Security Fears Lead Meta, Other AI Firms To Restrict Its Use

  20-02-2026 01:02 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. "You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment," he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. "Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts." Grad isn't the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic
  
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• Minecraft Java Is Switching From OpenGL To Vulkan

  20-02-2026 00:20 via developers.slashdot.org
  Minecraft: Java Edition is switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports: For modders, they're suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: "Switching from OpenGL to Vulkan will have an impact on the mods that currently use OpenGL for rendering, and we anticipate that up
  
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