ICT news

• Never-Before-Seen Linux Malware Is 'Far More Advanced Than Typical'

  14-01-2026 14:00 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen framework that infects Linux machines with a wide assortment of modules that are notable for the range of advanced capabilities they provide to attackers. The framework, referred to as VoidLink by its source code, features more than 30 modules that can be used to customize capabilities to meet attackers' needs for each infected machine. These modules can provide additional stealth and specific
  
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• 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
  
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• 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,
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• '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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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 (
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• 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
  
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• Union Contract with Microsoft Ratified by 1,900 Blizzard Developers and Workers

  14-09-2026 13:34 via games.slashdot.org
  Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," reports Kotaku, "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units."
  The workers now gain new protections "on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs."
  [The contract] acknowledges that AI tools "may be useful in the game development process to support human judgment and creativity and that
  
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• Should US Open-Weight AI Labs 'Distill' Frontier Models Too?

  14-09-2026 09:04 via news.slashdot.org
  Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime."Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, sometimes illicitly... Anthropic has accused Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax o
  
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• 220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak

  14-09-2026 04:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials. It was later secured after the disclosure, but it's unclear whether the data had already been copied or abused.
  
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• NASA and IBM Open Source Lunar Mapping Tools

  14-09-2026 00:04 via science.slashdot.org
  NASA and IBM have released an open-source AI model trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. "The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the global research community can build on," said IBM director of research for Europe, Juan Bernabe-Moreno. The Register
  
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• California's Gig Drivers Just Secured Collective Bargaining Power with Newly Certified Union

  13-09-2026 19:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  A union representing Uber and Lyft drivers was just certified by California's Public Employment Relations Board, officially recognizing them as the drivers' bargaining organization.The Sacramento Bee reports that this new bargaining structure :
  The move will allow the California Gig Workers Union to help drivers negotiate issues affecting working conditions and benefits. It comes as at least 30% of active drivers expressed support of the union... [California] Assembly Bill 1340 helped bring the
  
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• Flock Worker Calls Police On Reporter - For Filming Them in Public

  13-09-2026 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  "This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads," says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter "parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo of InvestigateTV's Atlanta affiliate where he also works, displayed a press placard on his dashboard and then pulled out a camera to record the installatio
  
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