ICT news

• QR-Style Codes Could Replace Barcodes 'Within Two Years'

  31-12-2024 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Traditional barcodes are set to be replaced by next-generation QR-style codes by 2027, offering enhanced functionality such as embedding sell-by dates, allergens, and recycling information. The Guardian reports: Tesco has started using them on some products, and other trials have suggested that waste of perishable food such as poultry can be cut by embedding sell-by dates in the new QR-style codes, allowing for more dynamic discounting. QR (quick response) codes will allow customers to instantly
  
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• Iceland is Planning For the Possibility That Its Climate Could Become Uninhabitable

  11-02-2026 04:45 via news.slashdot.org
  Iceland in October classified the potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation -- the ocean current system that ferries warm water northward from the tropics and essentially functions as the country's central heating -- as a national security risk, a designation that amounts to a formal reckoning with the possibility that climate change could render the island nation uninhabitable.
  Several recent studies have found the AMOC far more vulnerable to breakdown than scientist
  
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• ByteDance Suspends Seedance 2 Feature That Turns Facial Photos Into Personal Voices Over Potential Risks

  11-02-2026 02:45 via yro.slashdot.org
  hackingbear writes: China's Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve files. Generated videos run between 4 and 15 [or 60] seconds long and automatically come with sound effects or music.
  Its performance is unfortunately so good that it has forced the firm to block its facial-to-voice feature after the
  
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• White House Eyes Data Center Agreements Amid Energy Price Spikes

  10-02-2026 23:45 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants some of the world's largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
  A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lays out commitments designed to ensure energy-hungry data centers do not raise household electricity prices, strain water supplies or undermine grid reliabili
  
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• Lost Soviet Moon Lander May Have Been Found

  10-02-2026 22:00 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1966, a beach-ball-size robot bounced across the moon. Once it rolled to a stop, its four petal-like covers opened, exposing a camera that sent back the first picture taken on the surface of another world. This was Luna 9, the Soviet lander that was the earliest spacecraft to safely touchdown on the moon. While it paved the way toward interplanetary exploration, Luna 9's precise whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since.
  That may soon change. Two rese
  
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• Google's Personal Data Removal Tool Now Covers Government IDs

  10-02-2026 21:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google on Tuesday expanded its "Results about you" tool to let users request the removal of Search results containing government-issued ID numbers -- including driver's licenses, passports and Social Security numbers -- adding to the tool's existing ability to flag results that surface phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses.
  The update, announced on Safer Internet Day, is rolling out in the U.S. over the coming days. Google also streamlined its process for reporting non-consensual ex
  
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• The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline

  10-02-2026 20:01 via news.slashdot.org
  The U.S., whose population the Census Bureau did not expect to start shrinking until 2081, may record its first-ever decline as early as this year because of the Trump administration's accelerating immigration crackdown. Census data released in late January showed US population growth slowed to just 0.5% in the year prior to July 2025 -- the lowest rate since the pandemic -- as net migration fell to 1.3 million from a peak of 2.7 million the year before.
  Census experts now expect net migration t
  
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• Microsoft Begins the First-Ever Secure Boot Certificate Swap Across Windows Ecosystem

  10-02-2026 19:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has begun automatically replacing the original Secure Boot security certificates on Windows devices through regular monthly updates, a necessary move given that the 15-year-old certificates first issued in 2011 are set to expire between late June and October 2026.
  Secure Boot, which verifies that only trusted and digitally signed software runs before Windows loads, became a hardware requirement for Windows 11. A new batch of certificates was issued in 2023 and already ships on most PCs
  
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• A Bitcoin Blunder for the Ages: $40 Billion Accidentally Given Away

  10-02-2026 18:00 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The hundreds of prize payouts were mostly just a few bucks each, part of a promotional campaign by a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange. The total reward pot: 620,000 Korean won, or about $425. Then came a colossal mistake. A staffer for Bithumb, South Korea's No. 2 crypto exchange, didn't distribute 620,000 Korean won. Rather, the prizes, due to an input error, emerged in a different currency: 620,000 bitcoins, valued at more than $40 billion.
  That meant a
  
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• Apple and Google Agree To Change App Stores After 'Effective Duopoly' Claim

  10-02-2026 17:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple and Google have agreed to a set of commitments to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority that will prevent them from giving preferential treatment to their own apps and require greater transparency around how third-party apps are approved for sale.
  The CMA announced the measures on Tuesday, seven months after it declared that the two companies held an "effective duopoly" over the UK's mobile app ecosystem. Both companies also committed to not using data gathered from third-party develo
  
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• The Big Money in Today's Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor

  10-02-2026 16:00 via slashdot.org
  The American economy's most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers -- and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.
  Labor received 58% of gross domestic income in 1980; by the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 51.4%. Corporate profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the sam
  
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• NYC Private School Tuition Breaks $70,000 Milestone for Fall

  10-02-2026 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The top private schools in New York City plan to charge more than $70,000 this year for tuition, an amount exceeding that of many elite colleges, as they pass on the costs of soaring expenses including teacher salaries. From a report: Spence School, Dalton School and Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan's Upper East Side are among at least seven schools where the fees now exceed that threshold, according to school disclosures and Bloomberg reporting
  Fees among 15 private schools across the ci
  
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• Software Poses 'All-Time' Risk To Speculative Credit, Deutsche Bank Warns

  10-02-2026 13:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  The software and technology sectors pose one of the all-time great concentration risks to the speculative-grade credit market, according to Deutsche Bank AG analysts. Bloomberg: They comprise $597 billion and $681 billion of the speculative-grade credit universe, or about 14% and 16% respectively, analysts led by Steve Caprio wrote in a Monday note. Speculative debt spans high-yield debt, leveraged loans and US private credit.
  That's "a meaningful chunk of debt outstanding that risks souring bro
  
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• 2 To 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It's Decaf.

  10-02-2026 10:01 via science.slashdot.org
  If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea -- if it's caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily.
  People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 13
  
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• Deepfake Fraud Taking Place On an Industrial Scale, Study Finds

  10-02-2026 07:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  Deepfake fraud has gone "industrial," an analysis published by AI experts has said. From a report: Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams -- leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus -- are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.
  It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of "impersonation for profit," including a deepfake video of Western Australia's premier,
  
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• Electric Cars Are Making It Easier To Breathe, Study Finds

  10-02-2026 04:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: It turns out that when fewer cars spew exhaust as they drive along, air quality improves. That's the conclusion of a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health that looked at the effect of increased numbers of both EVs and plug-in hybrids on air pollution in California. The Golden State has by far the largest number of plug-in vehicles in the United States, and they've now reached significant numbers to have a positive impact on air quality.
  Between 2
  
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• Kalshi Prediction Markets Match or Beat Traditional Forecasting Tools For Macro Indicators, NBER Study Finds

  10-02-2026 02:45 via slashdot.org
  A new NBER working paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve, Northwestern's Kellogg School and Johns Hopkins finds that Kalshi -- the largest federally regulated prediction market in the U.S., overseen by the CFTC -- produces macroeconomic forecasts that match or beat those of professional forecasters and traditional financial instruments like fed funds futures.
  The study compared Kalshi-implied forecasts for the federal funds rate, CPI inflation and unemployment against the New York Fed's
  
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• Linux 7.0 Kernel Confirmed By Linus Torvalds, Expected In Mid-April 2026

  09-02-2026 23:45 via linux.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has confirmed the next major kernel series as Linux 7.0, reports Linux news website 9to5Linux.com: "So there you have it, the Linux 6.x era has ended with today's Linux 6.19 kernel release, and a new one will begin with Linux 7.0, which is expected in mid-April 2026. The merge window for Linux 7.0 will open tomorrow, February 9th, and the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone is expected on February 22nd, 2026."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• OpenAI Starts Running Ads in ChatGPT

  09-02-2026 22:00 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as "sponsored" and visually separated from ChatGPT's organic responses.
  OpenAI says the ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers, and advertisers receive only
  
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• Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch

  09-02-2026 21:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures.
  The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost about $20,000 in API fees. Each instance operated inside its own Docker container, independently claiming tasks via lock files and pu
  
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• Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don't Know It Yet

  09-02-2026 20:01 via news.slashdot.org
  The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases -- has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Ant
  
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• Autodesk Takes Google To Court Over AI Movie Software Named 'Flow'

  09-02-2026 19:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its "Flow" trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025.
  Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the same name -- then filed a trademark application in Tonga, where filings are not publicly accessible, before seeking U.S. protection.Read more of this story at
  
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• Google Lines Up 100-Year Sterling Bond Sale

  09-02-2026 18:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google's parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Monday and lining up a Swiss franc bond sale, the people said.
  Century bonds -- long-term borrowing at its most ex
  
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• Discord Will Require a Face Scan or ID for Full Access Next Month

  09-02-2026 17:01 via yro.slashdot.org
  Discord said today it's rolling out age verification on its platform globally starting next month, when it will automatically set all users' accounts to a "teen-appropriate" experience unless they demonstrate that they're adults. From a report: Users who aren't verified as adults will not be able to access age-restricted servers and channels, won't be able to speak in Discord's livestream-like "stage" channels, and will see content filters for any content Discord detects as graphic or sensitive.
  
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• AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China's Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US

  09-02-2026 16:14 via slashdot.org
  The AI boom has revived a workplace philosophy that China's own regulators cracked down on years ago: the 72-hour work week, known as 996 for its 9am-to-9pm, six-days-a-week cadence. US startups flush with venture capital are now openly advertising it as a feature, not a bug. Rilla, a New York-based AI company that monitors sales reps in the field, warns applicants on its careers page to expect roughly 70-hour weeks. Browser-Use, a seven-person startup building tools for AI-to-browser interactio
  
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• Age Bias is Still the Default at Work But the Data is Turning

  09-02-2026 15:12 via tech.slashdot.org
  A mounting body of research is making it harder for companies to justify what most of them still do -- push experienced workers out the door just as they're hitting their professional peak. A 2025 study published in the journal Intelligence analyzed 16 cognitive, emotional and personality dimensions and found that while processing speed declines after early adulthood, other capabilities -- including the ability to avoid distractions and accumulated knowledge -- continue to improve, putting peak
  
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• New Raspberry Pi 4 Model Splits RAM Across Dual Chips

  09-02-2026 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The blog OMG Ubuntu reports that a new version of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has been (quietly) introduced. "The key difference? It now uses a dual-RAM configuration."
  The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (PCB 13a) adopts a dual-RAM configuration to 'improve supply chain flexibility' and manufacturing efficiency, per a company product change notice document. Earlier versions of the Raspberry Pi 4 use a single RAM chip on the top of the board. The new revision adds a second LPDDR4 chip to the underside, wi
  
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• SpaceX Prioritizes Lunar 'Self-Growing City' Over Mars Project, Musk Says

  09-02-2026 09:34 via science.slashdot.org
  "Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX has shifted its focus to building a 'self-growing city' on the moon," reports Reuters, "which could be achieved in less than 10 years."
  SpaceX still intends to start on Musk's long-held ambition of a city on Mars within five to seven years, he wrote on his X social media platform, "but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster."
  Musk's comments echo a Wall Street Journal report on Friday, stating that SpaceX has to
  
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• National Football League Launches Challenge to Improve Facemasks and Reduce Concussions

  09-02-2026 06:34 via science.slashdot.org
  As Super Bowl Sunday comes to a close, America's National Football League "is challenging innovators to improve the facemask on football helmets to reduce concussions in the game," reports the Associated Press:
  The league announced on Friday at an innovation summit for the Super Bowl the next round in the HealthTECH Challenge series, a crowdsourced competition designed to accelerate the development of cutting-edge football helmets and new standards for player safety. The challenge invites invent
  
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• Carmakers Rush To Remove Chinese Code Under New US Rules

  09-02-2026 03:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  "How Chinese is your car?" asks the Wall Street Journal. "Automakers are racing to work it out."
  Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America's ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains. New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud, part of an effort to prevent cameras, microphones
  
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