ICT news

• RoboCrop: Teaching Robots How To Pick Tomatoes

  10-12-2025 11:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  alternative_right quotes a report from Phys.org: To teach robots how to become tomato pickers, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga, Graduate School of Engineering, programmed them to evaluate the ease of harvesting for each tomato before attempting to pick it. Fujinaga's new model uses image recognition paired with statistical analysis to evaluate the optimal approach direction for each fruit. The system involves image processing/vision of the fruit, its stems, and
  
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• Glaciers To Reach Peak Rate of Extinction In the Alps In Eight Years

  16-12-2025 08:00 via news.slashdot.org
  A new study warns that glaciers in the European Alps will hit their peak extinction rate within eight years, with global glacier loss accelerating toward thousands per year unless emissions are rapidly cut. "Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 disappearing each year by then," adds the Guardian. From the report: About 200,000 glaciers remain worldwide, with about 750 disappearing each year. However, the r
  
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• Microsoft Will Finally Kill Obsolete Cipher That Has Wrecked Decades of Havoc

  16-12-2025 04:30 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow adminis
  
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• Lidar-Maker Luminar Files For Bankruptcy

  16-12-2025 02:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  Once a star of the self-driving hype cycle, lidar maker Luminar has filed for bankruptcy amid legal turmoil, layoffs, and a cooling autonomous-vehicle market. It plans to sell off its assets before shutting down entirely. The Verge reports: As part of its bankruptcy, Luminar is seeking permission to sell both its lidar and semiconductor businesses, the latter of which it has already agreed to sell to Quantum Computing for $110 million. The company plans to continue to operate during the bankrupt
  
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• Google Search Homepage Adds a 'Plus' Menu

  16-12-2025 01:45 via search.slashdot.org
  After introducing an AI Mode shortcut earlier this year, Google has now added a new "plus" menu to its Search homepage, highlighting options for image and file uploads. 9to5Google reports: On google.com, the Search bar now has a plus icon at the far left that replaces the magnifying glass. Clicking lets you "Upload image" or "Upload file." It very much matches the AI Mode experience. Those two capabilities aren't new, but this plus menu does help emphasize that you can use Google to accomplish t
  
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• China, Iran Are Having a Field Day With React2Shell, Google Warns

  16-12-2025 01:02 via it.slashdot.org
  A critical React vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) is being actively exploited at scale by Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and criminal groups to gain remote code execution, deploy backdoors, and mine crypto. The Register reports: React maintainers disclosed the critical bug on December 3, and exploitation began almost immediately. According to Amazon's threat intel team, Chinese government crews, including Earth Lamia and Jackpot Panda, started battering the security hole within hours of its discl
  
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• JPMorgan Steps Further Into Crypto With Tokenized Money Fund

  16-12-2025 00:20 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: JPMorgan Chase is joining the list of traditional financial firms seeking to bring blockchain technology to an investing staple: the money-market fund. The banking giant's $4 trillion asset-management arm is rolling out its first tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. JPMorgan will seed the fund with $100 million of its own capital, and then open it to outside investors on Tuesday. Called My OnChain Net Yield Fund
  
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• Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year Is 'Slop'

  15-12-2025 23:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Merriam-Webster crowned "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting growing public awareness and and fatigue around low-quality, AI-generated content flooding the internet. "It's such an illustrative word," said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster's president. "It's part of a transformative technology, AI, and it's something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous." The Associated Press reports: "Slop" was first used in the 1700s to mean soft mud, but it evolved more g
  
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• Ford Ends F-150 Lightning Production, Starts Battery Storage Business

  15-12-2025 23:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Ford has effectively pulled the plug on the all-electric F-150 Lightning, pivoting away from full-size BEV pickups toward hybrids, range-extended EVs (EREVs), and even data-center battery storage. Ars Technica reports: Ford's announcements today can't be said to have come out of the blue. Rumors of the F-150's demise have been circulating for more than a month, and last week SK On ended its joint venture with Ford that was building a pair of EV battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. We learne
  
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• Russian Ban On Roblox Gaming Platform Sparks Rare Protest

  15-12-2025 22:23 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Several dozen people protested on Sunday in the Siberian city of Tomsk against Russia's ban on U.S. children's gaming platform Roblox, a rare show of public dissent as popular irritation over the ban gains some momentum. In wartime Russia, censorship is extensive: Moscow blocks or restricts social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube while distributing its own narrative through a network of social media and
  
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• Verizon Refused To Unlock Man's iPhone, So He Sued the Carrier and Won

  15-12-2025 21:05 via tech.slashdot.org
  A Kansas man who sued Verizon in small claims court after the carrier refused to unlock his iPhone has won his case, scoring a small but meaningful victory against a company that retroactively applied a policy change to deny his unlock request.
  Patrick Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon's Straight Talk brand in February 2025, intending to pay for one month of service before switching the device to US Mobile. Under FCC rules dating back to a 2019 waiver, Verizon must unlock phones
  
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• Why Floods Threaten One of the Driest Places in the World

  15-12-2025 20:24 via news.slashdot.org
  One of the most water-scarce regions on Earth is now experiencing a dramatic atmospheric shift that's pushing moisture onto Oman's northern coast at rates more than 1.5 times the global average, according to a Washington Post investigation of global atmospheric data [non-paywalled source]. The change has turned extreme rainfall into a recurrent source of catastrophe across the Arabian Peninsula. In the 126 years between 1881 and 2007, just six hurricane-strength storms hit Oman or came within 60
  
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• Cloudflare Reveals How Bots and Governments Reshaped the Internet in 2025

  15-12-2025 19:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Cloudflare's sixth annual Year in Review report describes an internet increasingly shaped by two forces: automated traffic and government intervention, as global connectivity grew 19% year over year in 2025.
  Google's web crawler now dominates automated traffic, dwarfing other AI and indexing bots to become the single largest source of bot activity on the web. Nearly half of all major internet disruptions globally were linked to government actions, and civil society and non-profit organizations b
  
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• Google To Retire 'Dark Web Report' Tool That Scanned for Leaked User Data

  15-12-2025 19:06 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google has decided to retire its free dark web monitoring tool, saying it wasn't as helpful as the company hoped. From a report: In a support page, Google announced the discontinuation of the "dark web report" tool, two years after offering it as a free perk to Gmail users before expanding it more broadly. The feature worked by scanning for your email addresses to determine whether they had appeared in data breaches, which often circulate on Dark Web marketplaces. The tool could then alert you a
  
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• US Tech Force Aims To Recruit 1,000 Technologists

  15-12-2025 18:21 via news.slashdot.org
  The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March -- less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs.
  The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers and data scientists, paying between $150,000 and $200,000 annually. About 20 companies have signed on to participate, includ
  
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• Scientists Thought Parkinson's Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water

  15-12-2025 17:40 via science.slashdot.org
  For decades, Parkinson's disease research has overwhelmingly focused on genetics -- more than half of all research dollars in the past two decades flowed toward genomic studies -- but a growing body of evidence now points to something far more mundane as a primary culprit: contaminated drinking water.
  A landmark study by epidemiologist Sam Goldman compared Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where trichloroethylene (TCE) had contaminated the water supply for approximately 35 yea
  
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• How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device?

  15-12-2025 17:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world's most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a SNAP-19C portable generator containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239 -- the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb -- was left behind in October 1965 when a sudden blizzard forced climbers to retreat from Camp Four, just
  
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• Electricity Is Now Holding Back Growth Across the Global Economy

  15-12-2025 16:21 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Grid constraints that were once a hallmark of developing economies are now plaguing the world's richest nations, and new research from Bloomberg Economics finds that rising electricity system stress is directly hurting investment. The analysis examined all G20 countries and found that a one-standard-deviation increase in grid stress relative to a country's historical average lowers the investment share of GDP by around 0.33 percentage points -- a 1.5% to 2% hit to capital outlays.
  The Netherland
  
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• LG's Software Update Forces Microsoft Copilot Onto Smart TVs

  15-12-2025 15:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  LG smart TV owners discovered over the weekend that a recent webOS software update had quietly installed Microsoft Copilot on their devices, and the app cannot be uninstalled. Affected users report the feature appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain models, sitting alongside streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube.
  LG's support documentation confirms that certain preinstalled or system apps can only be hidden, not deleted. At CES 2025, LG announced plans to inte
  
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• Security Researcher Found Critical Kindle Vulnerabilities That Allowed Hijacking Amazon Accounts

  15-12-2025 15:01 via it.slashdot.org
  The Black Hat Europe hacker conference in London included a session titled "Don't Judge an Audiobook by Its Cover" about a two critical (and now fixed) flaws in Amazon's Kindle. The Times reports both flaws were discovered by engineering analyst Valentino Ricotta (from the cybersecurity research division of Thales), who was awarded a "bug bounty" of $20,000 (£15,000 ).He said: "What especially struck me with this device, that's been sitting on my bedside table for years, is that it's conne
  
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• Are Warnings of Superintelligence 'Inevitability' Masking a Grab for Power?

  15-12-2025 09:34 via slashdot.org
  Superintelligence has become "a quasi-political forecast" with "very little to do with any scientific consensus, emerging instead from particular corridors of power." That's the warning from James O'Sullivan, a lecturer in digital humanities from University College Cork. In a refreshing 5,600-word essay in Noema magazine, he notes the suspicious coincidence that "The loudest prophets of superintelligence are those building the very systems they warn against..."
  "When we accept that AGI is inevit
  
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• SpaceX Alleges a Chinese-Deployed Satellite Risked Colliding with Starlink

  15-12-2025 06:24 via science.slashdot.org
  "A SpaceX executive says a satellite deployed from a Chinese rocket risked colliding with a Starlink satellite," reports PC Magazine:On Friday, company VP for Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, tweeted about the incident and blamed a lack of coordination from the Chinese launch provider CAS Space. "When satellite operators do not share ephemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space," he wrote, referring to the publication of predicted orbital positions for su
  
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• Roomba Maker 'iRobot' Files for Bankruptcy After 35 Years

  15-12-2025 04:24 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg.After 35 years, iRobot reached a "restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny."Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganised company... The plan will allow the debtor to remain as a going concern and continue to meet its commitm
  
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• Like Australia, Denmark Plans to Severely Restrict Social Media Use for Teenagers

  15-12-2025 02:24 via tech.slashdot.org
  "As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead," reports the Associated Press, "and severely restrict social media access for young people."The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement by three governing coalition and two opposition parties in parliament to ban access to social media for anyone under the age of 15. Such a measure would be the most sweeping step yet by a
  
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• CEOS Plan to Spend More on AI in 2026 - Despite Spotty Returns

  15-12-2025 01:17 via it.slashdot.org
  The Wall Street Journal reports that 68% of CEOs "plan to spend even more on AI in 2026, according to an annual survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs from advisory firm Teneo."
  And yet "less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said."They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources.Teneo also surveyed about 400 instituti
  
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• 'Investors in Limbo'. Will the TikTok Deal's Deadline Be Extended Again?

  14-12-2025 23:59 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:
  A billionaire investor keen on buying TikTok's US operations has told the BBC he has been left in limbo as the latest deadline for the app's sale looms.The US has repeatedly delayed the date by which the platform's Chinese owner, Bytedance, must sell or be blocked for American users. US President Donald Trump appears poised to extend the deadline for a fifth time on Tuesday. "We're just standing by and waiting to see what happens," investor Fr
  
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• Podcast Industry Under Siege as AI Bots Flood Airways with Thousands of Programs

  14-12-2025 22:34 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast "Diary of a CEO." On YouTube, his clone narrates "100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett," which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett's cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast ca
  
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• Podcast Industry Under Siege as AI Bot Flood Airways with Thousands of Programs

  14-12-2025 22:34 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast "Diary of a CEO." On YouTube, his clone narrates "100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett," which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett's cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast ca
  
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• Entry-Level Tech Workers Confront an AI-Fueled Jobpocalypse

  14-12-2025 21:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  AI "has gutted entry-level roles in the tech industry," reports Rest of World.
  One student at a high-ranking engineering college in India tells them that among his 400 classmates, "fewer than 25% have secured job offers... there's a sense of panic on the campus."
  Students at engineering colleges in India, China, Dubai, and Kenya are facing a "jobpocalypse" as artificial intelligence replaces humans in entry-level roles. Tasks once assigned to fresh graduates, such as debugging, testing, and rout
  
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• Polar Bears are Rewiring Their Own Genetics to Survive a Warming Climate

  14-12-2025 20:12 via news.slashdot.org
  "Polar bears are still sadly expected to go extinct this century," with two-thirds of the population gone by 2050," says the lead researcher on a new study from the University of East Anglia in Britain.
  But their research also suggests polar bears "are rapidly rewiring their own genetics in a bid to survive," reports NBC News, in "the first documented case of rising temperatures driving genetic change in a mammal."
  "I believe our work really does offer a glimmer of hope — a window of oppor
  
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