ICT news

• Should Functional Programming Be the Future of Software Development?

  13-11-2022 18:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  The CTO of a software company argues the software industry's current trajectory "is toward increasing complexity, longer product-development times, and greater fragility of production systems" — not to mention nightmarish problems maintaining code."To address such issues, companies usually just throw more people at the problem: more developers, more testers, and more technicians who intervene when systems fail. Surely there must be a better way," they write in IEEE Spectrum. "I'm part of a
  
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• Billions of Dollars Later and Still Nobody Knows What an Xbox Is

  24-02-2026 17:04 via games.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes.
  The brand started as a powerful video game console, but Game Pass and cloud gaming pushed it toward a hazier identity: the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign tried to redefine it as any device th
  
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• Discord Distances Itself From Persona Age Verification After User Backlash

  24-02-2026 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded."
  After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused
  
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• Russia Targets Telegram as Rift With Founder Pavel Durov Deepens

  24-02-2026 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services.
  The articles, credited to materials from Russia'
  
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• Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches

  24-02-2026 14:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanit
  
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• Quantum Algorithm Beats Classical Tools On Complement Sampling Tasks

  24-02-2026 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem."We st
  
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• Texas Is About To Overtake California In Battery Storage

  24-02-2026 08:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GW
  
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• US Farmers Are Rejecting Multimillion-Dollar Datacenter Bids For Their Land

  24-02-2026 04:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her nei
  
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• New Microsoft Gaming CEO Has 'No Tolerance For Bad AI'

  24-02-2026 03:02 via games.slashdot.org
  In her first major interview as Microsoft's new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that "great games" must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has "no tolerance for bad AI." Stepping in after Phil Spencer's retirement, she's pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters a new era. Variety reports: Sharma was quick in laying out her top priorities for Microsoft Gaming in an internal memo announcing h
  
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• Microsoft Says Bug In Classic Outlook Hides the Mouse Pointer

  24-02-2026 02:25 via it.slashdot.org
  joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse pointer vanished while using the app.[...] Microsoft explained in a recent support document that the mouse pointer (and in some cases the cursor)
  
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• Viral Doomsday Report Lays Bare Wall Street's Deep Anxiety About AI Future

  24-02-2026 01:45 via slashdot.org
  A 7,000-word "doomsday" thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, "painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work," reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are out. Worries of software-industry disruption don't go far enough. The "global intelligence crisis" is about to hit. The new, broader question: What if AI is so bullish
  
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• Trump's 'Board of Peace' Explores Stablecoin For Gaza

  24-02-2026 01:02 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Officials working with Donald Trump's "Board of Peace" are exploring setting up a stablecoin for Gaza as part of efforts to reshape the devastated Palestinian enclave's economy, according to five people familiar with the discussions. The talks around introducing a stablecoin -- a type of cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to a mainstream currency, such as the US dollar -- are at a preliminary stage, and many details of how one could
  
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• OpenAI Calls In the Consultants For Its Enterprise Push

  24-02-2026 00:20 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI has formed a multi-year "Frontier Alliance" with four consulting heavyweights to accelerate enterprise adoption of its no-code AI agent platform, OpenAI Frontier. TechCrunch reports: The alliance includes multi-year partnerships between OpenAI and four major consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini, to sell its enterprise products. OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team will work with the consulting giants to help them implement OpenAI's enter
  
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• Panasonic Will No Longer Make Its Own TVs

  23-02-2026 23:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Panasonic is handing over the manufacturing, marketing, and sales of its TVs to Shenzhen-based Skyworth, effectively exiting in-house TV production. Ars Technica reports: Skyworth is a Shenzhen-headquartered TV brand. The company claims to be "a top three global provider of the Android TV platform." In July, research firm Omdia reported that Skyworth was one of the top-five TV brands by sales revenue in Q1 2025; however, Skyworth hasn't been able to maintain that position regularly. Panasonic ma
  
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• ASML Unveils EUV Light Source Advance That Could Yield 50% More Chips By 2030

  23-02-2026 22:57 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Researchers at ASML Holding say they have found a way to boost the power of the light source in a key chip making machine to turn out up to 50% more chips by decade's end, to help retain the Dutch company's edge over emerging U.S. and Chinese rivals. ASML is the world's only maker of commercial extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, a critical tool for chipmakers such as TSMC, Intel and others in producing advanced computing chips. "It's
  
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• IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization

  23-02-2026 22:10 via slashdot.org
  IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and runs on the kind of mainframe systems IBM has sold for generations.
  Anthropic said the shrinking pool of developers who understand COBOL had long made modernization cost-prohibitive, and t
  
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• Linus Torvalds: Someone 'More Competent Who Isn't Afraid of Numbers Past the Teens' Will Take Over Linux One Day

  23-02-2026 20:36 via linux.slashdot.org
  Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: "You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel merge window is closed," he wrote in the post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1. "We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers." Torvalds pointed out that the numbers he applies to new kernel releases are es
  
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• 'How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?'

  23-02-2026 19:50 via it.slashdot.org
  Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writ
  
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• Anthropic Accuses Chinese Companies of Siphoning Data From Claude

  23-02-2026 19:10 via slashdot.org
  U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Anthropic said three Chinese AI companies set up more than 24,000 fraudulent accounts with its Claude AI model to help their own systems catch up. From a report: The three companies -- DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax -- prompted Claude more than 16 million times, siphoning information from Anthropic's system to train and improve their own products, Anthropic said in a blog post Monday.
  Earlier this month, an Anthropic rival, OpenAI, sent a memo to House law
  
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• Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

  23-02-2026 18:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  The first fiber-optic cable ever laid across an ocean -- TAT-8, a nearly 6,000-kilometer line between the United States, United Kingdom, and France that carried its first traffic on December 14, 1988 -- is now being pulled off the Atlantic seabed after more than two decades of sitting dormant, bound for recycling in South Africa.
  Subsea Environmental Services, one of only three companies in the world whose entire business is cable recovery and recycling, began the operation last year using its n
  
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• PayPal Attracts Takeover Interest After Stock Slump

  23-02-2026 17:48 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: PayPal, the digital payments pioneer, is attracting takeover interest from potential buyers after a stock slide wiped out almost half of its value, according to people familiar with the matter.
  The San Jose, California-based company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, the people said. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the people s
  
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• Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds

  23-02-2026 17:02 via news.slashdot.org
  Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem -- clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius.
  Two research groups are now racing to close that gap using AI, though they disagree sharply on method. Tapio Schneider at Caltech built CLIMA, a mo
  
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• Stressful People in Your Life Could Be Adding Months To Your Biological Age

  23-02-2026 16:22 via science.slashdot.org
  A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult -- whom the researchers call "hasslers" -- are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological age relative to same-age peers.
  The research drew on DNA methylation-based epigenetic clocks and ego-centric network data from a state-representative probability sample of 2,345
  
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• Sam Altman Would Like To Remind You That Humans Use a Lot of Energy, Too

  23-02-2026 15:40 via slashdot.org
  OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is pushing back on growing concerns about AI's environmental footprint, dismissing claims about ChatGPT's water consumption as "totally fake" and arguing that the fairer way to measure AI's energy use is to compare it against humans.
  In an interview with Indian Express, Altman acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers once made water usage a real concern but said that is no longer the case, calling internet claims of 17 gallons of water per query "completely unt
  
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• Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Calculate AI's Contribution To U.S. Growth May Be Basically Zero

  23-02-2026 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The narrative that AI spending has been singlehandedly propping up the U.S. economy -- a claim that captivated Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington over the past year -- is facing serious pushback from economists [non-paywalled source] at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, all of whom now calculate that the AI buildup's direct contribution to growth was dramatically overstated and possibly close to zero.
  The debate hinges on how GDP accounts for imported components: roughly
  
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• Is AI Impacting Which Programming Language Projects Use?

  23-02-2026 13:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  "In August 2025, TypeScript surpassed both Python and JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub for the first time ever..." writes GitHub's senior developer advocate.
  They point to this as proof that "AI isn't just speeding up coding. It's reshaping which languages, frameworks, and tools developers choose in the first place."Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week. Those early exposures reset the baseline for what "easy" means. When AI handles b
  
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• Rule-Breaking Black Hole Growing At 13x the Cosmic 'Speed Limit' Challenges Theories

  23-02-2026 09:34 via science.slashdot.org
  "A surprisingly ravenous black hole from the dawn of the universe is breaking two big rules," reports Live Science. "It's not only exceeding the 'speed limit' of black hole growth but also generating extreme X-ray and radio wave emissions — two features that are not predicted to coexist..."
  "How is this rule-breaking behavior even possible? In a paper published Jan. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of researchers observed ID830 in multiple wavelengths to find an answe
  
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• Should Job-Seekers Stop Using AI to Write Their Resumes?

  23-02-2026 06:35 via it.slashdot.org
  When one company asked job applicants to submit a video where they answer a question, most of the 300 responses were "eerily similar," reports the Washington Post (with a company executive saying it was "abundantly clear" they'd used AI.)Job seekers are turning to AI to help them land jobs more quickly in a tough labor market.... Employers say that's having an unintended consequence: Many applications are looking and sounding the same...It's easy to spot when candidates over-rely on AI, some emp
  
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• Raspberry Pi Stock Rises Over Its Possible Use With OpenClaw's AI Agents

  23-02-2026 03:34 via build.slashdot.org
  This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. "The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw."The Register explain
  
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• Telegram Disputes Russia's Claim Its Encryption Was Compromised

  23-02-2026 00:45 via it.slashdot.org
  Russia's domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia's state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals "tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians," Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to "push people to use a new state-backed alternative."Russia's communications watchdog limited access to Tel
  
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