ICT news

• Sony Chief Warns Technical Problems Persist for Cloud Gaming

  05-06-2023 18:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Sony's chief executive has warned that cloud gaming is still technically "very tricky,"playing down the risk to the console maker of the industry quickly converting to a technology on which its rival Microsoft has bet heavily. From a report: In an interview with the Financial Times, Kenichiro Yoshida said the PlayStation creator would still study "various options" in the future for streaming games over the Internet itself, adding it could utilize GT Sophy, its artificial intelligence agent, to e
  
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• There Was Some Good News on Green Energy in 2025

  29-12-2025 00:40 via news.slashdot.org
  Yes, greenhouse gas emissions kept rising in 2025, writes Bloomberg (alternate URL here). And the pledges of various governments to lower greenhouse gases "are nowhere near where they need to be to avoid catastrophic climate change..."
  But in 2025, "there were silver linings too."The world is decarbonizing faster than was expected 10 years ago and investment into the clean energy transition, including everything from wind and solar to batteries and grids, is expected to have reached a new record
  
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• 'No Happy Ending for Movie Theatres', Argues WSJ - No Matter Who Wins Warner Bros.

  28-12-2025 23:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Regardless of who ends up owning Warners Bros., "the outlook for theatrical movies is dimming," writes a Wall Street Journal tech columnist, noting that this year's U.S. box office of $8.3 billion (as of December 25) "is a bit below last year's and well below prepandemic levels of around $11 billion."Warner has historically been one of Hollywood's largest producers of theatrical films, averaging about 22 releases annually in the pre-Covid years of 2015 to 2019, according to data from Comscore. I
  
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• Did Tim Cook Post AI Slop in His Christmas Message Promoting 'Pluribus'?

  28-12-2025 22:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  Artist Keith Thomson is a modern (and whimsical) Edward Hopper. And Apple TV says he created the "festive artwork" shared on X by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Christmas Eve, "made on MacBook Pro."
  Its intentionally-off picture of milk and cookies was meant to tease the season finale of Pluribus. ("Merry Christmas Eve, Carol..." Cook had posted.)
  But others were convinced that the weird image was AI-generated.
  Tech blogger John Gruber was blunt. "Tim Cook posts AI Slop in Christmas message on Twitter/X,
  
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• Texas Father Rescues Kidnapped 15-Year-Old Daughter After Tracking Her Phone's Location

  28-12-2025 21:00 via mobile.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from The Guardian:A Texas father used the parental controls on his teenage daughter's cell phone to find and help rescue her after she was kidnapped at knifepoint while walking her dog on Christmas, authorities allege... Her father subsequently located her phone through the device's parental controls, the agency's statement said. The phone was about 2 miles (3.2km) away from him in a secluded, partly wooded area in neighboring Harris county... She then mana
  
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• Up Next for Arduino After Qualcomm Acquisition: High-Performance Computing

  28-12-2025 19:58 via news.slashdot.org
  Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino "isn't imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards," (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit's managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that Arduino users were now "explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering," Arduino corrected him in a blog post, noting that clause in their Terms & Conditions was only fo
  
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• Google's 'AI Overview' Wrongly Accused a Musician of Being a Sex Offender

  28-12-2025 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the CBC:
  Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he may have been defamed by Google after it recently produced an AI-generated summary falsely identifying him as a sex offender. The Juno Award-winning musician said he learned of the online misinformation last week after a First Nation north of Halifax confronted him with the summary and cancelled a concert planned for Dec. 19. "You are being put into a less secure situation because of a media company
  
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• How Will Rising RAM Prices Affect Laptop Companies?

  28-12-2025 17:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Laptop makers are facing record-setting memory prices next year. The site Notebookcheck catalogs how different companies are responding:
  Sources told [Korean business newspaper] Chosun Biz that some manufacturers have signed preliminary contracts with Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Even so, it won't prevent DDR5 RAM prices from soaring 45% higher by the end of 2026.... Before the memory shortage, PC sales had been on the upswing in part because of forced Windows 11 upgrades. That trend will like
  
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• Challenges Face European Governments Pursuing 'Digital Sovereignty'

  28-12-2025 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty":The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally
  
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• Is Dark Energy Weakening?

  28-12-2025 13:34 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:There is growing controversy over recent evidence suggesting that a mysterious force known as dark energy might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space. An analysis by a South Korean team has hinted that, rather than the Universe continuing to expand, galaxies could be pulled back together by gravity, ending in what astronomers call a "Big Crunch".
  The scientists involved believe that they may be on the
  
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• Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI

  28-12-2025 09:37 via it.slashdot.org
  "I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don't yet realize," says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that "could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced...""I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being
  
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• Military Planners Dread the Arctic, 'Where Drones Drop Dead and GPS Goes Haywire'

  28-12-2025 05:44 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures drain batteries or freeze equipment in minutes; navigation systems lack reference points on snowfields.D
  
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• OpenAI is Hiring a New 'Head of Preparedness' to Predict/Mitigate AI's Harms

  28-12-2025 02:34 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:
  OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy.
  It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledgedthat the "potential i
  
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• Researchers Show Some Robots Can Be Hijacked Just Through Spoken Commands

  28-12-2025 00:44 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering:Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems.In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a commercially available humanoid robot could be hijacked with nothing more than spoken commands, exposing how voice-based interaction can serve as an attack vector rather than a safe
  
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• New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows' 'Modern Standby'

  27-12-2025 23:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  Phoronix reports on "an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list" proposing "a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the 'Modern Standby' functionality found with Microsoft Windows..."
  Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear "sleeping" but will allow for instant wake-up for notifications, music playback, and other functionality. The display is off, the network remains online, a
  
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• Is Russia Developing an Anti-Satellite Weapon to Target Starlink?

  27-12-2025 22:34 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
  Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called "zone-effect" weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousand
  
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• NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux

  27-12-2025 21:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  NVIDIA has been "gradually dropping support for older videocards," notes Hackaday, "with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed.""What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?"On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back
  
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• Waymo Updates Vehicles to Better Handle Power Outages - But Still Faces Criticism

  27-12-2025 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Waymo explained this week that its self-driving car technology is already "designed to handle dark traffic signals," and successfully handled over 7,000 last Saturday during San Francisco's long power outage, properly treating those intersections as four-way stops. But while during the long outage their cars sometimes experienced a "backlog" when waiting for confirmation checks (leading them to freeze in intersections), Waymo said Tuesday they're implementing "fleet-wide updates" to provide thei
  
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• Open Source Initiative Estimates the 'Top Open Source Licenses in 2025'

  27-12-2025 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support".
  So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:mit(1.5M)apache-2-0(344k)bsd-3-clause(214k)bsd-2-clause(128k)gpl-2-0(76k)gpl-3-0(55k)isc-license-txt(35k)lgpl-3-0(34k)OFL-1.1(31k)lgpl-2-1(24k) . .
  From the Open Source Initiative's announcement:
  Please not
  
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• Japan Votes to Restart World's Biggest Nuclear Plant 15 Years After Fukushima Meltdown

  27-12-2025 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.
  But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster."
  Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata prefectural assembly, home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, approved a bill on Monday that clears the
  
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• Japan Votes to Restart Fukushima Nuclear Plant 15 Years After Its Meltdown

  27-12-2025 18:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.
  But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster."
  Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata prefectural assembly, home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, approved a bill on Monday that clears the
  
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• Should Physicists Study the Question: What is Life?

  27-12-2025 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that "many" of his colleagues in physics "have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human." And it's a mystery that:
  - "Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries"
  - "May even help redefine the field for the next generation"
  - "Could answer essential questions about AI."
  In short, while physicists have favored a "reductionist" philosophy about the fundamental laws controlling the uni
  
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• Free Software Foundation Receives 'Historic' Donations Worth Nearly $900K - in Monero

  27-12-2025 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.
  The two donations "are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization," the FSF said in a statement.
  "The donors wish to remain anonymous," according to the FSF's statement:The organization is in its annual winter fundraising drive, currently at three-quarters of its $400,000 USD winter goal, and wil
  
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• Video Call Glitches Evoke Uncanniness, Damage Consequential Life Outcomes

  27-12-2025 13:00 via slashdot.org
  Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances of being granted parole.
  Researchers from Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City conducted ten studies examining glitches across thousands o
  
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• Taiwan's iPass Releases Floppy Disk Pre-Paid Cash Card

  27-12-2025 11:01 via it.slashdot.org
  Taiwan's iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: "This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing."
  The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale starting Christmas Eve and comes in black or yellow finishes at 1:1 scale. It works across Taiwan's public transport network -- buses, tr
  
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• Toll Roads Are Spreading in America

  27-12-2025 09:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June.
  The federal gas tax hasn't been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it collected from fuel taxes, and at state and local levels, fuel taxes covered barely a quarter of road spend
  
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• Rocket Crashes in Brazil's First Commercial Launch

  27-12-2025 06:01 via science.slashdot.org
  The first-ever commercial rocket launched at Brazil's Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff late earlier this week, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace. From a report: The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff [Monday] at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT) but fell to the ground after something went wrong 30 seconds into its flight, Innospace CEO Kim Soo-jong said in a letter to shareholde
  
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• Mesh Networks Are About To Escape Apple, Amazon and Google Silos

  27-12-2025 03:00 via mobile.slashdot.org
  After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network.
  Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group's only certified standard, bringing a crucial new capability called credential sharing. Devices from different manufacturers can now securely join the same mesh network -- a
  
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• Driverless Future Gains Momentum With Global Robotaxi Deployments

  27-12-2025 01:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
  WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in November and began offering robotaxi passenger rides on Uber's platform in Dubai the following month. Amazon's Zoox started offering free rides to select early u
  
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