ICT news

• The Original Smart Thermostat, Unveiled 16 Years Ago, is About To Get Dumb

  02-05-2024 21:22 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Ecobee, the company that pioneered smart thermostats with its Ecobee Smart in 2008, has announced it will end online support for the device and its commercial counterpart, the Ecobee Energy Management System, on July 31, 2024. The move will disable internet-dependent features such as web portal control, smart integrations, and weather-related functionality, while basic HVAC control and scheduling will remain operational.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Are AI-Generated Search Results Still Protected by Section 230?

  19-05-2024 00:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Starting this week millions will see AI-generated answers in Google's search results by default. But the announcement Tuesday at Google's annual developer conference suggests a future that's "not without its risks, both to users and to Google itself," argues the Washington Post:
  For years, Google has been shielded for liability for linking users to bad, harmful or illegal information by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But legal experts say that shield probably won't apply when its
  
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• How an 'Unprecedented' Google Cloud Event Wiped Out a Major Customer's Account

  18-05-2024 23:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Ars Technica looks at what happened after Google's answer to Amazon's cloud service "accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason..."
  "[A]ccording to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15."UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service... UniSuper'
  
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• Eight Automakers Grilled by US Lawmakers Over Sharing of Connected Car Data With Police

  18-05-2024 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Automotive News:Automotive News recently reported that eight automakers sent vehicle location data to police without a court order or warrant. The eight companies told senators that they provide police with data when subpoenaed, getting a rise from several officials.
  BMW, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen presented their responses to lawmakers. Senators Ron Wyden from Oregon and Ed Markey from Massachusetts penned a lett
  
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• Study Confirms Einstein Prediction: Black Holes Have a 'Plunging Region'

  18-05-2024 21:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Albert Einstein was right," reports CNN. "There is an area at the edge of black holes where matter can no longer stay in orbit and instead falls in, as predicted by his theory of gravity."
  The proof came by combining NASA's earth-orbiting NuSTAR telescope with the NICER telescope on the International Space Station to detect X-rays:A team of astronomers has for the first time observed this area — called the "plunging region" — in a black hole about 10,000 light-years from Earth. "We'
  
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• 'Google Domains' Starts Migrating to Squarespace

  18-05-2024 20:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "We're migrating domains in batches..." announced web-hosting company Squarespace earlier this month.
  "Squarespace has entered into an agreement to become the new home for Google Domains customers. When your domain transitions from Google to Squarespace, you'll become a Squarespace customer and manage your domain through an account with us."
  Slashdot reader shortyadamk shares an email sent today to a Google Domains customer:"Today your domain, xyz.com, migrated from Google Domains to Squarespace
  
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• Is America's Defense Department 'Rushing to Expand' Its Space War Capabilities?

  18-05-2024 19:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  America's Defense Department "is rushing to expand its capacity to wage war in space," reports the New York Times, "convinced that rapid advances by China and Russia in space-based operations pose a growing threat to U.S. troops and other military assets on the ground and U.S. satellites in orbit."[T]he Defense Department is looking to acquire a new generation of ground- and space-based tools that will allow it to defend its satellite network from attack and, if necessary, to disrupt or disable
  
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• Cruise Reached an $8M+ Settlement With the Person Dragged Under Its Robotaxi

  18-05-2024 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Bloomberg reports that self-driving car company Cruise "reached an $8 million to $12 million settlement with a pedestrian who was dragged by one of its self-driving vehicles in San Francisco, according to a person familiar with the situation."The settlement was struck earlier this year and the woman is out of the hospital, said the person, who declined to be identified discussing a private matter. In the October incident, the pedestrian crossing the road was struck by another vehicle before land
  
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• Bruce Schneier Reminds LLM Engineers About the Risks of Prompt Injection Vulnerabilities

  18-05-2024 17:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Security professional Bruce Schneier argues that large language models have the same vulnerability as phones in the 1970s exploited by John Draper.
  "Data and control used the same channel," Schneier writes in Communications of the ACM. "That is, the commands that told the phone switch what to do were sent along the same path as voices."
  Other forms of prompt injection involve the LLM receiving malicious instructions in its training data. Another example hides secret commands in Web pages. Any LL
  
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• Facing Angry Users, Sonos Promises to Fix Flaws and Restore Removed Features

  18-05-2024 16:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  A blind worker for the National Federation of the Blind said Sonos had a reputation for making products usable for people with disabilities, but that "Overnight they broke that trust," according to the Washington Post.They're not the only angry customers about the latest update to Sonos's wireless speaker system. The newspaper notes that nonprofit worker Charles Knight is "among the Sonos die-hards who are furious at the new app that crippled their options to stream music, listen to an album all
  
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• 'Openwashing'

  18-05-2024 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: There's a big debate in the tech world over whether artificial intelligence models should be "open source." Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, sued the startup and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on claims that the company had diverged from its mission of openness. The Biden administration is investigating the risks and benefits of open source models. Proponents of open source A.I. models say they're more equitable and safer
  
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• The Delta Emulator Is Changing Its Logo After Adobe Threatened It

  18-05-2024 09:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  After Adobe threatened legal action, the Delta Emulator said it'll abandon its current logo for a different, yet-to-be-revealed mark. The issue centers around Delta's stylized letter "D", which the digital media giant says is too similar to its stylized letter "A". The Verge reports: On May 7th, Adobe's lawyers reached out to Delta with a firm but kindly written request to go find a different icon, an email that didn't contain an explicit threat or even use the word infringement -- it merely sug
  
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• Proteins In Blood Could Provide Early Cancer Warning 'By More Than Seven Years'

  18-05-2024 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Proteins in the blood could warn people of cancer more than seven years before it is diagnosed, according to research [published in the journal Nature Communications]. Scientists at the University of Oxford studied blood samples from more than 44,000 people in the UK Biobank, including over 4,900 people who subsequently had a cancer diagnosis. They compared the proteins of people who did and did not go on to be diagnosed with cancer and iden
  
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• Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks To Local Governments

  18-05-2024 03:25 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Karl Bode writes via Techdirt: Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA -- (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency). The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an "open access" fiber network that allows any ISP to then come and compete on the shared network. Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Uta
  
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• WD Rolls Out New 2.5-Inch HDDs For the First Time In 7 Years

  18-05-2024 01:20 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Western Digital has unveiled new 6TB external hard drives -- "the first new capacity point for this hard drive drive form factor in about seven years," reports Tom's Hardware. "There is a catch, though: the HDD is slow and will unlikely fit into any mobile PCs, so it looks like it will exclusively serve portable and specialized storage products." From the report: Western Digital's 6TB 2.5-inch HDD is currently used for the latest versions of the company's My Passport, Black P10, and G-Drive Armo
  
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• Palantir's First-Ever AI Warfare Conference

  18-05-2024 00:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Caroline Haskins: On May 7th and 8th in Washington, D.C., the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it. It was the inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness," hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project -- better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank cre
  
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• OpenAI Strikes Reddit Deal To Train Its AI On Your Posts

  18-05-2024 00:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Emilia David reports via The Verge: OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Reddit's data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products. It's an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million. The deal will also "enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods" and use OpenAI's large language models to build applications. OpenAI has also sig
  
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• France Bans TikTok In New Caledonia

  17-05-2024 23:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  In what's marked as an EU first, the French government has blocked TikTok in its territory of New Caledonia amid widespread pro-independence protests. Politico reports: A French draft law, passed Monday, would let citizens vote in local elections after 10 years' residency in New Caledonia, prompting opposition from independence activists worried it will dilute the representation of indigenous people. The violent demonstrations that have ensued in the South Pacific island of 270,000 have killed a
  
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• SEC: Financial Orgs Have 30 Days To Send Data Breach Notifications

  17-05-2024 22:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has adopted amendments to Regulation S-P that require certain financial institutions to disclose data breach incidents to impacted individuals within 30 days of discovery. Regulation S-P was introduced in 2000 and controls how some financial entities must treat nonpublic personal information belonging to consumers. These rules include developing and implementing data protection policies, confi
  
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• Canada Security Intelligence Chief Warns China Can Use TikTok To Spy on Users

  17-05-2024 22:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The head of Canada's Security Intelligence Service warned Canadians against using video app TikTok, saying data gleaned from its users "is available to the government of China," CBC News reported on Friday. From a report: "My answer as director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) is that there is a very clear strategy on the part of the government of China to be able to acquire personal information from anyone around the world," CSIS Director David Vigneault told CBC in an inter
  
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• Robert Dennard, Inventor of DRAM, Dies At 91

  17-05-2024 21:22 via news.slashdot.org
  
  necro81 writes: Robert Dennard was working at IBM in the 1960s when he invented a way to store one bit using a single transistor and capacitor. The technology became dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which when implemented using the emerging technology of silicon integrated circuits, helped catapult computing by leaps and bounds. The first commercial DRAM chips in the late 1960s held just 1024 bits; today's DDR5 modules hold hundreds of billions.
  Dr. Robert H. Dennard passed away last month a
  
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• Two Students Uncover Security Bug That Could Let Millions Do Their Laundry For Free

  17-05-2024 20:40 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Two university students discovered a security flaw in over a million internet-connected laundry machines operated by CSC ServiceWorks, allowing users to avoid payment and add unlimited funds to their accounts. The students, Alexander Sherbrooke and Iakov Taranenko from UC Santa Cruz, reported the vulnerability to the company, a major laundry service provider, in January but claim it remains unpatched. TechCrunch adds: Sherbrooke said he was sitting on the floor of his basement laundry room in th
  
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• User Outcry As Slack Scrapes Customer Data For AI Model Training

  17-05-2024 20:02 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  New submitter txyoji shares a report: Enterprise workplace collaboration platform Slack has sparked a privacy backlash with the revelation that it has been scraping customer data, including messages and files, to develop new AI and ML models. By default, and without requiring users to opt-in, Slack said its systems have been analyzing customer data and usage information (including messages, content and files) to build AI/ML models to improve the software.
  The company insists it has technical con
  
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• Apple Plans a Thinner iPhone in 2025

  17-05-2024 19:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple is developing a significantly thinner version of the iPhone [non-paywalled source] that could be released as early as 2025, The Information reported Friday, citing three people with direct knowledge of the project. From the report: The slimmer iPhone could be released concurrently with the iPhone 17, expected in September 2025, according to the three people with direct knowledge and two others familiar with the project. It could be priced higher than the iPhone Pro Max, currently Apple's m
  
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• Apple Geofences Third-Party Browser Engine Work for EU Devices

  17-05-2024 18:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple's grudging accommodation of European law -- allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices -- apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region. From a report: The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU. That requirement adds an additional barrier to anyone pla
  
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• VW and Renault End Talks To Develop Affordable EV

  17-05-2024 18:03 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Volkswagen has walked away from talks with Renault to jointly develop an affordable electric version of the Twingo car, Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the situation, in a setback for the EU carmakers' efforts to fend off Chinese rivals. From the report: The collapse of negotiations could mean the German carmaker may have to go it alone in developing its own affordable electric vehicle (EV). Renault will continue designing its electric Twingo, scheduled to hit the market in
  
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• OpenAI's Long-Term AI Risk Team Has Disbanded

  17-05-2024 17:25 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist and one of the company's cofounders, was named as the colead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power. Now OpenAI's "superalignment team" is no more, the company confirms. That c
  
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• Hopes For Sustainable Jet Fuel Not Realistic, Report Finds

  17-05-2024 16:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Hopes that replacement fuels for airplanes will slash carbon pollution are misguided and support for these alternatives could even worsen the climate crisis, a new report has warned. The Guardian: There is currently "no realistic or scalable alternative" to standard kerosene-based jet fuels, and touted "sustainable aviation fuels" are well off track to replace them in a timeframe needed to avert dangerous climate change, despite public subsidies, the report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a
  
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• Microsoft Plans Boldest Games Bet Since Activision Deal, Changing How 'Call of Duty' Is Sold

  17-05-2024 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft plans a major shakeup of its videogame sales strategy by releasing the coming installment of Call of Duty to its subscription service instead of the longtime, lucrative approach of only selling it a la carte. WSJ: The plans, which mark the biggest change to Microsoft's gaming division since it closed the $75 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, are expected to be announced at the company's annual Xbox showcase next month, according to people familiar with the matter. Call of Duty i
  
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• Arizona Woman Accused of Helping North Koreans Get Remote IT Jobs At 300 Companies

  17-05-2024 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An Arizona woman has been accused of helping generate millions of dollars for North Korea's ballistic missile program by helping citizens of that country land IT jobs at US-based Fortune 500 companies. Christina Marie Chapman, 49, of Litchfield Park, Arizona, raised $6.8 million in the scheme, federal prosecutors said in an indictment unsealed Thursday. Chapman allegedly funneled the money to North Korea's Munitions Industry Department, whic
  
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