ICT news

• Tim Berners-Lee Urges New Open-Source Interoperable Data Standard, Protections from AI

  28-09-2025 22:37 via tech.slashdot.org
  Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path
  Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teena
  
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• James Webb Space Telescope Confirms 1st 'Runaway' Supermassive Black Hole

  20-12-2025 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home, a
  
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• Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data

  20-12-2025 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:-Circumvented Google's security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
  -Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
  -Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to s
  
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• Airbus Moving Critical Systems Away From AWS, Google, and Microsoft Citing Data Sovereignty Concerns

  20-12-2025 02:40 via slashdot.org
  Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to move mission-critical systems like ERP, manufacturing, and aircraft design data onto a digitally sovereign European cloud, citing national security concerns and fears around U.S. extraterritorial laws like the CLOUD Act. "I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective," Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital, told The Register. "We want to ensure thi
  
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• Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs

  20-12-2025 02:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already "elite" or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: "Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs" with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. "I think that's crazy." While the rapidly
  
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• Ten Mistakes Marred Firewall Upgrade At Australian Telco, Contributing To Two Deaths

  20-12-2025 01:20 via it.slashdot.org
  An independent review found that at least ten technical and process failures during a routine firewall upgrade at Australia's Optus prevented emergency calls from reaching Triple Zero for 14 hours, during which 455 calls failed and two callers died. The Register reports: On Thursday, Optus published an independent report (PDF) on the matter written by Dr Kerry Schott, an Australian executive who has held senior management roles at many of the country's most significant businesses. The report fou
  
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• Strava Puts Popular 'Year In Sport' Recap Behind an $80 Paywall

  20-12-2025 00:40 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual "Year in Sport" wrap-up -- a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user's athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ($80 per year), rather than making it free to everyone, as it had been historically since the review's debut in 2016. This decision has roiled numer
  
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• TikTok Owner Signs Deal To Avoid US Ban

  20-12-2025 00:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  TikTok's owner ByteDance has signed a deal creating a U.S.-focused joint venture majority-owned by American and global investors, allowing the app to avoid a U.S. ban while ByteDance retains a minority stake. The BBC reports: Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executive Shou Zi Chew. The deal, which is set to close on January 22, would end years of efforts by Washingt
  
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• YouTuber's Livestream Appears On White House Website

  19-12-2025 23:20 via yro.slashdot.org
  The White House says it's investigating how a personal-finance YouTuber's livestream briefly appeared on the White House's official live video page. The creator says he has no idea how his video ended up there. The Associated Press reports: The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking. It's unclear if the website was breached or the video was linked accidentally by someone in th
  
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• Riot Games Is Making an Anti-Cheat Change That Could Be Rough On Older PCs

  19-12-2025 22:40 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we've written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like Secure Boot, a TPM 2.0
  
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• Microsoft Made Another Copilot Ad Where Nothing Actually Works

  19-12-2025 21:41 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft's latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines -- none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and found that Copilot repeatedly hallucinated interface elements that didn't exist, claimed to highlight on-screen buttons when it hadn't, and abandon
  
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• All That Cheap Chinese Stuff Is Now Europe's Problem

  19-12-2025 21:02 via slashdot.org
  President Trump's closure of the de minimis customs loophole in May -- which previously allowed Chinese packages valued under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free -- has redirected a flood of cheap goods toward Europe, where similar exemptions for packages under $175.8 in the EU and $180 in the UK remain intact.
  The shift has been swift: exports of low-value Chinese packages to the U.S. have dropped more than 40% since May, according to Chinese customs data, and the EU has this year overtaken the U.
  
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• FTC: Instacart To Refund $60M Over Deceptive Subscription Tactics

  19-12-2025 20:30 via news.slashdot.org
  alternative_right writes: Grocery delivery service Instacart will refund $60 million to settle FTC claims that it misled customers with false advertising and unlawfully enrolled them in paid subscriptions. Instacart partners with over 1,800 retailers to provide online shopping, delivery, and pickup services from nearly 100,000 stores across North America. Its platform serves millions of customers and is also used by roughly 600,000 independent shoppers across thousands of cities in Canada and th
  
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• Microsoft AI Chief: Staying in the Frontier AI Race Will Cost Hundreds of Billions

  19-12-2025 19:52 via slashdot.org
  Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman estimates that staying competitive in frontier AI development will require "hundreds of billions of dollars" over the next five to ten years, a sum that doesn't even account for the high salaries companies are paying individual researchers and technical staff. Speaking on a podcast, Suleyman compared Microsoft to a "modern construction company" where hundreds of thousands of workers are building gigawatts of CPUs and AI accelerators. There's "a structural advant
  
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• 2025 Was the Beginning of the End of the TV Brightness War

  19-12-2025 19:11 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  The television industry's brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, the year TCL and Hisense released the first consumer TVs capable of 5,000 nits under specific settings -- a figure that would have seemed absurd not long ago when manufacturers struggled to reach 2,000 nits. LG introduced Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, moving from a three-stack panel design to a four-stack red-blue-green-blue configuration that the company claims can achieve 4,000 nits. The technology appear
  
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• Uber is Hiring More Engineers Because AI is Making Them More Valuable, CEO Says

  19-12-2025 18:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  Uber is hiring more engineers rather than fewer because AI tools have made them "superhumans," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, pushing back against the industry trend of using productivity gains to justify headcount cuts. Speaking on the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast, Khosrowshahi noted that other tech executives see AI making engineers 20% to 30% more productive and conclude they need 20% to 30% fewer engineers. His view: every engineer has become more valuable. Between 80% and 90% of Uber's devel
  
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• 'How Lina Khan Killed iRobot'

  19-12-2025 17:54 via slashdot.org
  iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner into American homes over its 35-year history, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer that also produces competing household devices.
  The Wall Street Journal's editorial board placed blame for the company's demise on the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan, which opposed Amazon's $1.7 billion bid to acquire iRobot. That deal collapsed in Janua
  
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• ACM To Make Its Entire Digital Library Open Access Starting January 2026

  19-12-2025 17:08 via news.slashdot.org
  The Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that all publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available to everyone starting January 2026. Authors will retain full copyright to their published work under the new arrangement, and ACM has committed to defending those works against copyright and integrity-related violations.
  The transition follows what ACM described as extensive dialogue with auth
  
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• Food Becoming More Calorific But Less Nutritious Due To Rising Carbon Dioxide

  19-12-2025 16:33 via science.slashdot.org
  More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious -- and also potentially more toxic, a study has found. From a report: Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on plants' responses to increased CO2 levels. The results, she said, were a shock: although crop yields increase, they become less nutrient-dense. While zinc levels in particular drop, l
  
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• Apple Becomes a Debt Collector With Its New Developer Agreement

  19-12-2025 15:42 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple released an updated developer license agreement this week that gives the company permission to recoup unpaid funds, such as commissions or any other fees, by deducting them from in-app purchases it processes on developers' behalf, among other methods. From a report: The change will impact developers in regions where local law allows them to link to external payment systems. In these cases, developers must report those payments back to Apple to pay the required commissions or fees.
  The chan
  
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• Denmark Says Russia Was Behind Two 'Destructive and Disruptive' Cyberattacks

  19-12-2025 15:01 via news.slashdot.org
  The Danish government has accused Russia of being behind two "destructive and disruptive" cyberattacks in what it describes as "very clear evidence" of a hybrid war. From a report: The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyberattack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November.
  The first, it said, was
  
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• Most Parked Domains Now Serving Malicious Content

  19-12-2025 14:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Direct navigation -- the act of visiting a website by manually typing a domain name in a web browser -- has never been riskier: A new study finds the vast majority of "parked" domains -- mostly expired or dormant domain names, or common misspellings of popular websites -- are now configured to redirect visitors to sites that foist scams and malware. When Internet users try to visit expired domain names or accidentally navigate to a lookal
  
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• Google AI Summaries Are Ruining the Livelihoods of Recipe Writers

  19-12-2025 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google's AI Mode is synthesizing "Frankenstein" recipes from multiple creators, often stripping away context and accuracy and siphoning traffic and ad revenue away from food bloggers in the process. Many recipe writers warn this shift amounts to an "extinction event" for ad-supported food sites. The Guardian reports: Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in
  
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• Trump's Social Media Business Is Merging With a Nuclear Fusion Company

  19-12-2025 08:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Tony Isaac shares a report from CNN: President Donald Trump's social media and crypto company is making a huge bet on a far different industry -- nuclear fusion, a potentially lucrative albeit commercially unproven energy technology that could help power a suddenly electricity-starved economy. Trump Media and Technology Group Thursday announced a surprise merger with TAE Technologies, in an all-stock deal valued at more than $6 billion that would create one of the first publicly traded fusion co
  
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• UK Actors Vote To Refuse To Be Digitally Scanned In Pushback Against AI

  19-12-2025 04:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Actors have voted to refuse digital scanning to prevent their likeness being used by artificial intelligence in a pushback against AI in the arts. Members of the performing arts union Equity were asked if they would refuse to be scanned while on set, a common practice in which actors' likeness is captured for future use -- with 99% voting in favor of the move. The vote was an indicative ballot designed to demonstrate the strength of feeling
  
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• Swearing Actually Seems To Make Humans Physically Stronger

  19-12-2025 02:25 via science.slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A new study adds to the growing body of evidence that swearing can help us unleash our inner strength, improving physical performance, it seems, by helping people break through certain psychological barriers. [...] [Psychology researcher Richard Stephens of Keele University in the UK] and his colleagues at Keele and the University of Alabama wanted to test whether swearing could not only improve physical performance, as they had done in previo
  
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• LG Will Let TV Owners Delete Microsoft Copilot After Customer Outcry

  19-12-2025 01:45 via slashdot.org
  LG said it will let owners of its TVs delete Microsoft's Copilot shortcut after several reports highlighted the unremovable icon. In a statement to The Verge, LG says the company "respects consumer choice and will take steps to allow users to delete the shortcut icon if they wish." From the report: Last week, a user on the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit posted an image of the Microsoft Copilot icon in their lineup of apps on an LG TV, with no option to delete it. "My LG TV's new software update i
  
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• Compromised Apple Gift Card Leads to Apple Account Lockout

  19-12-2025 01:02 via apple.slashdot.org
  An Apple developer was locked out of his Apple Account after redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card, exposing how automated fraud systems can effectively cut users off from their digital lives with little explanation or recourse. TidBITS reports: After attempting to redeem a $500 Apple Gift Card purchased from a well-known retailer, Apple developer, author, and /dev/world conference organizer Paris Buttfield-Addison found himself locked out of his Apple Account. He writes: "I am writing this as
  
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• North Korean Infiltrator Caught Working In Amazon IT Department Thanks To Lag

  19-12-2025 00:20 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker's computer would send keystroke data within tens of milliseconds. This suspicious individual's keyboard lag was "more than 110 milliseconds," reports Bloomberg. Amazon is commendably proactive in its pursuit of impostors, acc
  
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• AI's Water and Electricity Use Soars In 2025

  18-12-2025 23:40 via hardware.slashdot.org
  A new study estimates that AI systems in 2025 consumed as much electricity as New York City emits in carbon pollution and used hundreds of billions of liters of water, driven largely by power-hungry data centers and cooling needs. Researchers say the real impact is likely higher due to poor transparency from tech companies about AI-specific energy and water use. "There's no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it's going to be really big regardless... In the end, everyone is payi
  
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