ICT news

• Troubling iOS 17.5 Bug Reportedly Resurfacing Old Deleted Photos

  15-05-2024 21:20 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: There are concerning reports on Reddit that Apple's latest iOS 17.5 update has introduced a bug that causes old photos that were deleted -- in some cases years ago -- to reappear in users' photo libraries. After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. "Same here," said one R
  
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• Earthcare Cloud Mission Launches To Resolve Climate Unknowns

  29-05-2024 10:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A sophisticated joint European-Japanese satellite has launched to measure how clouds influence the climate. Some low-level clouds are known to cool the planet, others at high altitude will act as a blanket. The Earthcare mission will use a laser and a radar to probe the atmosphere to see precisely where the balance lies. It's one of the great uncertainties in the computer models used to forecast how the climate will respond to increasing levels o
  
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• Lawyers To Plastic Makers: Prepare For 'Astronomical' PFAS Lawsuits

  29-05-2024 07:35 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The defense lawyer minced no words as he addressed a room full of plastic-industry executives. Prepare for a wave of lawsuits with potentially "astronomical" costs. Speaking at a conference earlier this year, the lawyer, Brian Gross, said the coming litigation could "dwarf anything related to asbestos," one of the most sprawling corporate-liability battles in United States history. Mr. Gross was referring to PFAS, the "forever chemical
  
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• Huge Google Search Document Leak Reveals Inner Workings of Ranking Algorithm

  29-05-2024 03:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Danny Goodwin reports via Search Engine Land: A trove of leaked Google documents has given us an unprecedented look inside Google Search and revealed some of the most important elements Google uses to rank content. Thousands of documents, which appear to come from Google's internal Content API Warehouse, were released March 13 on Github by an automated bot called yoshi-code-bot. These documents were shared with Rand Fishkin, SparkToro co-founder, earlier this month.What's inside. Here's what we
  
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• Chromebooks Will Get Gemini and New Google AI Features

  29-05-2024 02:50 via slashdot.org
  
  Google is introducing the Gemini AI chatbot to Chromebook Plus models, enhancing features like text rewriting, image editing, and hands-free control. Here are a few of the top new features coming to ChromeOS, as summarized by Wired: The first notable feature is Help Me Write, which works in any text box. Select text in any text box and right-click -- you'll see a box next to the standard right-click context menu. You can ask Google's AI to rewrite the selected text, rephrase it in a specific way
  
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• Instead of 'Auth,' We Should Say 'Permissions' and 'Login'

  29-05-2024 02:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The term "auth" is ambiguous, often meaning either authentication (authn) or authorization (authz), which leads to confusion and poor system design. Instead, Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, a software engineer at AI market research platform Remesh, argues that the industry adopt the terms "login" for authentication and "permissions" for authorization, as these are clearer and help maintain distinct, appropriate abstractions for each concept. From their blog post: We should always use the most clear ter
  
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• Nvidia Denies Pirate e-Book Sites Are 'Shadow Libraries' To Shut Down Lawsuit

  29-05-2024 01:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some of the most infamous so-called shadow libraries have increasingly faced legal pressure to either stop pirating books or risk being shut down or driven to the dark web. Among the biggest targets are Z-Library, which the US Department of Justice has charged with criminal copyright infringement, and Library Genesis (Libgen), which was sued by textbook publishers last fall for allegedly distributing digital copies of copyrighted works "on a
  
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• Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine Under DDoS Cyberattack

  29-05-2024 00:50 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The Internet Archive is "currently in its third day of warding off an intermittent DDoS cyber-attack," writes Chris Freeland, Director of Library Services at Internet Archive, in a blog post. While library staff stress that the archives are safe, access to its services are affected, including the Wayback Machine. From the post: Since the attacks began on Sunday, the DDoS intrusion has been launching tens of thousands of fake information requests per second. The source of the attack is unknown. "
  
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• Anthropic Hires Former OpenAI Safety Lead To Head Up New Team

  29-05-2024 00:10 via slashdot.org
  
  Jan Leike, one of OpenAI's "superalignment" leaders, who resigned last week due to AI safety concerns, has joined Anthropic to continue the mission. According to Leike, the new team "will work on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalization, and automated alignment research." TechCrunch reports: A source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that Leike will report directly to Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, and that Anthropic researchers currently working on scalable ov
  
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• Researchers Cracked an 11-Year-Old Password To a $3 Million Software-Based Crypto Wallet

  28-05-2024 23:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago when "Michael," an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down. Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in a password-protected digital wallet. He generated a password using the RoboForm password manager and stored that password in a file encrypted with a too
  
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• Ubuntu Linux 24.04 Now Optimized For Milk-V Mars RISC-V Single Board Computer

  28-05-2024 22:45 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has officially released the optimized Ubuntu 24.04 image for the Milk-V Mars, a credit-card-sized RISC-V single board computer (SBC) developed by Shenzhen MilkV Technology Co., Ltd.
  The Milk-V Mars is the world's first high-performance RISC-V SBC of its size. Powered by the StarFive JH7110 quad-core processor, the board is equipped with up to 8GB of LPDDR4 memory and supports various modern interfaces, including USB 3.0, HDMI 2.0 for 4K output, and Ethernet with Po
  
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• Russia Mulling Charging Companies To Use Foreign Software

  28-05-2024 22:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Russia may charge domestic companies to use foreign software, the TASS news agency quoted Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev as saying on Tuesday, as Moscow seeks to cut dependency on foreign technology and bolster its own. From a report: President Vladimir Putin has made achieving technological independence a key goal, as Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine seek to hamstring Moscow's ability to acquire technology and equipment from abroad that could help it on the battlefield. As
  
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• A Robot Will Soon Try To Remove Melted Nuclear Fuel From Japan's Destroyed Fukushima Reactor

  28-05-2024 21:22 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) showcased a remote-controlled robot on Tuesday that will retrieve small pieces of melted fuel debris from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant later this year. The robot, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, features an extendable pipe and tongs capable of picking up granule-sized debris. TEPCO plans to remove less than 3 grams of debris during the test at the No. 2 reactor, marking the first such operation since the 2011 meltdown c
  
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• Klarna Using GenAI To Cut Marketing Costs By $10 Million Annually

  28-05-2024 20:42 via slashdot.org
  
  Fintech firm Klarna, one of the early adopters of generative AI said on Tuesday it is using AI for purposes such as running marketing campaigns and generating images, saving about $10 million in costs annually. From a report: The company has cut its sales and marketing budget by 11% in the first quarter, with AI responsible for 37% of the cost savings, while increasing the number of campaigns, the company said. Using GenAI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Firefly for image generation, Klarna s
  
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• How China's 1980s PC Industry Hacked Dot-Matrix Printers

  28-05-2024 20:02 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Commercial dot-matrix printing was yet another arena in which the needs of Chinese character I/O were not accounted for. This is witnessed most clearly in the then-dominant configuration of printer heads -- specifically the 9-pin printer heads found in mass-manufactured dot-matrix printers during the 1970s. Using nine pins, these early dot-matrix printers were able to produce low-resolution Latin alphabet bitmaps with just one pass of the printer head. The ch
  
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• Adam Neumann Drops Bid To Acquire Bankrupt WeWork

  28-05-2024 19:20 via slashdot.org
  
  The WeWork founder Adam Neumann has shelved his bid to acquire the bankrupt shared office space provider. From a report: It emerged earlier this year that Neumann, who was ousted from the business in 2019 following a botched attempt to take it public on the stock market, was seeking to buy the business. His new real estate venture, Flow Global, submitted a bid of more than $500m to take over WeWork and its assets. On Tuesday morning, however, Neumann confirmed that Flow was walking away from his
  
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• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is Coming To Xbox Game Pass On Its Release Day

  28-05-2024 18:48 via games.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Just before Microsoft closed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, it said that it would take some time to bring the publisher's titles to Game Pass. We've only seen one such addition so far in the form of Diablo IV, but the company has announced another, somewhat notable one. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be available on Game Pass on its release day later this year.
  Microsoft is banking on the debut of a new Call of Duty title on its subscription service
  
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• Carbon Offsets, a Much-Criticized Climate Tool, Get Federal Guidelines

  28-05-2024 18:05 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Biden administration on Tuesday laid out for the first time [PDF] a set of broad government guidelines around the use of carbon offsets in an attempt to shore up confidence in a method for tackling global warming that has faced growing criticism. From a report: Companies and individuals spent $1.7 billion last year voluntarily buying carbon offsets, which are intended to cancel out the climate effects of activities like air travel by funding projects elsewhere, such as the planting of trees,
  
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• Global Sales of Polluting SUVs Hit Record High in 2023, Data Shows

  28-05-2024 17:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Sales of SUVs hit a new record in 2023, making up half of all new cars sold globally, data has revealed. Experts warned that the rising sales of the large, heavy vehicles is pushing up the carbon emissions that drive global heating. From a report: The analysis, by the International Energy Agency, found that the rising emissions from SUVs in 2023 made up 20% of the global increase in CO2, making the vehicles a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis. If SUVs were a country, the IEA said, t
  
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• Wall Street Moves To Fastest Settlement of Trades in a Century

  28-05-2024 16:40 via slashdot.org
  
  The US stock market is finally as fast as it was about a hundred years ago. Bloomberg News: That was the last time share trades in New York settled in a single day, as they will from Tuesday under new Securities and Exchange Commission rules. The change, halving the time it takes to complete every transaction, also occurred in jurisdictions including Canada and Mexico on Monday. The switch to the system known as T+1 -- abandoned in the earlier era as volumes became unwieldy -- is ultimately inte
  
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• PayPal Is Planning an Ad Business Using Data on Its Millions of Shoppers

  28-05-2024 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  PayPal hopes to boost its growth by starting an ad network [non-paywalled link] juiced with something it already owns: data on its millions of users. From a report: The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app. PayPal has hired Mark Grether, who formerly led Uber's advertisi
  
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• T-Mobile To Acquire Most of US Cellular in $4.4 Billion Deal

  28-05-2024 13:58 via mobile.slashdot.org
  
  T-Mobile said Tuesday that it plans to acquire most of U.S. Cellular, including stores, some of the wireless operator's spectrum and its customers, in a deal worth $4.4 billion. The deal includes cash and up to $2 billion of debt. From a report: T-Mobile said it will use U.S. Cellular wireless spectrum to improve coverage in rural areas while offering better connectivity to U.S. Cellular customers around the United States. The company said it will allow U.S. Cellular customers to keep their curr
  
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• OpenAI Says It Has Begun Training a New Flagship AI Model

  28-05-2024 13:05 via slashdot.org
  
  OpenAI said on Tuesday that it has begun training a new flagship AI model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT. From a report: The San Francisco start-up, which is one of the world's leading A.I. companies, said in a blog post that it expects the new model to bring "the next level of capabilities" as it strives to build "artificial general intelligence," or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The new model would be an
  
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• YouTube Begins Skipping Videos for Ad-Blocker Users

  28-05-2024 10:23 via news.slashdot.org
  
  YouTube's latest move against ad blockers involves skipping videos straight to the end or muting audio for users with ad blockers enabled, according to user reports. This follows previous tests by the Google-owned platform, including blocking playback after three videos and slowing down load times for ad-blocker users.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Ransomware Group Claims Responsibility for Christie's Hack

  28-05-2024 07:18 via it.slashdot.org
  
  A hacker group called RansomHub said it was behind the cyberattack that hit the Christie's website just days before its marquee spring sales began, forcing the auction house to resort to alternatives to online bidding. From a report: In a post on the dark web on Monday, the group claimed that it had gained access to sensitive information about the world's wealthiest art collectors, posting only a few examples of names and birthdays. It was not immediately possible to verify RansomHub's claims, b
  
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• Intel Removes Knights Mill and Knights Landing Xeon Phi Support In LLVM 19

  28-05-2024 04:30 via it.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Similar to the GCC compiler dropping support for the Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing accelerators a few days ago, Intel has also gone ahead and seen to the removal of Xeon Phi support for the LLVM/Clang 19 compiler. Since earlier this year in LLVM/Clang 18 the Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing support was treated as deprecated. Now for the LLVM 19 release due out around September, the support is removed entirely. This aligns with GCC 14 havi
  
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• Rivers of Lava on Venus Reveal a More Volcanically Active Planet

  28-05-2024 03:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Witnessing the blood-red fires of a volcanic eruption on Earth is memorable. But to see molten rock bleed out of a volcano on a different planet would be extraordinary. That is close to what scientists have spotted on Venus: two vast, sinuous lava flows oozing from two different corners of Earth's planetary neighbor. From a report: "After you see something like this, the first reaction is 'wow,'" said Davide Sulcanese, a doctoral student at the Universita d'Annunzio in Pescara, Italy, and an aut
  
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• Ditch Brightly Colored Plastic, Anti-Waste Researchers Tell Firms

  28-05-2024 01:31 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Retailers are being urged to stop making everyday products such as drinks bottles, outdoor furniture and toys out of brightly coloured plastic after researchers found it degrades into microplastics faster than plainer colours. From a report: Red, blue and green plastic became "very brittle and fragmented," while black, white and silver samples were "largely unaffected" over a three-year period, according to the findings of the University of Leicester-led project. The scale of environmental pollu
  
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• Microsoft's Automatic Super Resolution Arrives To Improve Gaming Performance

  28-05-2024 00:30 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has announced Auto SR, an AI-powered image upscaling solution for Windows 11 on Arm devices. The feature, exclusive to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X CPUs, aims to enhance gaming performance on ARM-based systems. Auto SR, however, comes with notable restrictions, including compatibility limitations with certain DirectX versions and the inability to work simultaneously with HDR.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Millions in US Face Extreme-Heat Threat

  27-05-2024 23:30 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Millions of Americans face the threat of dangerous heatwaves in the coming weeks with another summer of record-breaking temperatures forecast to hit the US. From a report: Most of New Mexico and Utah -- alongside parts of Arizona, Texas and Colorado -- have the highest chance (60% to 70%) of seeing hotter-than-average summer temperatures, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). In addition, the entire north-east -- from Maine down to Pennsylvania and New Jersey -
  
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