ICT news

• Whatever Happened to El Salvador's Bitcoin Experiment? Two Years Later...

  10-09-2023 20:59 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Agence France-Presse reports that "Two years ago, El Salvador shrugged off a chorus of warnings and adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in a bid to revitalize its economy and improve access to financial services.
  "It has not worked... Economist Cesar Villalona told AFP that Bitcoin 'does not exist in the local economy' in any significant way, because in El Salvador 'everything' is paid in dollars: wages, services and goods."Bitcoin has lost more than half its value since then and though President Na
  
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• Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects 'Unlike Any They Have Seen Before'

  15-09-2026 21:04 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (
  
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• Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' 'Hehe,' And 'Asdfg'

  15-09-2026 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  404 Media reports:Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was "LMAO."
  The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock's "reason" box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerfu
  
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• Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish 'Pointless'

  15-09-2026 12:04 via science.slashdot.org
  The New York Post wrote that OpenAI "stunned the mathematics world" last week when it announced its AI model "cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours."
  But a New York University professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company's scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused."
  [P]rofessor Tristan Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who tr
  
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• ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court

  15-09-2026 07:34 via slashdot.org
  Reuters reports:
  A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program... and said they will refer him to an attorney disciplinary
  
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• Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?

  15-09-2026 03:04 via games.slashdot.org
  Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," reports CNET, "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it."
  Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, "with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes."CNET's editor at large even argues that the Steam Frame "isn't necessarily the future of XR, as muc
  
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• A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast

  14-09-2026 22:34 via slashdot.org
  Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free".Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets peopl
  
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• No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage

  14-09-2026 18:04 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020.
  Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage."These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as d
  
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• Union Contract with Microsoft Ratified by 1,900 Blizzard Developers and Workers

  14-09-2026 13:34 via games.slashdot.org
  Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," reports Kotaku, "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units."
  The workers now gain new protections "on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs."
  [The contract] acknowledges that AI tools "may be useful in the game development process to support human judgment and creativity and that
  
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• Should US Open-Weight AI Labs 'Distill' Frontier Models Too?

  14-09-2026 09:04 via news.slashdot.org
  Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime."Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, sometimes illicitly... Anthropic has accused Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax o
  
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• 220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak

  14-09-2026 04:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials. It was later secured after the disclosure, but it's unclear whether the data had already been copied or abused.
  
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• NASA and IBM Open Source Lunar Mapping Tools

  14-09-2026 00:04 via science.slashdot.org
  NASA and IBM have released an open-source AI model trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. "The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the global research community can build on," said IBM director of research for Europe, Juan Bernabe-Moreno. The Register
  
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• California's Gig Drivers Just Secured Collective Bargaining Power with Newly Certified Union

  13-09-2026 19:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  A union representing Uber and Lyft drivers was just certified by California's Public Employment Relations Board, officially recognizing them as the drivers' bargaining organization.The Sacramento Bee reports that this new bargaining structure :
  The move will allow the California Gig Workers Union to help drivers negotiate issues affecting working conditions and benefits. It comes as at least 30% of active drivers expressed support of the union... [California] Assembly Bill 1340 helped bring the
  
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• Flock Worker Calls Police On Reporter - For Filming Them in Public

  13-09-2026 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  "This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads," says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter "parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo of InvestigateTV's Atlanta affiliate where he also works, displayed a press placard on his dashboard and then pulled out a camera to record the installatio
  
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• Malicious OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers in May

  13-09-2026 11:00 via slashdot.org
  A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a "major malicious attack" against RubyGems last May, according to a new report. That coordinated attack hit Ruby's package manager "with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days," writes The Hacker News, citing a senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io:The latest findings, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, indicate these events were propelled by a cluster o
  
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• Sam Bankman-Fried, Former Crypto Billionaire, Appeals His Conviction To the US Supreme Court

  13-09-2026 07:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  America's highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial on Thursday, CNN reports. But they add that "the former crypto mogul who was convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money" also asked America's high court "to throw out a court order requiring him to pay $11 billion as part of his sentence."Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 after prosecutors said he directed billions of dollars from the crypto exchange F
  
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• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Calls For AI Slowdown

  13-09-2026 03:00 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company's employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too quick a pace for
  
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• Automattic's Matt Mullenweg Claims He's Back 'In Control'

  12-09-2026 23:00 via slashdot.org
  Less than 48 hours after Automattic's board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave, Mullenweg told employees he was back "in control" of the company and that the board was again in agreement. 404 Media cited Slack screenshots late Thursday evening where Mullenweg posted "Don't call it a comeback" and linked to LL Cool J's music video for "Mama Said Knock You Out." "Mullenweg's Slack profile picture currently shows him wearing a pirate hat and eyepatch," the report notes. From the report: "Happy to annou
  
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• LG Responds to TV Spying Allegations

  12-09-2026 19:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  LG is pushing back against reports that its smart TVs are "spying" on users, saying wake-word detection happens locally and that features such as Automatic Content Recognition, voice recognition, and interest-based ads are optional. But critics note that researchers found TVs keeping logs of ambient conversations, and LG's response "did not address broader concerns about how much data it collects, who it shares it with, the potential for bad actors to exploit its features, or the misleading way
  
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• Scientists Create a New Form of Ice At 2,357 Degrees Celsius

  12-09-2026 15:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet -- under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit). [...] In their new experiments, a team led by physicist Alexis Forestier of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission subjected tiny samples of water to the sorts of extreme
  
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• Little Mercury May Be Shrinking Faster Than Scientists Expected

  12-09-2026 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  A new study suggests Mercury may have shrunk about 30% more than scientists previously thought, losing as much as 14 miles in diameter as its interior cooled and contracted over billions of years. "That's significant for a planet barely 3,000 miles (4,900 kilometers) across," reports the Associated Press. From the report: Mercury's rough surface, continually reshaped by debris hurled from impact craters, may have hidden the true extent of the loss, according to the researchers whose findings app
  
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• Can Red-Light Therapy Treat Brain Injuries?

  12-09-2026 07:00 via science.slashdot.org
  The Athletic reports that researchers at the University of Utah are studying itPBM, a medical-grade red-light therapy that has shown promising signs of reducing brain inflammation and improving cognition, mood, anxiety, motor performance and neural connectivity. The report centers in part on former BYU football star and University of Utah adjunct professor Larry Carr, who says the treatment helped him after years of brain damage from repeated head impacts. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt f
  
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• Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom

  12-09-2026 03:00 via games.slashdot.org
  Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. "Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons," says Alex Wormuth. "Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement." Since then, the digital brain model has been repurposed
  
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• PlayStation Ditched Hideo Kojima's 'Physint' on Budget Concerns, Missed Deadlines

  12-09-2026 00:00 via games.slashdot.org
  Sony reportedly pulled PlayStation funding from Hideo Kojima's upcoming espionage game Physint over concerns about its ballooning budget, missed deadlines, profitability, and the fact that it would not remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. Kojima Productions has since struck a deal with Xbox, which plans to publish the game on both Xbox and PC. It's also secured film and television rights. Bloomberg reports: The new game, Physint, hasn't yet been shown publicly but excited fans when it wa
  
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• US Legislators Complain About Secretive British Court and Apple Encryption

  11-09-2026 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain's most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple's legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers' encrypted data, warning that Whitehall's taste for secrecy is 'needlessly' straining relations between the two allies. The letter (PDF), shared with the Guardian ahead of being sent to the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT) on Friday, is signed by the Democrati
  
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• Altman Considers Slowing Down AI Development

  11-09-2026 20:00 via slashdot.org
  Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused development once this year for security work and is now pushing for mandatory U.S. AI safety requirements. Anthropic has also signaled interest in coordinating on the pace of new releases. Here are some of th
  
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• UK Government Rejects 'Kill Switch' Idea For Dangerous AI

  11-09-2026 19:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI "kill switch," arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament by lords and MPs in recent weeks as fears grow about the threat the tech poses. But the Cabinet Office - the part of government which
  
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• Anthropic Reveals Rogue AI Agents Hate CAPTCHAs

  11-09-2026 18:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic's latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about -- its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database -- but it also offers some levity: AI agents hate CAPTCHA. [...] The agent had a hard time with the technical challenge of seeing the CAPTCHA's imagery, interpreting correctly, and clicking on the right choices. It spends pages 45
  
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• California Governor Signs Laws Protecting Kids From Risks of Social Media, AI Chatbots

  11-09-2026 17:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per child if they are found negligent of harming children through their platforms, ban tech businesses from offering addictive feeds to anyone under 16, require operators of AI chatbots to perform
  
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• Boy Developed 'Toasted Skin' Condition From Using a Laptop Every Day

  11-09-2026 13:00 via science.slashdot.org
  A medical report published earlier this week says a boy in the U.K. developed erythema ab igne, or "toasted skin syndrome," after resting a laptop on his abdomen for up to eight hours a day, often while it was charging. "The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (six inches) wide, made of flat, reddish-brown 'interlacing lines forming irregular circles and a lace-like morphology,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: Based on the appearance, the doctors started reconsi
  
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