ICT news

• WhatsApp Allows Users To Edit Messages

  22-05-2023 22:57 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  WhatsApp users will now be able to edit messages within 15 minutes of hitting send. Reuters reports: "For the moments when you make a mistake or simply change your mind, you can now edit your sent messages on WhatsApp," the Meta Platforms Inc-owned messaging app said in a blog post on Monday.The function can be accessed by long-pressing the message and choosing "edit" in the drop-down menu. The modified message will carry the label "edited", without showing edit history.Read more of this story a
  
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• AI Agents 'Perilous' for Secure Apps Such as Signal, Whittaker Says

  20-01-2026 20:22 via it.slashdot.org
  Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker warned that AI agents that autonomously carry out tasks pose a threat to encrypted messaging apps [non-paywalled source] because they require broad access to data stored across a device and can be hijacked if given root permissions.
  Speaking at Davos on Tuesday, Whittaker said the deeper integration of AI agents into devices is "pretty perilous" for services like Signal. For an AI agent to act effectively on behalf of a user, it would need unilatera
  
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• Palantir CEO Says AI To Make Large-Scale Immigration Obsolete

  20-01-2026 19:35 via slashdot.org
  AI will displace so many jobs that it will eliminate the need for mass immigration, according to Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Bloomberg: "There will be more than enough jobs for the citizens of your nation, especially those with vocational training," said Karp, speaking at a World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday. "I do think these trends really do make it hard to imagine why we should have large-scale immigration unless you have a very specialized skill."
  Karp, who holds a PhD i
  
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• Crypto News Outlet Cointelegraph Loses 80% of Traffic After Google Penalty For Parasitic Blackhat SEO Deal

  20-01-2026 19:02 via news.slashdot.org
  Cointelegraph, once one of the most-visited cryptocurrency news sites, has seen its monthly traffic plummet from roughly 8 million visits to 1.4 million -- an 80% drop in three months -- after Google issued a manual penalty in October 2025 for the outlet's partnership with a blackhat SEO firm that used Cointelegraph's domain authority to promote affiliate links to offshore casinos and betting platforms.
  The CEO, who had no prior media experience, proceeded despite warnings from Google earlier in
  
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• He Went To Prison for Gene-Editing Babies. Now He's Planning To Do It Again

  20-01-2026 18:21 via science.slashdot.org
  He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who served three years in prison after creating the world's first gene-edited babies in 2018, is now preparing for another attempt at germline editing -- this time to prevent Alzheimer's disease. In an interview, He said he has established an independent lab in south Beijing and raised $7 million from private donors to fund research into introducing a protective genetic mutation found in Icelandic populations.
  The three girls born from his original experiment ar
  
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• Europe Must Invest in Open Source AI or Cede To China, Schmidt Says

  20-01-2026 17:44 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe must invest in its own open source artificial intelligence labs and address soaring energy prices, or it will quickly find itself dependent on Chinese models, former Google chief executive and tech investor Eric Schmidt said.
  "In the US, the companies are largely moving to closed source, which means they'll be purchased and licensed and so forth. And it is also the case that China is largely open weight, open source in its approach," Schmidt said at th
  
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• Ukraine To Share Wartime Combat Data With Allies To Help Train AI

  20-01-2026 17:05 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Ukraine will establish a system allowing its allies to train their AI models on Kyiv's valuable combat data collected throughout the nearly four-year war with Russia, newly appointed Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov has said. Fedorov -- a former digitalisation minister who last week took up the post to drive reforms across Ukraine's vast defence ministry and armed forces -- has described Kyiv's wartime data trove as one of its "cards" in negotiations with ot
  
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• Energy Costs Will Decide Which Countries Win the AI Race, Microsoft's Nadella Says

  20-01-2026 16:29 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology's promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that "GDP growth in any place will be directly correlated" to the cost of energy in using AI.
  He pointed to a new global commodity in "tokens" -- basic units of processing that are bought by users of AI models, allowing
  
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• Amazon CEO Jassy Says Tariffs Have Started To 'Creep' Into Prices

  20-01-2026 15:40 via news.slashdot.org
  Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs are starting to be reflected in the price of some items, as sellers weigh how to absorb the shock of the added costs. From a report: Amazon and many of its third-party merchants pre-purchased inventory to try to get ahead of the tariffs and keep prices low for customers, but most of that supply ran out last fall, Jassy said in a Tuesday interview with CNBC's Becky Quick at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
  "So you
  
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• Sony Is Ceding Control of TV Hardware Business To China's TCL

  20-01-2026 15:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Sony plans to spin off its TV hardware business to a new joint venture controlled by Chinese electronics giant TCL, the two said Tuesday, a significant retreat for the Japanese giant whose Bravia line has long occupied the premium end of the television market. TCL would hold a 51% stake in the venture and Sony would retain 49% under a nonbinding agreement the two companies signed. They aim to finalize binding terms by the end of March and begin operations in April 2027, pending regulatory approv
  
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• 'Just Because Linus Torvalds Vibe Codes Doesn't Mean It's a Good Idea'

  20-01-2026 14:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  In an opinion piece for The Register, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that while "vibe coding" can be fun and occasionally useful for small, throwaway projects, it produces brittle, low-quality code that doesn't scale and ultimately burdens real developers with cleanup and maintenance. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Vibe coding got a big boost when everyone's favorite open source programmer, Linux's Linus Torvalds, said he'd been using Google's Antigravity LLM on his toy program AudioNo
  
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• Ocean Damage Nearly Doubles the Cost of Climate Change

  20-01-2026 11:00 via news.slashdot.org
  A new study from Scripps Institution of Oceanography finds that factoring ocean damage into climate economics nearly doubles the estimated global cost of climate change, adding close to $2 trillion per year from losses to fisheries, coral reefs, and coastal infrastructure. "It is the first time a social cost of carbon (SCC) assessment -- a key measure of economic harm caused by climate change -- has included damages to the ocean," reports Inside Climate News. From the report: "For decades, we've
  
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• Bank of England 'Must Plan For a Financial Crisis Triggered By Aliens'

  20-01-2026 08:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  A former Bank of England analyst has urged contingency planning for a potential financial shock if the U.S. government were to confirm the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. The argument is that "ontological shock" alone could destabilize confidence and trigger crisis dynamics. The Independent reports: [Helen McCaw, who served as a senior analyst in financial security at the UK's central bank and worked for the Bank of England for 10 years until 2012] said politicians and bankers can no
  
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• The Fastest Human Spaceflight Mission In History Crawls Closer To Liftoff

  20-01-2026 04:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of
  
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• The World's Longest-Running Lab Experiment Is Almost 100 Years Old

  20-01-2026 03:30 via science.slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It all started in 1927, when physicist Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland in Australia filled a closed funnel with the world's thickest known fluid: pitch, a derivative of tar that was once used to seal ships against the seas. Three years later, in 1930, Parnell cut the funnel's stem, like a ribbon at an event, heralding the start of the Pitch Drop Experiment. From then on, the black substance began to flow. At least, that is, in a
  
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• Germany's EV Subsidies Will Include Chinese Brands

  20-01-2026 02:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  Germany is reinstating EV subsidies after a sharp sales drop, rolling out a 3 billion-euro program offering 1,500-6,000 euros per buyer starting in May and running through 2029. Unlike some neighboring countries, the incentives are open to all manufacturers with a focus on low- and middle-income households. From a report: "I cannot see any evidence of this postulated major influx of Chinese car manufacturers in Germany, either in the figures or on the roads -- and that is why we are facing up to
  
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• A Second US Sphere Could Come To Maryland

  20-01-2026 02:10 via news.slashdot.org
  Sphere Entertainment plans to build a second U.S. Sphere near Washington, D.C., with a smaller 6,000-seat "mini-Sphere" proposed for National Harbor in Maryland. The venue would retain the signature LED exterior and immersive 4D tech of the Las Vegas Sphere, just at a more compact scale. The Verge reports: The second US sphere would be built in an area known as National Harbor in Prince George's County, Maryland. Located along the Potomac River, National Harbor currently features a convention ce
  
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• Nvidia Contacted Anna's Archive To Secure Access To Millions of Pirated Books

  20-01-2026 01:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna's Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim (PDF) that the trillion-dollar company directly reached out to Anna's Archive, seeking high-speed access to the shadow library data. [...] Last Friday, the authors filed an amended complaint that significantly expands the s
  
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• OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025

  20-01-2026 00:50 via devices.slashdot.org
  According to CFO Sarah Friar, OpenAI's annualized revenue surpassed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion a year earlier with growth closely tracking an expansion in computing capacity. Reuters reports: OpenAI's computing capacity rose to 1.9 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 from 0.6 GW in 2024, Friar said in the blog, adding that Microsoft-backed OpenAI's weekly and daily active users figures continue to produce all-time highs. OpenAI last week said it would start showing ads in ChatGPT to some U.S. us
  
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• Threads Usage Overtakes X On Mobile

  20-01-2026 00:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  New data from Similarweb shows Threads has overtaken X in daily mobile users. However, X still dominates on the web with around 150 million daily web visits compared to Threads' 8.5 million daily visits. TechCrunch reports: Similarweb's data shows that Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android as of January 7, 2026, after months of growth, while X has 125 million daily active users on mobile devices. This appears to be the result of longer-term trends, rather than a reactio
  
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• Congress Wants To Hand Your Parenting To Big Tech

  19-01-2026 23:22 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): Lawmakers in Washington are once again focusing on kids, screens, and mental health. But according to Congress, Big Tech is somehow both the problem and the solution. The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing [Friday] on "examining the effect of technology on America's youth." Witnesses warned about "addictive" online content, mental health, and kids spending too much time buried in screen. At the center of the
  
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• Rackspace Customers Grapple With 'Devastating' Email Hosting Price Hike

  19-01-2026 22:30 via it.slashdot.org
  Rackspace's new pricing for its email hosting services is "devastating," according to a partner that has been using Rackspace as its email provider since 1999. From a report: In recent weeks, Rackspace updated its email hosting pricing. Its standard plan is now $10 per mailbox per month. Businesses can also pay for the Rackspace Email Plus add-on for an extra $2/mailbox/month (for "file storage, mobile sync, Office-compatible apps, and messaging"), and the Archiving add-on for an extra $6/mailbo
  
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• The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture

  19-01-2026 21:45 via news.slashdot.org
  The American monoculture -- the era when three television networks, seven movie studios, and a handful of record labels determined virtually everything the country watched and heard -- is collapsing under the weight of algorithmic recommendation engines and infinite streaming options. An estimated 200 million tickets were sold for "Gone With the Wind" in 1939 when the U.S. population was 130 million; more than 100 million people watched the MAS*H finale in 1983.
  Only three American productions g
  
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• Asus Confirms It Won't Launch Phones in 2026, May Leave Android Altogether

  19-01-2026 21:05 via mobile.slashdot.org
  Asus won't release any new smartphones this year, and that may signal the brand's exit from the Android space altogether. From a report: Asus Chairman Jonney Shih confirmed the news at an event in Taiwan on Jan. 16. According to a machine-translated version of quotes reported by Inside, Shih said, "Asus will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future."
  Shih said Asus will continue to support existing smartphone users with software updates and warranty assistance. This matches a previous
  
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• WhatsApp Texts Are Not Contracts, Judge Rules in $2M Divorce Row

  19-01-2026 20:25 via yro.slashdot.org
  A British painter who argued that her ex-husband had signed over their $2 million north London home through WhatsApp messages has lost her High Court appeal after the judge ruled that the sender's name appearing in a chat header does not constitute a legal signature.
  Hsiao-mei Lin, 54, presented messages from her former husband Audun Mar Gudmundsson, a financier, in which he stated he would transfer his share of their Tufnell Park property to her. Lin's lawyers argued that because Gudmundsson's
  
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• Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming May Soon Let You Stream Your Own Games for Free - If You Watch Ads

  19-01-2026 19:45 via games.slashdot.org
  Microsoft appears to be preparing an ad-supported tier for Xbox Cloud Gaming that would let players stream games they've purchased digitally without needing a Game Pass subscription, according to a Windows Central report citing sources familiar with the plans. Users last week began noticing a new message pop up while launching cloud games that referenced "1 hour of ad supported play time per session," though no such tier currently exists.
  The ad-supported option, expected to launch sometime this
  
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• ERP Isn't Dead Yet - But Most Execs Are Planning the Wake

  19-01-2026 19:10 via slashdot.org
  Seven out of ten C-suite executives believe traditional enterprise resource planning software has seen its best days, though the category remains firmly entrenched in corporate IT and opinion is sharply divided on what comes next. A survey of 4,295 CFOs, CISOs, CIOs and CEOs worldwide found 36% expect ERP to give way to composable, API-driven best-of-breed systems, while 33% see the future in "agentic ERP" featuring autonomous AI-driven decision-making.
  The research was commissioned by Rimini St
  
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• Valve Has 'Significantly' Rewritten Steam's Rules For How Developers Must Disclose AI Use

  19-01-2026 18:35 via games.slashdot.org
  Valve has substantially overhauled its guidelines for how game developers must disclose the use of generative AI on Steam, making explicit that tools like code assistants and other development aids do not fall under the disclosure requirement. The updated rules clarify that Valve's focus is not on "efficiency gains through the use of AI-powered dev tools."
  Developers must still disclose two specific categories: AI used to generate in-game content, store page assets, or marketing materials, and A
  
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• Netflix Wants Plots Explained Multiple Times Because Viewers Are on Their Phones, Matt Damon Says

  19-01-2026 18:08 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Netflix has begun asking filmmakers to adjust their storytelling approach to account for viewers who are scrolling through their phones while watching, according to Matt Damon. The traditional action movie formula involves three major set pieces distributed across the first, second, and third acts. Netflix now wants a large action sequence in the opening five minutes to hook viewers.
  The streamer has also suggested that filmmakers reiterate plot points "three or four times in the dialogue" to ac
  
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• Dumbphone Owners Have Lost Their Minds

  19-01-2026 17:31 via tech.slashdot.org
  The growing enthusiasm among Gen Z for ditching smartphones in favor of basic "dumbphones" may be overlooking a significant cognitive reality, according to a WIRED essay that draws on the 1998 "extended mind hypothesis" by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers. The hypothesis argues that external tools can extend the biological brain in an all but physical way, meaning your phone isn't just a device -- it's part of a single cognitive system composed of both the tool and your brain.
  "Interfe
  
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