ICT news

• 'Why I Quit Streaming And Got Back Into Cassettes'

  25-12-2025 02:25 via news.slashdot.org
  "In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we're missing when we stop taking risks," writes author Janus Rose in an article for 404 Media. Here's an excerpt: There are lots of advantages to the cassette lifestyle. Unlike vinyl records, tapes are compact and super-portable, and unlike streaming, you never have to worry about a giant company suddenly taking them away from you. They can be easily duplicated, shared, and made into mixtapes using equipment you find in a junk shop. When
  
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• Trump Administration To Overhaul Lottery System For H-1B Visas

  25-12-2025 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson,
  
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• Bitcoin Miners' Pivot To AI Has Lifted Bitcoin-Mining ETF By About 90% This Year

  25-12-2025 14:00 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It's harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That's because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the massive, electricity-hungry data centers expected to power the artificial-intelligence boom. Some companies are figuring out how to remake themselves as vital suppliers to Alph
  
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• Fake Video Claiming 'Coup In France' Goes Viral

  25-12-2025 11:00 via slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from Euronews: France's President Emmanuel Macron discovered news of his own supposed overthrow, after he received a message of concern, along with a link to a Facebook video. "On Sunday (14 December) one of my African counterparts got in touch, writing 'Dear president, what's happening to you? I'm very worried,'" Macron told readers of French local newspaper La Provence on December 16.Alongside the message, a compelling video showcasing a swirling helicopter, m
  
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• NASA Will Soon Find Out If the Perseverance Rover Can Really Persevere On Mars

  25-12-2025 08:00 via science.slashdot.org
  With NASA's Mars Sample Return mission delayed into the 2030s, engineers are certifying the Perseverance rover to keep operating for many more years while it continues collecting and safeguarding Martian rock samples. Ars Technica reports: The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excellent health, according to Steve Lee, Perseverance's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). "Perseverance is approaching five years of exploration on Mars," Le
  
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• Nuclear Developer Proposes Using Navy Reactors For Data Centers

  25-12-2025 04:30 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: A Texas power developer is proposing to repurpose nuclear reactors from Navy warships to power the United States grid as the Trump administration pushes to secure massive amounts of energy for the artificial intelligence boom. HGP Intelligent Energy LLC filed an application to the Energy Department to redirect two retired reactors to a data center project proposed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to a letter submitted to the agency's
  
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• Apple To Allow Alternative App Stores For iOS Users In Brazil

  25-12-2025 01:45 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple will allow alternative iOS app stores and external payment systems in Brazil after settling an antitrust case with the country's competition authority, following a lawsuit brought by MercadoLibre back in 2022. Thurrott reports: Yesterday, Brazil's Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica (CADE) explained in its press release that it has approved a Term of Commitment to Cease (TCC) submitted by Apple. To settle the lawsuit, the iPhone maker has agreed to allow third-party iOS app stores
  
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• Apple's App Course Runs $20,000 a Student. Is It Really Worth It?

  25-12-2025 01:02 via developers.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Two years ago, Lizmary Fernandez took a detour from studying to be an immigration attorney to join a free Apple course for making iPhone apps. The Apple Developer Academy in Detroit launched as part of the company's $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and aims to expand opportunities for people of color in the country's poorest big city. But Fernandez found the program's cost-of-living stipend lacking -- "A lot of us got on foo
  
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• The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here

  25-12-2025 00:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel has dubbed "phone-based retirement." A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time -- four hours and 16 minutes -- in front of screens. Nielsen reported this year that adults 65 a
  
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• Spotify Disables Accounts After Open-Source Group Scrapes 86 Million Songs From Platform

  24-12-2025 23:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping.""We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "Since day o
  
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• Microsoft Says It's Not Planning To Use AI To Rewrite Windows From C To Rust

  24-12-2025 23:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company's goal was to "eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030."
  Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for several large-scale research projects at Microsoft, made the claim in what was originally a hiring post for his team. His original wording described a "North Star" of "1 engineer, 1
  
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• Italy Tells Meta To Suspend Its Policy That Bans Rival AI Chatbots From WhatsApp

  24-12-2025 22:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  Italy's antitrust regulator Italian Competition Authority ordered Meta to suspend a policy that blocks rival AI chatbots from using WhatsApp's business APIs, citing potential abuse of market dominance. "Meta's conduct appears to constitute an abuse, since it may limit production, market access, or technical developments in the AI Chatbot services market, to the detriment of consumers," the Authority wrote. "Moreover, while the investigation is ongoing, Meta's conduct may cause serious and irrepa
  
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• Amazon Faces 'Leader's Dilemma' - Fight AI Shopping Bots or Join Them

  24-12-2025 22:21 via slashdot.org
  Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space -- block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website code to block external AI agents from crawling it, and as of this week had blocked 47 bots including those from all major AI companies. In November, Amazon s
  
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• China Is Worried AI Threatens Party Rule

  24-12-2025 21:40 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that
  
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• An Amateur Codebreaker May Have Just Solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac Killings

  24-12-2025 21:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expre
  
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• European Leaders Condemn US Visa Bans as Row Over 'Censorship' Escalates

  24-12-2025 20:30 via news.slashdot.org
  European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of "coercion and intimidation," after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies. From a report: The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner and one of the architects of the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, including two in Germany and two
  
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• Russia Plans a Nuclear Power Plant on the Moon Within a Decade

  24-12-2025 20:01 via science.slashdot.org
  Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite. Reuters: Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as a leading power in space exploration, but in recent decades it has fallen behind the United States and, increasingly, China. Russia's ambitions suffer
  
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• Some of DOJ's Careful Redactions Can Be Defeated With Copy-Paste

  24-12-2025 19:01 via news.slashdot.org
  The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document.
  A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Jeffrey Epstein's estate appeared on the DOJ's "Epstein Library" website with black boxes throughout. Techd
  
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• What Rules Govern Hallmark Christmas Movies?

  24-12-2025 18:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos.
  The document, referred to as Hallmark's "bible" by writers and producers who have worked on these films, specifies everything from script length (105-110 pages across
  
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• 25.2% of Energy EU Used in 2024 Came From Renewables

  24-12-2025 17:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024, 25.2% of gross final energy consumption in the EU came from renewable sources, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2023. This share is 17.3 pp short of meeting the 2030 target (42.5%), which would require an annual average increase of 2.9 pp from 2025 to 2030.
  Among the EU countries, Sweden recorded the highest share of its gross final energy consumption coming from renewable sources (62.8%). Sweden primarily relied on solid biomass, hydro and
  
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• YouTube Has a Firm Grip on Daytime TV

  24-12-2025 16:01 via news.slashdot.org
  YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, but its real competitive advantage comes not from prime-time viewing but from its stranglehold on daytime hours when Americans are meditating, exercising, cooking, or simply looking for background noise. At 11 a.m. in October, YouTube commanded an average audience of 6.3 million viewers compared to Netflix's 2.8 million, according to Nielsen data. Amazon drew about a million viewers at that hour, and HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock each pull
  
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• Why Are There No Large Market Cap Companies Globally in Edtech?

  24-12-2025 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Goldman Sachs, in a note this week, via India Dispatch: There are various reasons that explains this: (i) A large part of the global education spend goes towards formal education (schools, colleges and universities), which are typically either run by governments or are not-for-profit institutions;
  (ii) It is difficult to replicate education quality at scale in our view, since most teachers would have a different pedagogy, and thus standardization is harder to achieve vs that in other internet ca
  
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• US Bars Five Europeans It Says Pressured Tech Firms To Censor American Viewpoints Online

  24-12-2025 14:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints. The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as "radical" activists and "weaponized" nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa policy announced in May to restrict the entry of foreigners deemed responsible for censorship of protected s
  
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• 2015 Radio Interview Frames AI As 'High-Level Algebra'

  24-12-2025 11:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus incentives rather than something mystical, touching on architectural bottlenecks, why "reasoning" may not simply emerge from brute forc
  
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• What Might Adding Emojis and Pictures To Text Programming Languages Look Like?

  24-12-2025 08:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That's the premise of "Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?" (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with Python and SQL might look like. A GitHub repo includes a Google Colab-ready Python notebook proof of concept that does rudimentary emoji-to-text translation via an IPython input transfo
  
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• Inside Uzbekistan's Nationwide License Plate Surveillance System

  24-12-2025 04:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles' license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few. The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was tracked over six months as he travele
  
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• iOS 26.3 Brings AirPods-Like Pairing To Third-Party Devices In EU Under DMA

  24-12-2025 03:10 via devices.slashdot.org
  Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple's iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same capabilities and access to device features that Apple's own products get. In iOS 26.3, EU wearable device makers can now test proximity pairing and improved notifications.Here a
  
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• John Carreyou and Other Authors Bring New Lawsuit Against Six Major AI Companies

  24-12-2025 02:30 via yro.slashdot.org
  A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it's because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of b
  
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• Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve's Steam Deck On Its Servers

  24-12-2025 01:50 via linux.slashdot.org
  Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers. [...]The presentation at LPC 2025 by Meta engineers was in fact titled "How do we make a Steam Deck scheduler work on large servers." At Meta they have
  
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• ServiceNow To Buy Armis For $7.75 Billion As It Bets Big On Cybersecurity For AI

  24-12-2025 01:10 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: ServiceNow announced a deal to acquire cybersecurity company Armis on Tuesday, marking a new milestone in the software giant's artificial-intelligence business strategy. The $7.75 billion all-cash transaction is part of ServiceNow's goal of advancing governance and trust in autonomous AI agents, and the company's largest transaction to date. "The acquisition of Armis will extend and enhance ServiceNow's Security, Risk, and [Operational Techno
  
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