ICT news

• Why Watts Should Replace mAh as Essential Spec for Mobile Devices

  02-04-2025 09:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Tech manufacturers continue misleading consumers with impressive-sounding but less useful specs like milliamp-hours and megahertz, while hiding the one measurement that matters most: watts. The Verge argues that the watt provides the clearest picture of a device's true capabilities by showing how much power courses through chips and how quickly batteries drain. With elementary math, consumers could easily calculate battery life by dividing watt-hours by power consumption. The Verge: The Steam De
  
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• Ring Cancels Its Partnership With Flock Safety After Surveillance Backlash

  13-02-2026 10:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration. From a report: In a statement published on Ring's blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint de
  
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• Russia Fully Blocks WhatsApp

  13-02-2026 07:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. messenger app WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, has been completely blocked in Russia for failing to comply with local law, the Kremlin said on Thursday, suggesting Russians turn to a state-backed "national messenger" instead. "Due to Meta's unwillingness to comply with Russian law, such a decision was indeed taken and implemented," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, proposing that Russians switch to MAX, Russia's state-owned messenger.Read
  
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• Windows 11 Notepad Flaw Let Files Execute Silently via Markdown Links

  13-02-2026 04:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11's Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning.
  The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday update, stemmed from Notepad's relatively new Markdown support -- a feature Microsoft added after discontinuing WordPad and rewriting Notepad to serve as both a plain
  
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• CIA Makes New Push To Recruit Chinese Military Officers as Informants

  13-02-2026 02:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China's top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military. The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military officer, in the latest U.S. step in a campaign to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington's strategic rival.
  It follows a similar effort last May that
  
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• IBM Plans To Triple Entry-Level Hiring in the US

  12-02-2026 23:30 via slashdot.org
  IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers. From a report: While the company declined to disclose specific hiring figures, it said the expansion will be "across the board," affecting a wide range of departments. "And yes, it's for all these jobs that we're being told AI can do," said Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's chief human resources officer, speaking at a conference this week in New York.
  LaMoreaux said s
  
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• WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties

  12-02-2026 22:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark.
  The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, th
  
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• Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year

  12-02-2026 21:00 via slashdot.org
  Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed.
  The San Francisco-based
  
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• Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing

  12-02-2026 20:10 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources said that Palo Alto's findings that China was tied to the sprawling hacking spree were dialed back following last month's news, first reported by Reuters, that Palo Alto was one of about 15 U.S. and
  
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• Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps

  12-02-2026 19:10 via it.slashdot.org
  Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settings, installing unwanted software, and modifying core Windows experiences without permission.
  A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode
  
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• Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser

  12-02-2026 18:12 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.
  The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an ex
  
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• Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool

  12-02-2026 17:00 via developers.slashdot.org
  Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it the
  
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• The "Are You Sure?" Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind

  12-02-2026 16:03 via slashdot.org
  The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.
  The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, rewards respon
  
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• Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers

  12-02-2026 15:00 via slashdot.org
  AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid.
  In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI
  
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• Meta Auditor EY Raised Red Flag on Data-Center Accounting

  12-02-2026 13:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make.
  Such a warning label is rare for a sp
  
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• US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says

  12-02-2026 10:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world."
  Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales
  
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• Siri's AI Overhaul Delayed Again

  12-02-2026 07:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.
  The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI's ChatGPT instead of Apple's own technology, the report sai
  
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• Anthropic Safety Researcher Quits, Warning 'World is in Peril'

  12-02-2026 04:44 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks.
  Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety
  
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• With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

  12-02-2026 02:45 via yro.slashdot.org
  Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network.
  Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned last year, has since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI int
  
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• Is Linux Mint Burning Out? Developers Consider Longer Release Cycle

  11-02-2026 23:45 via linux.slashdot.org
  BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvements, they admit it consumes significant time
  
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• A Hellish 'Hothouse Earth' Getting Closer, Scientists Say

  11-02-2026 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach.
  The climate would also be very different to the benign conditi
  
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• US Had Almost No Job Growth in 2025

  11-02-2026 21:01 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025, according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data, and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025. This is far fewer than the 1.46 million jobs that were adde
  
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• EVs Could Be Cheaper To Own Than Gas Cars in Africa by 2040

  11-02-2026 20:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems -- solar panels, batteries and an inverter -- could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040.
  The analysis considered total cost of ownership including sticker price, financing and fuel or charging costs, but excluded policy-related factors like
  
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• UK Orders Deletion of Country's Largest Court Reporting Archive

  11-02-2026 19:01 via news.slashdot.org
  The UK's Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country's largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021.
  Courtsdesk's research found that journalists received no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, that court case listings were accurate on just 4.2% of sitting days, and that half a
  
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• Are CDs Making a Comeback? A Statistical Analysis

  11-02-2026 18:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  Reports of the compact disc's death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 and 3.06% in 2024.
  Google search traffic for "CD Player" has ticked upward over the past 16 months after two decades of near
  
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• HP Now Rents Gaming Laptops

  11-02-2026 17:00 via slashdot.org
  HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine's retail price.
  The service ranges from $50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with an RTX 5080. At current sale prices, subscribers would exceed the cost of buying the laptop outright within 16
  
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• Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month

  11-02-2026 16:00 via slashdot.org
  Sony will ship its last batch of Blu-ray recorders this month, according to Kyodo News, ending the company's decades-long run in a product category it helped create. The recorders targeted exclusively the Japanese domestic market, where households used them to record broadcast television. Sony had already stopped manufacturing the devices and recordable discs about a year ago, and the final shipments are clearing out remaining inventory.
  Kyodo attributes the segment's death to the rise of stream
  
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• T-Mobile Will Live Translate Regular Phone Calls Without an App

  11-02-2026 15:01 via tech.slashdot.org
  T-Mobile is opening registration today for a beta test of Live Translation, an AI-powered feature that will translate live phone calls into more than 50 languages when it launches this spring.
  The feature operates at the network level, so it doesn't require any specific app or device -- beta participants simply dial 87 to activate it on a call. T-Mobile President of Technology and CTO John Saw told The Verge that Live Translation works over VoLTE, VoNR and VoWiFi, meaning it isn't limited to 5G.
  
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• Moderna Says FDA Refuses To Review Its Application for Experimental Flu Shot

  11-02-2026 13:20 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: The Food and Drug Administration has refused to start a review of Moderna's application for its experimental flu shot, the company announced Tuesday, in another sign of the Trump administration's influence on tightening vaccine regulations in the U.S. Moderna said the move is inconsistent with previous feedback from the agency from before it submitted the application and started phase three trials on the shot, called mRNA-1010. The drugmaker said it has reque
  
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• Discord Tries To Walk Back Age Verification Panic, Says Most Users Won't Need Face Scans

  11-02-2026 10:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Discord has moved to calm a user backlash over its upcoming age verification mandate by clarifying that the "vast majority" of people will never be asked to confirm their age through a face scan or government ID.
  The platform said it will instead rely on an internal "age prediction" model that draws on account information, device and activity data, and behavioral patterns across its communities to estimate whether someone is an adult. Users whose age the model cannot confidently determine will s
  
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