ICT news

• Zoom Is Adding Email and Calendar Features

  08-11-2022 23:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  At its Zoomtopia conference, the company announced a bunch of features that are coming to its platform, including two key ones for productivity: email and calendars. Engadget reports: You can connect third-party email and calendar services to Zoom and access them through the desktop app. The company says that can help save you time instead of having to switch between apps and perhaps needing to hunt for the right tab in your browser. Those on the Zoom One Pro or Zoom Standard Pro plans will be a
  
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• Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras

  25-02-2026 22:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.
  Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a year ago and a maker of license plate readers. It has faced criticism for allowing federal authorities access to its massive netw
  
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• Xbox Co-founder Says Microsoft is Quietly Sunsetting the Platform

  25-02-2026 21:01 via games.slashdot.org
  Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition.
  Microsoft recently announced that Asha Sharma, whose career has focused on AI and software as a service, will replace Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO, and that COO and president Sarah Bond is leaving the co
  
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• Hacker Used Anthropic's Claude To Steal Sensitive Mexican Data

  25-02-2026 20:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  A hacker exploited Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity
  
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• DVD Sales Decline Slows Sharply as Gen Z Discovers the Appeal of Physical Media

  25-02-2026 19:00 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S.
  Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, c
  
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• Scientists Crack the Case of 'Screeching' Scotch Tape

  25-02-2026 18:00 via science.slashdot.org
  The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E.
  Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fract
  
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• Microsoft Japan Raided Over Suspected Violation of Anti-Monopoly Law

  25-02-2026 17:00 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan's Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan's offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
  The source said Japan's antitrust authorities would also be seeking clarification from Microsoft's parent company in the United States. Microsoft Japan is suspected of setting conditions that effec
  
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• Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service

  25-02-2026 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app.
  The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserving a four-wheeled Uber. In the app, after entering your destination, Uber Air will appear as an option f
  
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• Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge

  25-02-2026 15:00 via slashdot.org
  Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry's most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy -- a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. "We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments ... if competitors are blazing ahead," chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME.
  T
  
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• HP Says Memory's Contribution To PC Costs Just Doubled To 35%

  25-02-2026 13:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM's contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreements for the year and also "qualified new suppliers [and] built in strategic inventory positions for key platforms and cut the time to qualify new
  
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• CISA and Partners Release Guidance for Ongoing Global Exploitation of Cisco SD-WAN Systems

  25-02-2026 13:00 via cisa.gov
  The purpose of this Alert is to provide resources for organizations with Cisco Software-Defined Wide-Area Networking (SD-WAN) systems, including Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies, to address ongoing exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities. Notably, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added CVE-2026-20127 and CVE-2022-20775 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog on Feb. 25, 2026. As a result of the malicious cyber activity and v
  
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• Apple's Touch-Screen MacBook Pro To Have Dynamic Island, New Interface

  25-02-2026 09:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  Apple's forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models -- the company's first-ever laptops to support touch input -- will feature the iPhone's Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans.
  The 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release toward the end of 2026 and won't be part of Apple's product ann
  
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• The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year

  25-02-2026 05:01 via hardware.slashdot.org
  The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill.
  The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survi
  
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• First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor

  25-02-2026 02:30 via science.slashdot.org
  A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024.
  Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatm
  
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• Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox

  24-02-2026 23:30 via it.slashdot.org
  Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop.
  "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it pe
  
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• New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says

  24-02-2026 22:00 via news.slashdot.org
  The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand.
  The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in
  
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• CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes

  24-02-2026 21:00 via it.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems.
  The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 mi
  
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• Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards

  24-02-2026 20:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs.
  The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows incr
  
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• The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents

  24-02-2026 19:01 via news.slashdot.org
  More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 â" neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it.
  The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-o
  
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• Microsoft Execs Worry AI Will Eat Entry Level Coding Jobs

  24-02-2026 18:01 via developers.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.
  The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is based on several assumptions, the first of which is that agentic coding assistants "give senior engineers an AI boost... while imposing an AI drag
  
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• Billions of Dollars Later and Still Nobody Knows What an Xbox Is

  24-02-2026 17:04 via games.slashdot.org
  Microsoft has spent more than $76 billion acquiring game studios and publishers over the past few years in an attempt to turn Xbox into a Netflix-like subscription platform, and the result is that nobody -- possibly not even Microsoft -- can clearly articulate what Xbox actually is anymore, The Verge writes.
  The brand started as a powerful video game console, but Game Pass and cloud gaming pushed it toward a hazier identity: the "This is an Xbox" ad campaign tried to redefine it as any device th
  
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• Discord Distances Itself From Persona Age Verification After User Backlash

  24-02-2026 16:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded."
  After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused
  
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• Russia Targets Telegram as Rift With Founder Pavel Durov Deepens

  24-02-2026 15:00 via yro.slashdot.org
  Russia has opened an investigation into Telegram founder Pavel Durov for "abetting terrorist activities," [non-paywalled source] in the latest sign that his uneasy relationship with the Kremlin has broken down. From a report: Two Russian newspapers, including the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta and Kremlin-friendly tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, alleged on Tuesday that the messaging app had become a tool of western and Ukrainian intelligence services.
  The articles, credited to materials from Russia'
  
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• Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches

  24-02-2026 14:00 via news.slashdot.org
  Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, key points in link previews, and AI chatbot providers in the sidebar. Firefox 148 also brings Firefox for Android, support for the Trusted Types API, CSS shape() function support, Sanit
  
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• Quantum Algorithm Beats Classical Tools On Complement Sampling Tasks

  24-02-2026 11:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task -- known as complement sampling -- dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem."We st
  
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• Texas Is About To Overtake California In Battery Storage

  24-02-2026 08:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  U.S. battery storage installations hit a record 57.6 GWh in 2025, and Texas is now poised to surpass California as the nationâ(TM)s largest storage market in 2026. Electrek reports: According to the US Energy Storage Market Outlook Q1 2026 from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, installations are now four times higher than totals from just three years ago. The US had a total of 137 GWh of utility-scale storage installed as of 2025, plus 19 GW
  
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• US Farmers Are Rejecting Multimillion-Dollar Datacenter Bids For Their Land

  24-02-2026 04:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her nei
  
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• New Microsoft Gaming CEO Has 'No Tolerance For Bad AI'

  24-02-2026 03:02 via games.slashdot.org
  In her first major interview as Microsoft's new gaming chief, Asha Sharma said that "great games" must deliver emotional resonance and a distinct creative voice, while making clear that she has "no tolerance for bad AI." Stepping in after Phil Spencer's retirement, she's pledging consistency, community trust, and a human-first approach to storytelling as Xbox enters a new era. Variety reports: Sharma was quick in laying out her top priorities for Microsoft Gaming in an internal memo announcing h
  
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• Microsoft Says Bug In Classic Outlook Hides the Mouse Pointer

  24-02-2026 02:25 via it.slashdot.org
  joshuark quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear in the classic Outlook desktop email client for some users. This bug has been acknowledged almost two months after the first reports started surfacing online, with users saying that Outlook became unusable after the mouse pointer vanished while using the app.[...] Microsoft explained in a recent support document that the mouse pointer (and in some cases the cursor)
  
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• Viral Doomsday Report Lays Bare Wall Street's Deep Anxiety About AI Future

  24-02-2026 01:45 via slashdot.org
  A 7,000-word "doomsday" thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, "painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work," reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are out. Worries of software-industry disruption don't go far enough. The "global intelligence crisis" is about to hit. The new, broader question: What if AI is so bullish
  
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