Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: A maximum severity vulnerability that allows hackers to hijack GitLab accounts with no user interaction required is now under active exploitation, federal government officials warned as data showed that thousands of users had yet to install a patch released in January. A change ... ⌘ Read more
Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: A maximum severity vulnerability that allows hackers to hijack GitLab accounts with no user interaction required is now under active exploitation, federal government officials warned as data showed that thousands of users had yet to install a patch released in January. A change ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft has changed its policy to ban U.S. police departments from using generative AI through the Azure OpenAI Service, the company's fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI technologies. Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service prohibits integ ... ⌘ Read more
Ecobee, the company that pioneered smart thermostats with its Ecobee Smart in 2008, has announced it will end online support for the device and its commercial counterpart, the Ecobee Energy Management System, on July 31, 2024. The move will disable internet-dependent features such as web portal control, smart integrations, and wea ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a column: When Apple CEO Tim Cook and a bunch of his deputies take the virtual stage next week to announce new iPads, they're going to spend a lot of time talking about specs. If the rumors are true, we're going to get new iPad Pros with OLED screens and thinner bodies, new Airs with faster chips and a correctly placed front camera, and a couple of new acces ... ⌘ Read more
The FBI cut its warrantless searches of American data in half in 2023, according to a government report released on Tuesday. From a report: According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's annual transparency report, the FBI conducted 57,094 searches of "US person" data under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveil ... ⌘ Read more
Google is making its last attempt to fight back against a historic effort by the US Department of Justice to break the tech giant's grip on online search, as the most significant antitrust trial in 25 years comes to a close in Washington. From a report: A federal court in Washington began hearing closing arguments on Thursday after a 10-week ... ⌘ Read more
Apple is tweaking how it applies a new fee that can apply to iOS developers in the European Union as it continues to configure its approach to the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA): Developers of free apps will be able to avoid the fee entirely under changes it announced Thursday, which apply from today, while other develo ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is fully rolling out passkey support for all consumer accounts today. From a report: After enabling them in Windows 11 last year, Microsoft account owners can also now generate passkeys across Windows, Android, and iOS. This makes it effortless to sign in to a Microsoft account without having to type a password in every time.
[ services in the company's latest push to promote its generative AI technology in Asia. The investment, the largest in Microsoft's 32-year history in Malay ... ⌘ Read more
The Google Phone app is rolling out "Audio Emoji" to some users as part of an incoming update in the beta channel, version 128. As 9to5Google reports, they are "essentially stock sound effects attached to one of six different emoji." The list includes: clapping (applause), laughing, party, crying (trombone), poop, and sting (ba dum tss). From the report: When you, as the caller, select ... ⌘ Read more
A new battery from Energizer comes with "color alert technology" to alert parents if their child has swallowed one. When the coin lithium battery comes into contact with saliva, it activates a blue dye "so parents and caregivers know that medical attention could be required," reports the New York Times. The battery also features more secure packaging an ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A controversial bill that would require all new cars to be fitted with AM radios looks set to become a law in the near future. Yesterday, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) revealed that the "AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act" now has the support of 60 US Senators, as well as 246 co-sponsors ... ⌘ Read more
New submitter berghem shares a report from The Guardian: For the first time, researchers have formally shown that exposure to toxic PFAS increases the likelihood of death by cardiovascular disease, adding a new level of concern to the controversial chemicals' wide use. The findings are especially significant because proving an as ... ⌘ Read more
According to CNBC, Google is laying off at least 200 employees from its "Core" teams and moving some roles to India and Mexico. From the report: The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company's flagship products and for protecting users' online safety, according to Go ... ⌘ Read more
Unity has appointed Matthew Bromberg, former CEO of Zynga, as its new CEO, president and board member. "Filling a role that has been temporarily filled by former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, Bromberg will formally join Unity as CEO on May 15," reports VentureBeat. "Whitehurst will serve as executive chair of the Unity board, and Roelof Botha will transition from chairma ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission chair today made a final plea to Congress, asking for money to continue a broadband-affordability program that gave out its last round of $30 discounts to people with low incomes in April. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) has lowere ... ⌘ Read more
Anthropic has released its Claude AI chatbot on the App Store, bringing the company's ChatGPT competitor to the masses. Compared to OpenAI's chatbot, Claude is built with a focus on reducing harmful outputs and promoting safety, with a goal of making interactions more reliable and ethically aware. You can give it a try here. 9to5Mac reports: Anthropic highlights three launch ... ⌘ Read more
Roblox announced it'll be rolling out virtual billboards with video advertisements that will be displayed in its virtual worlds. Reuters reports: Users will now see billboards featuring content from brands such as e.l.f beauty, Walmart and Warner Bros Discovery, just as they would in real life. That would give advertisers access to Roblox's nearly 72 ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Dropbox said its digital-signature product, Dropbox Sign, was breached by hackers, who accessed user information including emails, user names and phone numbers. The software company said it became aware of the cyberattack on April 24, sought to limit the incident and reported it to law enforcement and regulatory aut ... ⌘ Read more
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told employees Wednesday that it is blocking access to ChatGPT on agency-issued laptops to "protect our data from security threats associated with use of ChatGPT," 404 Media reported Wednesday. From the report: "NARA will block access to commercial ChatGPT on NARANet [an internal network] and on NARA issued laptops, tablets, d ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has confirmed that the April 2024 Windows security updates break VPN connections across client and server platforms. From a report: The company explains on the Windows health dashboard that "Windows devices might face VPN connection failures after installing the April 2024 security update or the April 2024 non-security preview update."
"We are invest ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Two months after hackers broke into Change Healthcare systems stealing and then encrypting company data, it's still unclear how many Americans were impacted by the cyberattack. Last month, Andrew Witty, the CEO of Change Healthcare's parent company UnitedHealth Group, sai ... ⌘ Read more
"Tens of millions" of people are using technical workarounds to secretly access WhatsApp in countries where it is banned, the messaging platform's boss has said. From a report: "You'd be surprised how many people have figured it out," Will Cathcart told BBC News. Like many Western apps, WhatsApp is banned in Iran and North Korea and, intermittent ... ⌘ Read more
ArsTechnica: Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
L ... ⌘ Read more
The US could lose out on valuable AI and tech talent if some of its immigration policies are not modernized, Google says in a letter sent to the Department of Labor. From a report: Google says policies like Schedule A, a list of occupations the government "pre-certified" as not having enough American workers, have to be more flexible an ... ⌘ Read more
Windows 11's market share dropped in April 2024, falling below 26% after reaching an all-time high of 28.16% in February. According to Statcounter, Windows 11 lost 0.97 points, while Windows 10 gained 0.96 points, crossing the 70% mark for the first time since September 2023. Neowin adds: Some argue that Windows 11 still offers little to no bene ... ⌘ Read more
LastPass, the password manager company, has officially separated from its parent company, GoTo, following a series of high-profile hacks in recent years. The company will now operate under a shareholder holding company called LMI Parent.
LastPass -- owned by private equity firms Francisco Partners and Elliott Management -- has faced criticism for its handling of the breaches, which resulted in the theft of customer dat ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft's motivation for investing heavily and partnering with OpenAI came from a sense of falling badly behind Google, according to an internal email released Tuesday as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case against the search giant. Bloomberg: The Windows software maker's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, was "very, very worried" when h ... ⌘ Read more
The massive volumes of debt piling up around the globe forced the president of the World Economic Forum to reach back more than 200 years for a comparable period. Fortune: In an interview Sunday with CNBC at a WEF conference in Saudi Arabia, Borge Brende warned overall debt is approaching the world's total economic outpu ... ⌘ Read more
LinkedIn, the professional network known for job listings and unsolicited career advice, is jumping into gaming. From a report: The platform is officially introducing a set of Wordle-style puzzle games, weeks after they were first spotted in the app. The company is starting with three games: Pinpoint, a word game where players must guess the theme that ties ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who has said his "biological age" is roughly a decade younger than his actual one, has put forward his largely unlined face as a spokesman for the longevity movement. The 54-year-old has built his brand on the idea that aging is a treatable disease. The notion has proven so ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Sunday, word began to spread on social media about a new mystery chatbot named "gpt2-chatbot" that appeared in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. Some people speculate that it may be a secret test version of OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 large language model (LLM). The paid version of ChatGPT ... ⌘ Read more
AmiMoJo shares a report from Tech Times: China has reached a major landmark in green transportation with the launch of the world's largest fully electric container ship. Developed and manufactured by China Ocean Shipping Group (Cosco), the vessel is now operating a regular service route between Shanghai and Nanjing, aiming to reduce emissions significantly along ... ⌘ Read more
Satellite operator SES plans to buy fellow satellite operator Intelsat, in a $3.1 billion deal that's expected to close next year. According to Space Magazine, the combined company could help it "compete with SpaceX's huge Starlink broadband network." From the report: SES and Intelsat both operate communications satellites in geostationary orbit, which ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: U.S. wind power slipped last year for the first time in a quarter-century due to weaker-than-normal Midwest breezes, underscoring the challenge of integrating volatile renewable energy sources into the grid. Power produced by turbines slipped 2% in 2023, even after developers added 6. ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares that IPv6rs has debuted a new one-click self hosting system:
Everyone seemed like they were talking about self hosting, but we didn't understand why it wasn't more prolific. Thus, we conducted a survey to hear reasons. It turned out the two most common reasons were:
1\\. Lack of an external IP address
2\\. Too difficult to setup and maintain
Our service already solves the first is ... ⌘ Read more
Kaiser Permanente is the latest healthcare giant to report a data breach. Kaiser said 13.4 million current and former insurance members had their patient data shared with third-party advertisers, thanks to an improperly implemented tracking code the company used to see how its members navigated through its websites ... ⌘ Read more
Mishaal Rahman reports via Android Authority: Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android's Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that "remove ACK's support for riscv64." The descriptio ... ⌘ Read more
Arcade giant Dave & Buster's said it will begin allowing customers to bet on arcade games. "Customers can soon make a friendly $5 wager on a Hot Shots basketball game, a bet on a Skee-Ball competition or on another arcade game," reports CNBC. "The betting function, expected to launch in the next few months, will work through the company's app." From the repo ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Foss Outpost: Systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering has posted on Mastodon about their upcoming v256 release of Systemd, which is expected to include a sudo replacement called "run0". The developer talks about the weaknesses of sudo, and how it has a large possible attack surface. For example, sudo supports network access, LDAP configurations, other ... ⌘ Read more
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has been sentenced to four months in prison after pleading guilty to charges related to enabling money laundering through his cryptocurrency exchange. CNBC reports: The sentence handed down to Zhao in Seattle federal court was significantly less than the three years that federal prosecutors had been seeking for him. The defe ... ⌘ Read more
After convincing the world to buy open source and give up the Morse Code test for ham radio licenses, Bruce Perens has a new gambit: develop a license that ensures software developers receive compensation from large corporations using their work. The new Post-Open Zero Cost License seeks to address the financial disparities in open source software use and includes provi ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The ransomware gang that hacked into U.S. health tech giant Change Healthcare used a set of stolen credentials to remotely access the company's systems that weren't protected by multifactor authentication (MFA), according to the chief executive of its parent company, UnitedHealth Group (UHG) ... ⌘ Read more
Large swathes of Asia are sweltering through a heatwave that has topped temperature records from Myanmar to the Philippines and forced millions of children to stay home from school. From a report: In India, record temperatures have triggered a deadly heatwave and concerns about voter turnout in the nation's marathon election. Extreme heat has also forced Bangladesh to c ... ⌘ Read more
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block on free speech grounds a provision of Texas law aimed at preventing minors from accessing pornographic content online. From a report: The justices turned away a request made by the Free Speech Coalition, a pornography industry trade group, as well as several companies. The challengers said the 2023 law violates the Consti ... ⌘ Read more
Maciej Pocwierz, a senior software engineer Semantive, writing on Medium: A few weeks ago, I began working on the PoC of a document indexing system for my client. I created a single S3 bucket in the eu-west-1 region and uploaded some files there for testing. Two days later, I checked my AWS billing page, primarily to make sure that what I was doing was well within the free- ... ⌘ Read more
The Biden administration on Tuesday released rules designed to speed up permits for clean energy while requiring federal agencies to more heavily weigh damaging effects on the climate and on low-income communities before approving projects like highways and oil wells. From a report: As part of a deal to raise the country's debt limit last year, Con ... ⌘ Read more
Walmart isn't making enough money off its new health centers, so it decided to close up shop. From a report: The retail giant announced today that it'll shutter all 51 health centers it opened up across five states since 2019. Walmart is also getting rid of its virtual care program after acquiring telehealth provider MeMD in 2021. "We determined there is not ... ⌘ Read more
One of Europe's most wanted cyber criminals has been jailed for attempting to blackmail 33,000 people whose confidential therapy notes he stole. From a report: Julius Kivimaki obtained them after breaking into the databases of Finland's largest psychotherapy company, Vastaamo. After his attempt to extort the company failed, he emailed patients directly, threatening ... ⌘ Read more
theodp writes: Reports of the death of Bill Gates' influence at Microsoft have been greatly exaggerated: "Publicly, [Bill] Gates has been almost entirely out of the picture at Microsoft since 2021, following allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female employees. In fact, Business Insider has learned, Gates has been quietly orchestrating much of Microsoft's ... ⌘ Read more
Eight prominent U.S. newspapers owned by investment giant Alden Global Capital are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, in a complaint filed Tuesday in the Southern District of New York. From a report: Until now, the Times was the only major newspaper to take legal action against AI firms for copyright infringement. Many o ... ⌘ Read more
Apple has confirmed reports [video link] of a software glitch causing some iPhone alarms to fail to play a sound.
[](http://twitter.com/home?status=Apple+Confirms+iPhone+Alarm+Failure+Reports%3A+https%3A%2F%2Fapple.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F24%2F04%2F30%2F1430252%2F%3Futm_source%3Dtwitter%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter)[![](https://a.fsdn.com/sd/fa ... ⌘ Read more
Apple has poached dozens of AI experts from Google and has created a secretive European laboratory in Zurich, as the tech giant builds a team to battle rivals in developing new AI models and products. From a report: According to a Financial Times analysis of hundreds of LinkedIn profiles as well as public job postings and research papers, the $2.7tn company has undertaken a hiring spree ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ahead of its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco early this fall, GitHub announced Copilot Workspace, a dev environment that taps what GitHub describes as "Copilot-powered agents" to help developers brainstorm, plan, build, test and run code in natural language. Jonathan Cart ... ⌘ Read more
Richard Speed reports via The Register: NASA's optical communications demonstration has hit 25 Mbps in a test transmitting engineering data back to Earth from 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away. The payload is riding aboard the Psyche probe, which is headed for an asteroid of the same name. On December 11, when the spacecraft was 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) ... ⌘ Read more
Jules Roscoe reports via 404 Media: Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has "ruwik ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Energy ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies reached a deal to shut down their coal-fired power plants in the first half of the 2030s, in a significant step towards the transition away from fossil fuels. "There is a technical agreement, we will seal the final political deal on Tuesday," said Italian energy minister Gilberto ... ⌘ Read more
Crypto company Tether announced Monday that it has invested $200 million to acquire a majority stake in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech via its venture capital division Tether Evo. [The firm is not related to the asset management giant BlackRock.] CoinDesk reports: Blackrock Neurotech develops medical ... ⌘ Read more
ReneR writes: A major T2 Linux milestone has been released, shipping with full support for 25 CPU architectures and several C libraries, as well as restored support for Intel IA-64 Itanium. Additionally, many vintage X.org DDX drivers were fixed and tested to work again, as well as complete support for the latest KDE 6 and GNOME 46.
T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support and support for nearly all existing CPU a ... ⌘ Read more
As reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple's iPadOS will need to abide by EU's DMA rules, as it is now designated as a gatekeeper alongside the Safari web browser, iOS operating system and the App Store. "Apple now has six months to ensure full compliance of iPadOS with the DMA obligations," reads the EU's blog post about the change. Engadget reports: What does Apple have to do to ensure iP ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: WeWork has a new plan to get out of bankruptcy -- and it doesn't involve Adam Neumann, who wants to acquire the flexible office provider he created. WeWork announced Monday that it has raised $450 million in equity funding, which it could use to emerge from Chapter 11. The company a ... ⌘ Read more
Longtime Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from The Mirror: The city court in Syktyvkar, the largest city in Russia's northwestern Komi region, announced it had arrested [former world chess champion Garry Kasparov] in absentia alongside former Russian parliament member Gennady Gudkov, Ivan Tyutrin co-founder of the Free Russia Forum - ... ⌘ Read more
Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference in May, Google has decided to lay off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others. "As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said a Google spokesperson. "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the s ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Streamable: Roku wants to take the term "ad-supported" to another level. The company held its quarterly earnings conference call on Thursday, and revealed that 81.6 million households used a Roku device or smart TV to stream video in the first three months of the year. As part of the report, company CEO Anthony Wood laid ... ⌘ Read more
If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligen ... ⌘ Read more
Millions of Americans pay for Netflix, doling out anywhere from $6.99 to $22.99 a month. It's a common belief that you can get out of recurring charges like this by canceling your credit card. Netflix won't be able to find you, and your account will just go away, right? You wouldn't be crazy for believing it, but it's a myth that canceling a cred ... ⌘ Read more
The Federal Communications Commission has fined the nation's largest wireless carriers for illegally sharing access to customers' location information without consent and without taking reasonable measures to protect that information against unauthorized disclosure. From a report: Sprint and T-Mobile -- which have merged since the investigatio ... ⌘ Read more
The latest figures from IDC shows that Samsung's share in China's foldable smartphone market was 5.9% in Q1 2024. At one point, Samsung was pulling in a quarterly foldable market share of nearly 30% in China. From a report: It essentially came in dead last, as Samsung finds itself comprehensively beaten by the handful of companies that make foldable phones. This i ... ⌘ Read more
As of today, Walmart is able to sell physical goods directly to users inside Roblox. Digiday adds: The introduction of real-life e-commerce could be a watershed moment for the company's ambitions to become an all-encompassing destination for virtual life. Walmart's Roblox e-commerce experience launches later today, with users inside the pr ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: I paid a lot of money for the privilege of getting an Apple Vision Pro brand-new in February. All-in, with optical inserts and taxes, I financed a little over $3,900 for the 256GB version of the headset. A day or so ago, I made a mistake that I'm sure many early adopters are familiar with: I looked up how much it's been selling for ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, we wrote that some of Intel's recent high-end Core i9 and Core i7 processors had been crashing and exhibiting other weird issues in some games and that Intel was investigating the cause. An Intel statement obtained by Igor's Lab suggests that Intel's investig ... ⌘ Read more
Razer will have to fork over $1.1 million in refunds to customers who purchased its RGB-clad Zephyr face mask, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Federal Trade Commission on Monday. From a report: The company claimed the face mask used N95-grade filters, but the FTC alleges Razer never submitted the ... ⌘ Read more
Countries are for the first time considering restrictions on the global production of plastic -- to reduce it by 40% in 15 years -- in an attempt to protect human health and the environment. From a report: As the world attempts to make a treaty to cut plastic waste at UN talks in Ottawa, Canada, two countries have put forward the fir ... ⌘ Read more
Amazon says its deliveries are getting even faster, announcing that it delivered over 2 billion items the same or next day to Prime members during the first three months of 2024, breaking its record for 2023. From a report: The company says it delivered almost 60 percent of Prime orders the same or next day in 60 of the biggest metropolitan areas in the US.
[ introduces new minimum-security standards for manufacturer ... ⌘ Read more
Oakland, California is now home to "the first commercial hydrogen fuel station for big-rig trucks in the United States," according to the Los Angeles Times — serving 30 hydrogen fuel-cell trucks.
The newspaper says the facility "could mark the start of a nationwide network for fuel-cell truck refueling. It could also flop."
Hydrogen fuel is exp ... ⌘ Read more
RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) wants to tell you about a "new" star that will be visible to the naked eye — without a telescope — sometime before September:
By "star", I do not mean "comet", "meteorite" or "firefly", but genuine [star] photons arriving here after about 3000 years in flight, causing your eyes to see a bright point on the nighttime sky. When it happens, the ... ⌘ Read more
Though it's long past Y2K, another date-related bug is still with us, writes Slashdot reader Bruce66423, sharing this report from the BBC.
"A 101-year-old woman keeps getting mistaken for a baby, because of an error with an airline's booking system."
The problem occurs because American Airlines' systems apparently ca ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world's biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland. The scale of the project transforming swathes of barren salt desert on the edge of western India in ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared a report this week from Reuters:
The U.S. Department of Commerce is reviewing the national security implications of China's work in open-source RISC-V chip technology, according to a letter sent to U.S. lawmakers...
The technology is being used by major Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba Group Holding and has ... ⌘ Read more
Pursuing an unfair business practices case against Amazon, America's Federal Trade Commission has now "accused" Amazon of using Signal, reports the Seattle Times:
The newspaper notes that the app "can be set to automatically delete messages, to hide information related to the FTC's ongoing antitrust investigation into the company."
... ⌘ Read more
Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares "an interesting essay on the history of orthodoxy in quantum mechanics," published this week in Nature.
Its title? "'Shut up and calculate': how Einstein lost the battle to explain quantum reality."
[T]he views of Danish physicist Niels Bohr came to dominate. Albert Einstein famously disagreed with him and, in the 1920s an ... ⌘ Read more
"In less than 15 years, battery costs have fallen by more than 90%," according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, "one of the fastest declines ever seen in clean energy technologies."
And it's expected to get even cheaper, reports Reuters:
An expected sharp fall in battery costs for energy storag ... ⌘ Read more
This year Dell moved to soldered RAM for its XPS 14 and 16, writes Digital Trends, which "makes it impossible to upgrade, or even repair."
"This was a big change from the past, where the XPS 15 and 17 were both celebrated for their upgradability."
Of course, Dell isn't the first to make the transition. In fact, they're one of the last, which is what makes the decision so much tougher to swa ... ⌘ Read more
In September NASA's James Webb Space Telescope investigated an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, and "revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide."
Webb's discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that [planet] K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one whi ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
Poland's prosecutor general told the parliament on Wednesday that powerful Pegasus spyware was used against hundreds of people during the former government in Poland, among them elected officials. Adam Bodnar told lawmakers that he found the scale of the surve ... ⌘ Read more
They're calling it "the world's largest 3D printer," but also "the factory of the future" — not just a 3D printer, but a manufacturing system.
It's the succcessor to a 3D printer that could create an entire house, cutting construction time and labor, according to the Associated Press. And this one "may one day create entire neighborhoods."
It has a voracious appetite, consuming as much as 500 p ... ⌘ Read more
"South Korea is considering prohibiting the use of iPhones and smart wearable devices inside military buildings," reports the Defense Post, "due to increasing security concerns."
But the blog Apple Insider argues the move "has less to do with security and more to do with a poorly crafted mobile device management suite coupled wi ... ⌘ Read more
It's another speech-recognizing, AI-powered handheld device "about half the size of a phone," writes CNET. (Though the $199 device comes with a keyboard and a tiny 2.8-inch screen.) "The Rabbit R1 can identify items in its environment. Point it at a plant, and it can tell you what kind it is. Aim it at your lunch, and it can tell you what's in it.
"it also feels a bit like a ... ⌘ Read more
Japan's moon lander "has woken up again," reports the Register, "having survived three lunar nights."
A post on social media from the lander's X account confirmed that once more, Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had defied the odds and snapped a picture of the lunar surface using its navigation camera.
SLIM was revived a few weeks ago, after ... ⌘ Read more
What happened after India banned TikTok? The move "mostly drew widespread support" notes the Associated Press, in a country "where protesters had been calling for a boycott of Chinese goods since the deadly confrontation in the remote Karakoram mountain border region."
"There was a clamour leading up to this, and the popular narrative was how can we allow Chinese companies to do business in In ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:
Tech giant Cisco Systems on Wednesday joined Microsoft and IBM in signing onto a Vatican-sponsored pledge to ensure artificial intelligence is developed and used ethically and to benefit the common good... The pledge outlines key pillars of ethical and resp ... ⌘ Read more
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Times of India:
Several Apple customers were inexplicably locked out of their Apple ID accounts Friday evening in a major service disruption, forcing them to reset their passwords across all devices and services. According to user reports on social media, the widespread outage began around 8 p. ... ⌘ Read more
This week Russia vetoed a UN resolution that proposed banning nuclear weapons in space, CNN reports.
But it all happened "amid U.S. intelligence-backed concerns that Moscow is trying to develop a nuclear device capable of destroying satellites."
In February, President Joe Biden confirmed the US has intelligence that Russia is developing a nuclear anti-satel ... ⌘ Read more
"A former high school athletic director was arrested Thursday morning," reports CBS News, "after allegedly using artificial intelligence to impersonate the school principal in a recording..."
One-time Pikesville High School employee Dazhon Darien is facing charges that include theft, stalking, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness. Inve ... ⌘ Read more
Reuters reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration "is investigating a union's claims that Boeing retaliated against two employees who in 2022 insisted the planemaker re-evaluate prior engineering work on 777 and 787 jets."
The employees' union "said the two unidentified engineers were representatives of the FAA, which delegates some of its ove ... ⌘ Read more