ICT news

Follow @newslocke_ict

• Vibe Coded AI App Generates Recipes With Very Few Guardrails

  03-04-2025 05:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A "vibe coded" AI app developed by entrepreneur and Y Combinator group partner Tom Blomfield has generated recipes that gave users instruction on how to make "Cyanide Ice Cream," "Thick White Cum Soup," and "Uranium Bomb," using those actual substances as ingredients. Vibe coding, in case you are unfamiliar, is the new practice where people, some with limited coding experience, rapidly develop software with AI assisted coding tools without over
  
  Read more

• Microsoft's Copilot Roasts Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella

  07-04-2025 01:57 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  "Three Microsoft CEOs walk into a room..." Satya Nadella posted on X.com, "and are interviewed by Copilot!"
  As part of Microsoft's 50th anniversary celebration, Microsoft CEO Nadella joined former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in a funny two-minute video (also available on YouTube) in which Nadella asks Copilot for an AI-powered roast of each of them."All right Satya," Copilot answers. "Let's spice it up..."Copilot: Steve, we'll start with you. Your enthusiasm is legendary. But do
  
  Read more

• Could We Reach Mars Faster With Nuclear Fusion-Powered Rockets?

  07-04-2025 00:57 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Nuclear fusion — which releases four times the energy of fission — could theoretically happen sooner in space than on earth, reports CNN.
  "And it could help spacecraft achieve speeds of up to 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) per hour — more than the fastest object ever built..."With funding from the UK Space Agency, British startup Pulsar Fusion has unveiled Sunbird, a space rocket concept designed to meet spacecraft in orbit, attach to them, and carry them to their destinati
  
  Read more

• 'Minecraft Movie' Scores Biggest Videogame Movie Opening Ever, Faces Early Leaks Online

  06-04-2025 23:40 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  It was already the best-selling videogame of all time, notes the Hollywood Reporter. And A Minecraft Movie just had the biggest opening ever for a video game movie adaptation. WIth a production budget of $150 million, it earned in $157 million in just its first weekend in the U.S., with a worldwide total of $301 million.A Warner Bros. executive called the movie "lightning in a bottle," while the head of co-producer Legendary Pictures acknowledged the game is a global phenomon, according to the a
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• NFL Adopts Sony's 'Virtual Measurements' for Football's First Downs

  06-04-2025 21:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  theodp writes: America's National Football League announced that beginning with the 2025 season, Sony's Hawk-Eye virtual measurement technology will assess and identify first downs after a ball spot. Sony's Hawk-Eye virtual measurement technology, which consists of six 8K cameras for optical tracking of the position of the ball, is operated from the NFL's "Art McNally GameDay Central Officiating Center" in New York and is integrated with the League's existing replay system. It will serve as an e
  
  Read more

• In 'Milestone' for Open Source, Meta Releases New Benchmark-Beating Llama 4 Models

  06-04-2025 20:05 via news.slashdot.org
  
  It's "a milestone for Meta AI and for open source," Mark Zuckerberg said this weekend. "For the first time, the best small, mid-size, and potentially soon frontier [large-language] models will be open source."
  Zuckerberg anounced four new Llama LLMs in a video posted on Instagram and Facebook — two dropping this weekend, with another two on the way. "Our goal is to build the world's leading AI, open source it, and make it universally accessible so that everyone in the world benefits."
  Zuck
  
  Read more

• Forget 'Snow Sequoia'. Now I'm Cheering for Better Linux Hardware

  06-04-2025 18:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  It was long-time Slashdot reader uninet who argued "Apple Needs a Snow Sequoia." (That is, Apple needs an upgrade to MacOS Sequoia that's like it's earlier "Snow Leopard" upgrade to "Leopard" OS — an upgrade that's "all about how little it added and how much it took away".)"My recent column on Apple's declining software quality hit a nerve..." he writes in a follow-up. "So why do any of us put up with software that grows increasingly buggy?"
  "One word: hardware. And that's where I'd love t
  
  Read more

• After 48 Years, Voyager Scientist Confronts the Missions Final Years

  06-04-2025 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "I started working on Voyager in 1977," the Voyager mission's project scientist told Gizmodo Saturday in a new interview. "It was my first job out of college."
  35 years later, a Voyager probe became the first spacecraft to cross into interstellar space in 2012, with Voyager 2 following in 2018. But while each Voyager spacecraft carries 10 scientific instruments, all but three have now been turned off to conserve power, Gizmodo writes. "The two spacecraft now have enough power to operate for anot
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• New Tinder Game 'Lets You Flirt With AI Characters. Three of Them Dumped Me'

  06-04-2025 16:34 via slashdot.org
  
  Tinder "is experimenting with a chatbot that claims to help users improve their flirting skills," notes Washington Post internet-culture reporter Tatum Hunter. The chatbot is available only to users in the United States on iPhones for a limited time, and powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o each character "kicks off an improvised conversation, and the user responds out loud with something flirty..."
  "Three of them dumped me."You can win points for banter the app deems "charming" or "playful." You lose poi
  
  Read more

• 'Tron' Sequel Trailer Released by Disney

  06-04-2025 13:34 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  This October will see the release of a film that's nearly 43 years in the making, reports Ars Technica:It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON, had on both the film industry — thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects rife with computer-generated imagery — and on nerd culture at large. Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseri
  
  Read more

• Were Still More UK Postmasters Also Wrongly Prosecuted Over Accounting Bug?

  06-04-2025 09:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  U.K. postmasters were mistakenly sent to prison due to a bug in their "Horizon" accounting software — as first reported by Computer Weekly back in 2009. Nearly 16 years later, the same site reports that now the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission "is attempting to contact any former subpostmasters that could have been prosecuted for unexplained losses on the Post Office's pre-Horizon Capture software.
  "There are former subpostmasters that, like Horizon users, could have been convicte
  
  Read more

• Starliner's Space Station Flight Was 'Wilder' Than We Thought

  06-04-2025 06:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters while approaching the International Space Station last summer. NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore took manual control, remembers Ars Technica, "But as Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go..."Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules.
  
  Read more

• Microsoft's New AI-Generated Version of 'Quake 2' Now Playable Online

  06-04-2025 03:34 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has created a real-time AI-generated rendition of Quake II gameplay (playable on the web).
  Friday Xbox's general manager of gaming AI posted the startling link to "an AI-generated gaming experience" at Copilot.Microsoft.com "Move, shoot, explore — and every frame is created on the fly by an AI world model, responding to player inputs in real-time. Try it here."They started with their "Muse" videogame world models, adding "a real-time playable extension" that players can interact
  
  Read more

• Makers of Rent-Setting Software Sue California City Over Ban

  06-04-2025 00:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Berkeley, California is "the latest city to try to block landlords from using algorithms when deciding rents," reports the Associated Press (noting that officials in many cities claim the practice is driving up the price of housing).But then real estate software company RealPage filed a federal lawsuit against Berkeley on Wednesday:
  Texas-based RealPage said Berkeley's ordinance, which goes into effect this month violates the company's free speech rights and is the result of an "intentional camp
  
  Read more

• 'Landrun': Lightweight Linux Sandboxing With Landlock, No Root Required

  05-04-2025 23:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Over on Reddit's "selfhosted" subreddit for alternatives to popular services, long-time Slashdot reader Zoup described a pain point:
  - Landlock is a Linux Security Module (LSM) that lets unprivileged processes restrict themselves.
  - It's been in the kernel since 5.13, but the API is awkward to use directly.
  - It always annoyed the hell out of me to run random binaries from the internet without any real control over what they can access.
  So they've rolled their own solution, according to Thursday
  
  Read more

• Ian Fleming Published the James Bond Novel 'Moonraker' 70 Years Ago Today

  05-04-2025 22:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "The third James Bond novel was published on this day in 1955," writes long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger.Film buff Christian Petrozza shares some history:
  In 1979, the market was hot amid the studios to make the next big space opera. Star Wars blew up the box office in 1977 with Alien soon following and while audiences eagerly awaited the next installment of George Lucas' The Empire Strikes Back, Hollywood was buzzing with spacesuits, lasers, and ships that cruised the stars. Politically, the
  
  Read more

• NASA Seeks Proposals for Two More Private Astronaut Space Station Visits

  05-04-2025 21:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  This week NASA "issued a solicitation for the next two private astronaut missions to the International Space Station," reports Space News. Scheduled after May of 2026 and then mid-2027, "These will be the fifth and sixth such missions to the ISS, part of a broader low Earth orbit commercialization effort by NASA with the ultimate goal of replacing the International Space Station with one or more commercial stations."
  NASA's Space Station program manager calls the missions "a key part" of helping
  
  Read more

• Microsoft Uses AI To Find Flaws In GRUB2, U-Boot, Barebox Bootloaders

  05-04-2025 20:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader zlives shared this report from BleepingComputer:
  Microsoft used its AI-powered Security Copilot to discover 20 previously unknown vulnerabilities in the GRUB2, U-Boot, and Barebox open-source bootloaders.
  GRUB2 (GRand Unified Bootloader) is the default boot loader for most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, while U-Boot and Barebox are commonly used in embedded and IoT devices. Microsoft discovered eleven vulnerabilities in GRUB2, including integer and buffer overflows in fil
  
  Read more

• Open Source Coalition Announces 'Model-Signing' with Sigstore to Strengthen the ML Supply Chain

  05-04-2025 19:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  The advent of LLMs and machine learning-based applications "opened the door to a new wave of security threats," argues Google's security blog. (Including model and data poisoning, prompt injection, prompt leaking and prompt evasion.)
  So as part of the Linux Foundation's nonprofit Open Source Security Foundation, and in partnership with NVIDIA and HiddenLayer, Google's Open Source Security Team on Friday announced the first stable model-signing library (hosted at PyPI.org), with digital signature
  
  Read more

• Python's PyPI Finally Gets Closer to Adding 'Organization Accounts' and SBOMs

  05-04-2025 18:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Back in 2023 Python's infrastructure director called it "the first step in our plan to build financial support and long-term sustainability of PyPI" while giving users "one of our most requested features: organization accounts." (That is, "self-managed teams with their own exclusive branded web addresses" to make their massive Python Package Index repository "easier to use for large community projects, organizations, or companies who manage multiple sub-teams and multiple packages.")Nearly two y
  
  Read more

• Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taut

  05-04-2025 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."
  But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly."Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating buff
  
  Read more

• Eric Raymond, John Carmack Mourn Death of 'Bufferbloat' Fighter Dave Taht

  05-04-2025 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."
  But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly."Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating buff
  
  Read more

• OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss Copyright Claims Rejected by Judge

  05-04-2025 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Is OpenAI's ChatGPT violating copyrights? The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023. But Ars Technica summarizes OpenAI's response. The New York Times (or NYT) "should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles... partly because of the newspaper's own reporting..."
  OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet.
  But on Friday, U.S. district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's moti
  
  Read more

• A Busy Hurricane Season is Expected. Here's How It Will Be Different From the Last

  05-04-2025 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Yet another busy hurricane season is likely across the Atlantic this year -- but some of the conditions that supercharged storms like Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024 have waned, according to a key forecast issued Thursday.
  A warm -- yet no longer record-hot -- strip of waters across the Atlantic Ocean is forecast to help fuel development of 17 named tropical cyclones during the season that runs from June 1 through Nov. 30, according to Colorado State Uni
  
  Read more

• Bonobos May Combine Words In Ways Previously Thought Unique To Humans

  05-04-2025 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  A new study shows bonobos can combine vocal calls in ways that mirror human language, producing phrases with meanings beyond the sum of individual sounds. "Human language is not as unique as we thought," said Dr Melissa Berthet, the first author of the research from the University of Zurich. Another author, Dr Simon Townsend, said: "The cognitive building blocks that facilitate this capacity is at least 7m years old. And I think that is a really cool finding."
  The Guardian reports: Writing in th
  
  Read more

• Fram2 Crew Returns To Earth After Polar Orbit Mission

  05-04-2025 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  SpaceX's Fram2 mission returned safely after becoming the first crewed spaceflight to orbit directly over Earth's poles. From a report: Led by cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang, who is the financier of this mission, the Fram2 crew has been free-flying through orbit since Monday. The group splashed down at 9:19 a.m. PT, or 12:19 p.m. ET, off the coast of California -- the first West Coast landing in SpaceX's five-year history of human spaceflight missions. The company livestreamed the splashdo
  
  Read more

• Scientists Warn Indonesia's Rice Megaproject Faces Failure

  05-04-2025 07:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto's ambitious plan to create 1 million hectares of new rice farms in eastern Merauke Regency faces strong criticism from scientists who have warned it will fail due to unsuitable soils and climate. Military "food brigades" are currently guarding bulldozers clearing swampy forests in Indonesian New Guinea for the project, which aims to boost food self-sufficiency for the nation's 281 million people.
  Soil scientists warn that Merauke's conditions could lead to a
  
  Read more

• Two Teenagers Built 'Cal AI', a Photo Calorie App With Over a Million Users

  05-04-2025 05:30 via slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In a world filled with "vibe coding," Zach Yadegari, teen founder of Cal AI, stands in ironic, old-fashioned contrast. Ironic because Yadegari and his co-founder, Henry Langmack, are both just 18 years old and still in high school. Yet their story, so far, is a classic. Launched in May, Cal AI has generated over 5 million downloads in eight months, Yadegari says. Better still, he tells TechCrunch that the customer retention rate is over 30% an
  
  Read more

• Wikimedia Drowning in AI Bot Traffic as Crawlers Consume 65% of Resources

  05-04-2025 03:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Web crawlers collecting training data for AI models are overwhelming Wikipedia's infrastructure, with bot traffic growing exponentially since early 2024, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. According to data released April 1, bandwidth for multimedia content has surged 50% since January, primarily from automated programs scraping Wikimedia Commons' 144 million openly licensed media files.
  This unprecedented traffic is causing operational challenges for the non-profit. When Jimmy Carter died i
  
  Read more

• An Interactive-Speed Linux Computer Made of Only 3 8-Pin Chips

  05-04-2025 02:20 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Software engineer and longtime Slashdot reader, Dmitry Grinberg (dmitrygr), shares a recent project they've been working on: "an interactive-speed Linux on a tiny board you can easily build with only 3 8-pin chips": There was a time when one could order a kit and assemble a computer at home. It would do just about what a contemporary store-bought computer could do. That time is long gone. Modern computers are made of hundreds of huge complex chips with no public datasheets and many hundreds of w
  
  Read more

Follow @newslocke_ict on Twitter!