"Six years after sailing out of San Francisco with the ambition of developing the technology to rid the world's oceans of plastic, The Ocean Cleanup returned to San Francisco with the knowledge and know-how to relegate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the history books," according to a new announcement from the group. As the Los Angeles Time describes it, "After three years extracting plastic waste from the notorious Great... Read more ›
8
U.S. Justice Department officials "are turning to the 3D-printing industry to help stop the proliferation of tiny pieces of plastic transforming weapons into illegal homemade machine guns," reports the Associated Press: "Law enforcement cannot do this alone," [U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Friday] during a gathering in Washington of federal law enforcement officials, members of the 3D-printing industry and academia. "We need to engage software developers, technology experts... Read more ›
3
Workers get the right to request a four-day workweek under a new proposal by the U.K. government. But a professor of economics at the University of Leeds argues "There remain problems, however" — starting with the fact that "under current laws, employers can still resist the requests of workers, if they want to." There is also the problem of unevenness in the effect of the law. While workers in well-paid... Read more ›
8
"The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years," Elon Musk posted on X.com this weekend. Musk said the launches will happen when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens, which the science blog NextBigFuture identifies as "about November through December 2026." Musk noted that the 2026 missions "will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars," but "If those landings go well, then the first crewed... Read more ›
50
Security engineer Bryan Hance co-founded the nonprofit Bike Index, back in 2013, reports the Los Angeles Times, "where cyclists can register their bikes and contact information, making it easier to reunite lost or stolen bikes with their owners." It now holds descriptions and serial numbers of about 1.3 million bikes worldwide. "But in spring 2020, Hance was tipped to something new: Scores of high-end bikes that matched the descriptions of... Read more ›
15
Alorica — which runs customer-service centers around the world — has introduced an AI translation tool that lets its representatives talk with customers in 200 different languages. But according to the Associated Press, "Alorica isn't cutting jobs. It's still hiring aggressively." The experience at Alorica — and at other companies, including furniture retailer IKEA — suggests that AI may not prove to be the job killer that many people fear.... Read more ›
44
This week after striking for over a month, videogame performers reached agreements with 80 games this week, reports the Associated Press. "SAG-AFTRA announced the agreements with the 80 individual video games on Thursday. Performers impacted by the work stoppage can now work on those projects. "The strike against other major video game publishers, including Disney and Warner Bros.' game companies and Electronic Arts Productions Inc., will continue." The interim agreement... Read more ›
24
"Solar farms could blanket millions of acres in the United States over the coming decades," writes the New York Times. But "the sites that capture that energy take up land that wildlife needs to survive and thrive." "We have to address both challenges at the same exact time," said Rebecca Hernandez, a professor of ecology at the University of California, Davis, whose research focuses on how to do just that.... Read more ›
3
A schoolteacher using an interactive whiteboard is surprised by an alert. Their school is in "hard lockdown." They knew — instantly — something was about to happen, and "got everybody into a corner," they later told CNN. Classroom doors at the school are always locked, so they then "turned off the lights. And just kind of held everyone nice and tight, and just said, 'Wait for everything to happen, everything... Read more ›
24
The Wall Street Journal writes that Telegram "has become the premier internet platform to buy everything from hacked data and weapons to illicit drugs and child sexual abuse material, according to current and former law-enforcement officials and cybercrime researchers..." And it's also being used by identity thieves: There are thousands of channels and groups on Telegram that offer stolen identities that can be used to open bank and investment accounts.... Read more ›
0
"If you're plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations..." writes KDE developer Nate Graham on his personal blog. But "We know that the fraction of people who subscribe to these channels is small, so there's a huge number of people who may not even know they can donate to KDE, let alone that donations are critically important to its continued existence..." From 6.2... Read more ›
9
"China is on track to launch its Tianwen-3 mission to Mars in 2028, two years earlier than previously planned," writes the South China Morning Post, a change that one space policy research believes "suggests a rising confidence by China in its ability to get the technology right for the complex operation." On Thursday, Liu Jizhong, chief designer of China's Mars mission, told the Second International Conference on Deep Space Exploration... Read more ›
2
Wired interviews America's foreign policy chief, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, about U.S. digital polices, starting with a new "cybersecurity bureau" created in 2022 (which Wired previously reported includes "a crash course in cybersecurity, telecommunications, privacy, surveillance, and other digital issues.") Look, what I've seen since coming back to the State Department three and a half years ago is that everything happening in the technological world and in cyberspace is... Read more ›
0
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Britain's competition watchdog on Friday issued a statement of objections over Google's ad tech practices, which the regulator provisionally found are impacting competition in the U.K. In a statement, the Competition and Markets Authority alleged that the U.S. internet search titan "has harmed competition by using its dominance in online display advertising to favour its own ad tech services." The "vast majority"... Read more ›
2
The Register reports that Google "recently rewrote the firmware for protected virtual machines in its Android Virtualization Framework using the Rust programming language." And they add that Google "wants you to do the same, assuming you deal with firmware." A post on Google's security blog by Android engineers Ivan Lozano and Dominik Maier promises to show "how to gradually introduce Rust into your existing firmware," adding "You'll see how easy... Read more ›
75
Harvard's school of public policy is publishing a Misinformation Review for peer-reviewed, scholarly articles promising "reliable, unbiased research on the prevalence, diffusion, and impact of misinformation worldwide." This week it reported that "Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI." They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic s Read more ›
0
Digital rights activists want device manufacturers to disclose a "guaranteed minimum support time" for devices — and federal regulations ensuring a product's core functionality will work even after its software updates stop. Influential groups including Consumer Reports, EFF, the Software Freedom Conservancy, iFixit, and U.S. Pirg have now signed a letter to the head of America's Consumer Protection bureau (at the Federal Trade Commision), reports The Register: In an eight-page... Read more ›
3
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: "The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education" recounts an experiment Eric Klopfer conducted in his undergrad CS class at MIT. He divided the class into three groups and gave them a programming task to solve in the Fortran language, which none of them knew. Reminiscent of how The Three Little Pigs used straw, sticks, and bricks to build their houses with very different results,... Read more ›
0
Long-time FOSS-watcher Bruce Byfield writes that while people "still dream of a completely free alternative, increasingly the emphasis in FOSS seems to be on accepting coexistence with proprietary software." Many, too, have always preferred the permissive BSD licenses, which permits combining FOSS and proprietary software. From some perspectives, Debian's newest [non-free firmware] repository or Nobara's popularity [a Fedora-based distro but with proprietary drivers and gaming applications] is simply an adm Read more ›
3
The New York Times analyzed over 3.2 million Telegram messages from 16,220 channels. Their conclusion? Telegram "offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities" — and that Telegram "has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app." Or, more succinctly: "Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual... Read more ›
5
Most popular sources
Business Insider
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32% 1 |
Tech Wire Asia
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13% |
The Verge
|
7% 1 |
Wired
|
6% 2 |
Gizmodo
|
5% 2 |
| View sources » | |
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26.11.2024 15:24
Last update: 15:16 EDT.
News rating updated: 22:10.
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