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xAI To Pay Telegram $300 Million To Integrate Grok Into Chat App

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 06:20
Telegram has partnered with xAI to integrate the Grok chatbot into its platform for one year, with xAI paying $300 million in cash and equity. Telegram will also receive 50% of subscription revenue from Grok. TechCrunch reports: Earlier this year, xAI made the Grok chatbot available to Telegram's premium users. It seems Grok might now be made available to all users. A video posted by [Telegram CEO Pavel Durov] on X suggested that Grok can be pinned on top of chats within the app, and users can also ask questions to Grok from the search bar. Notably, Meta has also integrated Meta AI into the search bar on Instagram and WhatsApp. The video also shows that you will be able to use Grok for writing suggestions, summarizing chats, links, and documents, and creating stickers. Grok will supposedly also help answer questions for businesses and assist with moderation.

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Categories: Technology

Google Photos Turns 10 With Major Editor Redesign, QR Code Sharing

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 05:42
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: Google Photos was announced at I/O 2015 and the company is now celebrating the app's 10th birthday with a redesign of the photo editor. Google is redesigning the Photos editor so that it "provides helpful suggestions and puts all our powerful editing tools in one place." It starts with a new fullscreen viewer that places the date, time, and location at the top of your screen. Meanwhile, it's now Share, Edit, Add to (instead of Lens), and Trash at the bottom. Once editing, Google Photos has moved controls for aspect ratio, flip, and rotate to be above the image. In the top-left corner, we have Auto Frame, which debuted in Magic Editor on the Pixel 9, to fill-in backgrounds and is now coming to more devices. Underneath, we get options for Enhance, Dynamic, and "AI Enhance" in the Auto tab. That's followed by Lighting, Color, and Composition, as well as a search shortcut: "You can use AI-powered suggestions that combine multiple effects for quick edits in a variety of tailored options, or you can tap specific parts of an image to get suggested tools for editing that area." The editor allows you to circle or "tap specific parts of an image to get suggested tools for editing that area." This includes the subject, background, or some other aspect. You then see the Blur background, Add portrait light, Sharpen, Move and Reimagine appear in the example below. We also see the redesigned sliders throughout this updated interface. This Google Photos editor redesign "will begin rolling out globally to Android devices next month, with iOS following later this year." We already know the app is set for a Material 3 Expressive redesign. Meanwhile, Google Photos is starting to roll out the ability to share albums with a QR code. This method makes for easy viewing and adding with people nearby. Google even suggests printing it out when in (physical) group settings. Google shared a few tips, tricks and tools for the new editor in a blog post.

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Categories: Technology

Japanese Authorities Refer 'Spoiler Website' Operators To Prosecutors in Rare Corporate Copyright Case

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 04:40
Japanese police referred five individuals and a company to prosecutors last week for allegedly operating a website that published detailed movie plots without permission from rights holders. The Miyagi Prefectural Police Headquarters and Minamisanriku Police Station sent the case to the Sendai District Public Prosecutors Office on suspicion of violating the Copyright Act. The Content Overseas Distribution Association described the case as having "very few precedents for a corporation being referred to the prosecutor's office on suspicion of violating the Copyright Act, making this an extremely rare case." The website posted detailed content from films including "Godzilla Minus One" and four others copyrighted by Toho, "Shin Kamen Rider" and two others by Toei, "Neck" and one other by KADOKAWA, and "Shin Ultraman" by Tsuburaya Productions. The site listed more than 8,000 films with complete storylines, character names, dialogue, and scene descriptions.

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Categories: Technology

80% Chance of Record Heat in Coming Years, Climate Agencies Forecast

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 04:00
The world faces an 80% probability of breaking another annual temperature record within the next five years, according to a forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office. The projections, derived from more than 200 computer simulations run by 10 global scientific centers, indicate an 86% chance that one of the next five years will surpass the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold established by the Paris climate accord, with a 70% chance that the entire five-year period will average above that milestone. For the first time, the agencies identified a slight possibility that global annual temperatures could reach the more alarming 2 degrees Celsius benchmark before the decade's end.

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Categories: Technology

The Hobby Computer Culture

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 03:20
A fairly comprehensive look at the early personal computer culture reveals that from 1975 through early 1977, personal computers remained "almost exclusively the province of hobbyists who loved to play with computers and found them inherently fascinating," according to newly surfaced historical research. When BYTE magazine launched in 1975, its cover called computers "the world's greatest toy," reflecting the recreational rather than practical focus of early adopters. A BYTE magazine survey from late 1976 showed these pioneers were remarkably homogeneous: 72% held at least a bachelor's degree, had a median annual income of $20,000 ($123,000 in 2025 dollars), and were overwhelmingly male at 99%. Rather than developing practical software applications, early users gravitated toward games, particularly Star Trek simulations that appeared frequently in magazine advertisements and user group demonstrations. The hobbyist community organized around local clubs like the famous Homebrew Computer Club, retail stores, and specialized magazines that helped establish what one researcher calls "a mythology of the microcomputer." This narrative positioned hobbyists as democratizing heroes who "ripped the computer and the knowledge of how to use it from the hands of the priests, sharing freedom and power with the masses," challenging what they termed the "computer priesthood" of institutional gatekeepers. This self-contained hobbyist culture would soon be "subsumed by a larger phenomenon" as businessmen began targeting mass markets in 1977.

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Categories: Technology

Japan Post Launches 'Digital Address' System

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 02:40
Japan Post has launched a "digital address" system that links seven-digit combinations of numbers and letters to physical addresses. From a report: Under the system, users can input these seven-digit codes on online shopping websites, and their addresses will automatically appear on the sites. People can obtain digital addresses by registering with Japan Post's Yu ID membership service. Their digital addresses will not change even if their physical addresses change. Their new addresses will be linked to the codes if they submit notices of address changes.

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Categories: Technology

Cyberattack Surge Creates Opportunity for Insurers, Prompts Rethink on Premiums

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 02:01
The recent surge in cyberattacks is pushing cyber insurers toward a fundamental reassessment of premium pricing, Bloomberg reports, with industry analysts warning of an impending "inflection point" that could reshape the market. Marks & Spencer's impending $404 million hit to its operating profit from a recent hack underscores claims that will "attract intense scrutiny from insurers," according to cybersecurity expert Adam Casey. While incidents like this might not trigger immediate premium hikes across the board, they might likely contribute to an upward pricing trend. Panmure Liberum analyst Abid Hussain said that premiums have recently been falling as policy coverage has tightened, but the industry now faces a critical decision point. "There's going to be another step change, either in the policy wording or in the premiums, or both," Hussain said.

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Categories: Technology

Blue Book Sales Surge As Universities Combat AI Cheating

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 01:26
Sales of blue book exam booklets have surged dramatically across the nation as professors turn to analog solutions to prevent ChatGPT cheating. The University of California, Berkeley reported an 80% increase in blue book sales over the past two academic years, while Texas A&M saw 30% growth and the University of Florida recorded nearly 50% increases this school year. The surge comes as students who were freshmen when ChatGPT launched in 2022 approach senior year, having had access to AI throughout their college careers.

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Categories: Technology

Planet's Darkening Oceans Pose Threat To Marine Life, Scientists Say

Slashdot - 29 May, 2025 - 00:40
Great swathes of the planet's oceans have become darker in the past two decades, according to researchers who fear the trend will have a severe impact on marine life around the world. From a report: Satellite data and numerical modelling revealed that more than a fifth of the global ocean darkened between 2003 and 2022, reducing the band of water that life reliant on sunlight and moonlight can thrive in. The effect is evident across 75m sq km (30m sq miles) of ocean, equivalent to the land area of Europe, Africa, China and North America combined, and disturbs the upper layer of water where 90% of marine species live. Dr Thomas Davies, a marine conservationist at the University of Plymouth, said the findings were a "genuine cause for concern," with potentially severe implications for marine ecosystems, global fisheries and the critical turnover of carbon and nutrients in the oceans. Most marine life thrives in the photic zones of the world's oceans, the surface layers that allow sufficient light through for organisms to exploit. While sunlight can reach a kilometre beneath the waves, in practice there is little below 200 metres.

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Categories: Technology

DSA-5931-1 systemd - security update

Debian Security - 29 May, 2025 - 00:00
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) discovered that systemd-coredump is prone to a kill-and-replace race condition which may allow a local attacker to gain sensitive information from crashed SUID processes. Additionally systemd-coredump does not specify %d (the kernel's per- process "dumpable" flag) in /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern allowing a local attacker to crash root daemons that fork() and setuid() to the attacker's uid and consequently gain read access to the resulting core dumps and therefore to sensitive information from memory of the root daemons.

Details can be found in the Qualys advisory at https://www.qualys.com/2025/05/29/apport-coredump/apport-coredump.txt

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-5931-1

Categories: Security

DSA-5930-1 libavif - security update

Debian Security - 29 May, 2025 - 00:00
Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered in libavif, a library for handling .avif files, which could result in denial of service or potentially the execution of arbitrary code.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-5930-1

Categories: Security

DSA-5929-1 chromium - security update

Debian Security - 29 May, 2025 - 00:00
Security issues were discovered in Chromium which could result in the execution of arbitrary code, denial of service, or information disclosure.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-5929-1

Categories: Security

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