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IT service company's latest move to clear its maturing debts

French IT services provider Atos has entered talks with Airbus to sell its tech security division in an effort to ease its financial burdens.…

Roku, the maker of TV streaming boxes and software, is debuting its first high-end televisions in a bid to continue sales momentum for the company's devices. From a report: In the spring, Roku will roll out 55-inch, 65-inch and 75-inch Pro Series TVs that will cost consumers as much as $1,500. The new televisions put Roku in competition with Samsung and LG, which offer several models in that price range. It's a step up from the company's current TVs -- the Select and Plus -- which top out at $999. [...] The new TVs include a thinner design with a flat back for mounting on walls, improved picture quality and better audio for cinematic sound, the San Jose, California-based company said in a statement.

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The source? Repurposed parts from electric vehicles

Honda and Mitsubishi are to test the feasibility of powering a datacenter with fuel cells taken from electric vehicles, using hydrogen produced as a byproduct of an industrial process.…

Amazon-owned Wickr is dead, more than a year after reports showed it had become the app of choice for drug traffickers. 404 Media: If you open the encrypted messaging app Wickr Me today, you'll be greeted with a line of red text: "Reconnecting..." Below that, in white text over a black background, the app says "We're having issues connecting to the Wickr Me network. If the problem persists, try restarting your app or contacting support." Closing and reopening the app will not work. There is no point in contacting support either. That's because on December 31, 2023, Wickr Me, the free version of Wickr, was shut down entirely. Wickr Me is no longer available to download on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. The app stopped accepting new users more than a year ago. And now, even current users cannot speak to one another. So ends the story of an app that while never reaching the popularity of other encrypted messaging apps like Signal, nor those that later turned on end-to-end encryption for the masses like WhatsApp, nonetheless played an important role in the adoption of and debate around secure communications.

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A dinosaur fossil listed for sale in London for $20 million embodies one of the most heated debates in paleontology. From a report: When fossil hunters unearthed the remains of a dinosaur from the hills of eastern Montana five years ago, they carried several key characteristics of a Tyrannosaurus rex: a pair of giant legs for walking, a much smaller pair of arms for slashing prey, and a long tail stretching behind it. But unlike a full-grown T. rex, which would be about the size of a city bus, this dinosaur was more like the size of a pickup truck. The specimen, which is now listed for sale for $20 million at an art gallery in London, raises a question that has come to obsess paleontologists: Is it simply a young T. rex who died before reaching maturity, or does it represent a different but related species of dinosaur known as a Nanotyrannus? The dispute has produced reams of scientific research and decades of debate, polarizing paleontologists along the way. Now, with dinosaur fossils increasingly fetching eye-popping prices at auction, the once-esoteric dispute has begun to ripple through auction houses and galleries, where some see the T. rex name as a valuable brand that can more easily command high prices. "It's ultimately a quite in-the-weeds question of the taxonomy and the classification of one very particular type of dinosaur," said Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. "However, it involves T. rex, and the debate always gets a little bit more ferocious when the king of dinosaurs is involved." On the internet, juvenile T. rex versus Nanotyrannus has become something of a meme, providing fuel for jokes on niche social media channels. ("I won't believe in Nanotyrannus until it shows up at my own door and devours me," a paleontology student with the handle "TheDinoBuff" joked recently on the social media site X.) The gallery selling the specimen discovered in Montana -- which is known as Chomper -- was faced with a choice. Call it a juvenile T. rex? Label it a Nanotyrannus? Or embrace the ambiguity of an unresolved scientific debate? The David Aaron gallery in London went with calling it a "rare juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton." It cited an influential 2020 paper on the subject led by Holly N. Woodward, which used an analysis of growth rings within bone samples from two disputed specimens -- which are estimated to have been similarly sized to Chomper -- to argue that they were juveniles nearing growth spurts.

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Users aren't the only ones questioning the Windows 11 feature's utility

Windows boss Mikhail Parakhin has admitted that the Start menu needs a bit of work.…

Company’s removal from ransomware gang’s leak blog could mean negotiations underway

Xerox has officially confirmed that a cyber baddie broke into the systems of its US subsidiary - a week after INC Ransom claimed to have exfiltrated data from the copier and print giant.…

Sacha Labourey on the HashiCorp license, Jenkins X experiments, and when LLMs will come for your job

Interview "It's the experiment that went too far," says CloudBees' Sacha Labourey of HashiCorp's licensing change.…

Interpretation, debate, and judges set to decide how the rubber hits the road

Analysis As 2023 drew to a close, the year of AI hype was ending as it began. According to figures from Pitchbook, Big Tech spent twice as much on deals with Generative AI startups than venture capital groups during the year.…

Industry lull good for tech, but human toll is grim reading

The 7.6 preliminary magnitude earthquake that hit Japan on New Year's Day is forcing Ishikawa Prefecture chip and electronics companies to temporarily shut their doors, with affected companies including Toshiba, GlobalWafers, Murata and others.…

The most successful compile-it-yourself Linux distro now has compiled, packaged executables

Gentoo now offers 20-plus gigabytes of pre-compiled binaries, from desktops to office suites, to speed up installations and updates.…

According to new findings from the Millennium Cohort study, almost half of British teenagers say they feel addicted to social media. The Guardian reports: The latest research, by Dr Amy Orben's team at the University of Cambridge, used data from the Millennium Cohort study which is tracking the lives of about 19,000 people born in 2000-2002 across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. When the cohort were aged 16-18 they were asked, for the first time, about social media use. Of the 7,000 people who responded, 48% said they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "I think I am addicted to social media." A higher proportion of girls (57%) agreed compared to boys (37%), according to the data shared with the Guardian. Scientists said this did not mean that these people are actually suffering from a clinical addiction, but that expressing a perceived lack of control suggests a problematic relationship. "We're not saying the people who say they feel addicted are addicted," said Georgia Turner, a graduate student leading the analysis. "Self-perceived social media addiction is not [necessarily] the same as drug addiction. But it's not a nice feeling to feel you don't have agency over your own behavior. It's quite striking that so many people feel like that and it can't it be that good." "Social media research has largely assumed that [so-called] social media addiction is going to follow the same framework as drug addiction," said Turner. Orben's team and others argue that this is likely to be oversimplistic and are investigating whether the teenagers cluster into groups whose behavioral can be predicted by other personality traits. It could be that, for some, their relationship is akin to a behavioral addiction, but for others their use could be driven by compulsive checking, others may be relying on it to cope with negative life experiences, and others may simply be responding to negative social perceptions about "wasting time" on social media.

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Details sub-CPU allotments, performant Iceberg tables after Microsoft, Databricks bring market noise

Feature Last year was a big one for data analytics and ML in the cloud. Two of the biggest players, Microsoft and Databricks, both overhauled their platforms, with the former also managing to launch products.…

With the average demand hitting $1.5 million, something's gotta change

Emsisoft has called for a complete ban on ransom payments following another record-breaking year of digital extortion.…

"To prevent disinformation from eroding democratic values worldwide, the U.S. must establish a global watermarking standard for text-based AI-generated content," writes retired U.S. Army Col. Joe Buccino in an opinion piece for The Hill. While President Biden's October executive order requires watermarking of AI-derived video and imagery, it offers no watermarking requirement for text-based content. "Text-based AI represents the greatest danger to election misinformation, as it can respond in real-time, creating the illusion of a real-time social media exchange," writes Buccino. "Chatbots armed with large language models trained with reams of data represent a catastrophic risk to the integrity of elections and democratic norms." Joe Buccino is a retired U.S. Army colonel who serves as an A.I. research analyst with the U.S. Department of Defense Defense Innovation Board. He served as U.S. Central Command communications director from 2021 until September 2023. Here's an excerpt from his report: Watermarking text-based AI content involves embedding unique, identifiable information -- a digital signature documenting the AI model used and the generation date -- into the metadata generated text to indicate its artificial origin. Detecting this digital signature requires specialized software, which, when integrated into platforms where AI-generated text is common, enables the automatic identification and flagging of such content. This process gets complicated in instances where AI-generated text is manipulated slightly by the user. For example, a high school student may make minor modifications to a homework essay created through Chat-GPT4. These modifications may drop the digital signature from the document. However, that kind of scenario is not of great concern in the most troubling cases, where chatbots are let loose in massive numbers to accomplish their programmed tasks. Disinformation campaigns require such a large volume of them that it is no longer feasible to modify their output once released. The U.S. should create a standard digital signature for text, then partner with the EU and China to lead the world in adopting this standard. Once such a global standard is established, the next step will follow -- social media platforms adopting the metadata recognition software and publicly flagging AI-generated text. Social media giants are sure to respond to international pressure on this issue. The call for a global watermarking standard must navigate diverse international perspectives and regulatory frameworks. A global standard for watermarking AI-generated text ahead of 2024's elections is ambitious -- an undertaking that encompasses diplomatic and legislative complexities as well as technical challenges. A foundational step would involve the U.S. publicly accepting and advocating for a standard of marking and detection. This must be followed by a global campaign to raise awareness about the implications of AI-generated disinformation, involving educational initiatives and collaborations with the giant tech companies and social media platforms. In 2024, generative AI and democratic elections are set to collide. Establishing a global watermarking standard for text-based generative AI content represents a commitment to upholding the integrity of democratic institutions. The U.S. has the opportunity to lead this initiative, setting a precedent for responsible AI use worldwide. The successful implementation of such a standard, coupled with the adoption of detection technologies by social media platforms, would represent a significant stride towards preserving the authenticity and trustworthiness of democratic norms.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Microsoft's MS-DOS (and its IBM-branded counterpart, PC DOS) eventually became software juggernauts, powering the vast majority of PCs throughout the '80s and serving as the underpinnings of Windows throughout the '90s. But the software had humble beginnings, as we've detailed in our history of the IBM PC and elsewhere. It began in mid-1980 as QDOS, or "Quick and Dirty Operating System," the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased. Last week, Internet Archive user f15sim discovered and uploaded a new-old version of 86-DOS to the Internet Archive. Version 0.1-C of 86-DOS is available for download here and can be run using the SIMH emulator; before this, the earliest extant version of 86-DOS was version 0.34, also uploaded by f15sim. This version of 86-DOS is rudimentary even by the standards of early-'80s-era DOS builds and includes just a handful of utilities, a text-based chess game, and documentation for said chess game. But as early as it is, it remains essentially recognizable as the DOS that would go on to take over the entire PC business. If you're just interested in screenshots, some have been posted by user NTDEV on the site that used to be Twitter. According to the version history available on Wikipedia, this build of 86-DOS would date back to roughly August of 1980, shortly after it lost the "QDOS" moniker. By late 1980, SCP was sharing version 0.3x of the software with Microsoft, and by early 1981, it was being developed as the primary operating system of the then-secret IBM Personal Computer. By the middle of 1981, roughly a year after 86-DOS began life as QDOS, Microsoft had purchased the software outright and renamed it MS-DOS. Microsoft and IBM continued to co-develop MS-DOS for many years; the version IBM licensed and sold on its PCs was called PC DOS, though for most of their history the two products were identical. Microsoft also retained the ability to license the software to other computer manufacturers as MS-DOS, which contributed to the rise of a market of mostly interoperable PC clones. The PC market as we know it today still more or less resembles the PC-compatible market of the mid-to-late 1980s, albeit with dramatically faster and more capable components.

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Meanwhile, ISRO chief sets sights on next crewed mission

India kicked off the new year with the launch of an X-ray polarimetry space observatory to research cosmic radiation.…

David Batty reports via The Guardian: [Andrew Scott], best known as Fleabag's "hot priest," has revealed he halted the renowned soliloquy in Shakespeare's play when an audience member took out a laptop to send emails. The actor decided not to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous theatre etiquette during his run in the 2017 production of Hamlet at London's Almeida theatre, for which he earned an Olivier nomination. Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused film podcast, Scott said there was "no way" he could continue with the speech, and refused to resume until the man put his laptop away. "When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop -- not his phone, his laptop -- while I was in the middle of 'To be or not to fucking be'" said the actor, who said he thought the offending audience member was sending emails. "I was pausing and [the stage team] were like, 'Get on with it' and I was like, 'There's no way.' I stopped for ages." A woman next to the laptop user appeared to alert him to the situation and he finally stopped. "He had absolutely no doubts," added Scott, who was on the podcast to promote his current film All of Us Strangers.

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An issue with Sony's projectors caused theater chain Alamo Drafthouse to close theaters entirely on New Year's Eve. "As of New Year's Day, however, most theaters and most showtimes now appear to be available, with a few exceptions," reports The Verge. From the report: It's not clear what happened. As New Year's Day is a holiday, we somewhat understandably haven't yet been able to reach Alamo or Sony spokespeople, and not every theater or every screening was affected. That didn't stop Alamo from blaming its Sony projectors for what at least one theater called a "nationwide" outage, however. "Due to nation-wide technical difficulties with Sony, we aren't able to play any titles today," read part of a taped paper sign hanging inside a Woodbury, Minnesota location. That apparently didn't keep the customer who took a picture of that sign from watching The Apartment at that very same location, though: "When we went to our seats, the wait staff let us know that despite the fact that the previews were playing, we wouldn't know until the movie actually started whether we could see the film or not. If it didn't work, the screen would just turn black. Luckily, the film went through without a hitch." What might have only affected some screenings at some theaters? I've seen speculation on Reddit that it may have something to do with expired digital certificates used to unlock encrypted films, but we haven't heard that from Alamo or Sony. We're looking forward to finding out. Longtime Slashdot reader innocent_white_lamb suggests that "[a] cryptographic key used to master all movies distributed by Deluxe" was the culprit after it expired on December 30. "This means that almost all Hollywood movies will no longer play on many commercial cinema servers. In particular, many showings of Wonka and Aquaman had to be cancelled due to the expired encryption key." From their submitted story: Deluxe and the movie companies have been frantically trying to remaster and send out revised versions of current movies over the past few days. Nobody knows what will happen to older movie titles since everything mastered by Deluxe since 2011 may be affected and may need to be remastered if it is to be shown in movie theaters again. There are at least four separate threads discussing this matter on Film-Tech.com, notes innocent_white_lamb.

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Meanwhile: Fidelity downgrades social network's valuation by 71%, so far

Links to articles and pages on the web made sense again on X, for a short while at least, as headlines and titles returned to preview cards shown in tweets in the digital land formerly known as Twitter. …