Exaze invests in SA’s future tech skills
A persistent gap exists between the talent the market needs and the talent it produces, which continues to hold businesses back, says Sarvesh Batta, CEO of Exaze.
Science/Tech
Finding focus: Strategic approach to cyber security for small and medium companies
SMEs must reduce complexity, consolidate visibility and build on what their existing team can realistically manage, says Kaspersky.
Can you solve it? This TV show is flipping brilliant!
A probability puzzle
Today’s puzzle imagines a TV game show.
The compere announces that at the end of the show two people will be chosen and each placed in a separate booth.
Continue reading…
South Africa’s Costly Data Breaches: 1.81% GDP Loss And The Avoidable Own-Goals Costing The Economy
South Africa’s escalating cybersecurity crisis is inflicting a devastating blow to the national economy, with costly data breaches potentially knocking at least 1.81% off the country’s annual GDP, a series of avoidable own-goals that experts warn are entirely preventable. According to Cube ICT Solutions, a leading managed ICT services provider, the average cost of a single […]
Malatsi comes out swinging in Starlink lobbying row
Solly Malatsi insists nobody influenced him into pursuing a policy his party, the DA, had already promised.
Eskom chair and business lobby in open war over grid reform
The fight over who owns South Africa’s transmission grid has burst spectacularly into the open.
Likely origin of mysterious ‘space balls’ found on Queensland beaches revealed by Australian Space Agency
Organisation says objects consistent with ‘debris from a foreign rocket body that recently re-entered the atmosphere’
The Australian Space Agency has said the six so-called “space balls” found in north Queensland were likely from a “foreign rocket body” that had recently re-entered the atmosphere after being in orbit.
The six mysterious objects were found by the public washed ashore in the...
Starwatch: Waning crescent moon pairs up with the Seven Sisters
Cluster might look like a mini version of the Plough unless you grab your binoculars
In the early hours of 11 July, the waning crescent moon will be gliding past the beautiful Pleiades star cluster, which is also known as M45 or the Seven Sisters.
The chart shows the view looking east-north-east from London at 3am BST. By then, the sky will getting ready to start brightening for the coming day,...
How Tech Scammers Conned Four People Out of $673,000 in Three Days
USA Today reports on a Facebook post from a Washington state sheriff’s office:Four residents of Clallam County, a coastal region west of Seattle along northern Washington’s peninsula, lost more than $673,000 in just three days, according to the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office… The smallest amount lost was $3,500, which someone purchased in Apple gift cards for a scammer posing as an employee...
Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing, scientists say
Study finds those who speak two languages have brains that appear around six years younger than those who speak one
Learning another language could slow ageing in the brain by up to 13 years, according to research.
People who speak more than one language seem to have younger brains and the more languages you speak and the earlier you speak them, the better, according to findings from a study...
Hundreds Support Legal Defense for Engineer Charged with Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
“Hundreds of freedom lovers are rallying behind a US Air Force engineer” who’s been accused of damaging over a dozen AI-integrated surveillance cameras last year and even knocking down their poles.Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 sharesthis article from Futurism:According to local channel WAVY, Virginia-based Air Force engineer and mechanic Jeffrey Sovern is facing 13 counts of destruction of...
Go-based TypeScript 7.0 Finally Reaches Release Candidate Stage
It was more than two years ago that TypeScript’s creator Anders Hejlsberg announced plans to rewrite its compiler in Go. This week Microsoft announced its first Go-based release candidate for TypeScript 7.0, reports InfoWorld:TypeScript 7.0 is often about 10 times faster than TypeScript 6.0, Microsoft said, thanks to native code speed and shared memory parallelism… Unlike TypeScript 6.0,...
Meta is Quietly Launching Pocket, an App for Vibe-coding and Scrolling Small ‘Gizmos’
“Mozilla shut down the well-loved read-it-later Pocket app last year, and now Meta is launching an app called Pocket with an entirely different, AI-focused pitch,” writes The Verge. While it’s not available for downloads in most locations, Meta’s Pocket will allow people “to generate small, interactive apps and games using AI prompts,” writes TechCrunch. They’re called “gizmos”, and Pocket...
Big Companies That Invest Heavily in AI Also Hire More People, Report Suggests
“Companies spending heavily on AI are growing headcount faster, even in the entry-level roles that many fear are doomed,” writes TechCrunch. That’s the conclusion of new report tracking AI spending from Ramp’s corporate card/bill pay data as well as Revelio Labs’ workforce records from 21,599 U.S. firms:According to the report, “high-intensity adopters” — firms that spend on average $30 per...
Microsoft and Amazon Commit Billions to New AI Implementation Units for Businesses
Microsoft is investing $2.5 billion in a new group “assisting clients with AI implementations,” reports CNBC:[Microsoft] said Thursday that 6,000 employees will be embedded with clients, in a practice that’s become known as forward deployed engineering [or FDE]… The announcement comes two days after cloud rival Amazon said it was putting $1 billion behind an FDE initiative to support fast-paced...
Ask Slashdot: Which Apps Aren’t Available on Linux?
Have you ever needed a Linux application which only exists in the Windows world? Long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM writes:Windows does have a lot of useful app (but smaller than “power apps”). Some of these are closed source, some are open, but they’re not all available in Linux yet. My list would have to contain Gimp Tookit versions of: IrfanView image manager, which I think is unequaled in...
Windows 11 Identifier Code Used to Arrest 19-Year-Old Over Alleged Ransomware Spree
America’s Justice Department and FBI teamed joined Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation to arrest a teenager they say is part of one of the world’s biggest cybercrime syndicates, reports Tom’s Hardware. The “Scattered Spider” syndicate has extorted over $100 million in ransom payments, according to Department of Justice figures:19-year-old Peter Stokes is a dual U.S.-Estonian citizen who...
Short Story Accused of Being AI-written Goes on to Win Contest’s First Prize
“A story widely accused on social media of being written using AI has gone on to win the overall Commonwealth short story prize,” reports the Guardian. In mid-May the story had been selected as a regional winner, but with critics on X and Bluesky “claiming it showed ‘obvious markers’ of AI use.”In the wake of the controversy, the Commonwealth Foundation conducted a review of the regional...
Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet
The internet’s largest stockpile of free knowledge is under threat from MAGA, A.I. and foreign autocrats. A bibliophile ex-ambassador is here to help.
The Guardian view on gene-edited humans: darker uses must be acknowledged alongside medical ones | Editorial
Polling shows that the public supports this new technology, but the conversation must move beyond simple questions of safety
Ever since Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technology emerged in the early 2010s, ethical questions around genetically altered humans, so-called designer babies, have become increasingly urgent. There is already a worldwide legal prohibition. No country currently allows human...
GoDaddy Warns India’s Crackdown on Fake Site Registrars Could Upend Internet Privacy Everywhere
“The internet is filled with fakes,” writes Gizmodo. “A court in India is setting out to address the problem by requiring more transparency from domain registrars to make it easier to crack down on fraud. And while the intentions might be good, Reuters is reporting that major American domain registrar GoDaddy is sounding the warning bells that the court’s decision could fundamentally reshape...