Recent Posts

How to Win Radio Contests

My cousin Jared Pot is a family legend for all kinds of reasons, the main one being that you can't listen to FM radio in the greater Toronto area without hearing him win a contest. I'm only barely exaggerating: The man routinely wins three to four prizes a week. Everyone …

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Germany’s Far Right Is in a Panic Over Telegram

Soon after the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, a warning that was viewed more than 85,000 times started circulating among Germany’s far right: “Back up your Telegram data as quickly as you can and clean your account.” The message came from Kim Dotcom, the embattled German founder …

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A New Group Is Trying to Make AI Data Licensing Ethical

The first wave of major generative AI tools largely were trained on “publicly available” data—basically, anything and everything that could be scraped from the internet. Now, sources of training data are increasingly restricting access and pushing for licensing agreements. With the hunt for additional data sources intensifying, new licensing startups …

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This Could Be the Start of Amazon’s Next Robot Revolution

In 2012, Amazon quietly acquired a robotics startup called Kiva Systems, a move that dramatically improved the efficiency of its ecommerce operations and kickstarted a wider revolution in warehouse automation. Last week, the ecommerce giant announced another deal that could prove similarly profound, agreeing to hire the founders of Covariant, …

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The Japanese Robot Controversy Lurking in Israel’s Military Supply Chain

Activists in Japan earlier this year accused one of the country’s largest robotics manufacturers of profiting off the war in Gaza, accusing it of violating its own company policies in aiding the Israeli defense industry. At a protest outside the headquarters of FANUC Corporation earlier this summer, the Boycott, Divestment, …

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