The Kik Messenger app has officially been acquired by U.S.-based holding company MediaLab. The news comes just one day before the app was scheduled to shut down. From a report: The blog post noted that MediaLab plans to keep the app alive and also outlines ideas it has to improve the app moving forward. It is noted that the acquiring company…
Tag: bots
These New Scientist-inspired Twitter bots are surrealist art
Bots on social media get a bad rap, but they can be used for good and for art, like in these three headline bots revealed at New Scientist Live Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2219727-these-new-scientist-inspired-twitter-bots-are-surrealist-art/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Fast swimming fish robot could perform underwater surveillance
Tunabot, a fish-inspired robot, can swim faster than most other swimming bots and could be used for underwater monitoring and surveillance Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2216695-fast-swimming-fish-robot-could-perform-underwater-surveillance/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
AI learns to defy the laws of physics to win at hide-and-seek
Bots built by artificial intelligence lab OpenAI worked together to find solutions to problems that humans hadn’t thought of Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2216410-ai-learns-to-defy-the-laws-of-physics-to-win-at-hide-and-seek/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Should We Be Allowed To Kick Robots?
“Seen in the wild, robots often appear cute and nonthreatening. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be hostile,” argues a new article in Wired, reporting on what appears to be a pre-meditated kicking of a Knightscope K5 patrol robot in a parking lot in California: K5’s siblings, it turns out, don’t fare much better. In 2017 a drunk man attacked a K5…
Marty the Grocery Store Robot Called ‘Ominous’, ‘Mostly Useless’
By the end of the year, Stop & Shop will have installed 500 “giant, gray, aisle-patrolling robots” in its chains of stores, reports Mashable, starting in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. “Attention shoppers: I’ve seen the future of grocery store technology, and let me tell you, we can do better.” Each of the robots weighs a massive 140-pounds and…
Will California’s New Bot Law Strengthen Democracy?
On July 1st, California became the first state in the nation to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter. Violators could face fines under state statutes related to unfair competition. From a report: Just as pharmaceutical companies must disclose that the…
Google’s New Media Literacy Program Teaches Kids How To Spot Disinformation, Fake News
Google announced this morning it’s expanding its two-year-old digital safety and citizenship curriculum for children, “Be Internet Awesome,” to now include media literacy — specifically, the ability to identify so-called “fake news” and other false content. “The company is launching six new media literacy activities for the curriculum that will help teach kids things like how to avoid a phishing attack,…
Twitch Sues Troll Streamers Who Flooded Site With Violent Videos and Pornography
An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg:
Twitch Interactive, the livestreaming platform owned by Amazon.com, has sued anonymous trolls who flooded the site last month with pornography, violent content and copyrighted movies and television shows… Twitch says it works to remove offensive posts and ban the accounts of the users who post them, but that the videos quickly reappear, apparently posted by bots, while…
Telegram Blames China For DDoS Attack Coinciding With Hong Kong Protests
The distributed denial of service attack that hit Telegram Wednesday came from China, the secure messaging app’s founder said. Pavel Durov’s tweet suggested that the country’s government may have done it to disrupt protests in Hong Kong. From a report: In a DDoS attack, an online service gets bombarded with traffic from networks of bots, to the point where it’s overwhelmed…