Posts By: David Firth

Alarmed By Deepfake Videos, Facebook Creates Contest to Detect Them

Posted by & filed under Deepfake videos, FaceBook.

Alarmed by the rise of realistic fake videos created with artificial intelligence, Facebook is funding a competition to find ways to automatically detect these counterfeits. The competition, called the Deepfake Detection Challenge, will be overseen by the Partnership on AI, a non-profit group whose members include many leading technology companies, non-governmental organizations, and research bodies. Microsoft will… Read more »

Walmart Canada rolls out nationwide grocery delivery through Instacart

Posted by & filed under App Economy.

Walmart’s  relationship with Instacart  deepened today with an expansion of their partnership across Canada for grocery delivery. Walmart Canada had previously run a 17-store pilot program with Instacart, starting last September, in both the Greater Toronto area and Winnipeg. With the expansion, Walmart Canada will offer same-day grocery delivery from nearly 200 Walmart stores nationwide. Canadian Walmart shoppers can now… Read more »

‘Dangerous’ AI offers to write fake news

Posted by & filed under Artificial intelligence, Ethical Issues, ethics, IS ethics.

An artificial intelligence system that generates realistic stories, poems and articles has been updated, with some claiming it is now almost as good as a human writer. The text generator, built by research firm OpenAI, was originally considered “too dangerous” to make public because of the potential for abuse. But now a new, more powerful version… Read more »

The Zambian agri-tech app making farming cool

Posted by & filed under App Economy.

Agripredict, led by young founder and CEO Mwila Kangwa, helps identify and stop the crop diseases that have ravaged Zambia’s farms in past seasons. Using Agripredict’s phone application, the 22,000 Zambian farmers in the company’s pilot program can get detailed information on plant diseases and weather patterns that would before have come only from skilled… Read more »

Peer-to-peer parking marketplace Rover tests monthly subscriptions

Posted by & filed under App Economy.

In today’s installment of “the future is 100% subscription-based,” Toronto-based startup Rover is testing out subscriptions for its parking marketplace. Rover lets users list their unused parking spots for on-demand rental by others on the service, giving them a passive way to earn some income while hopefully increasing the utilization rate of parking spaces at the same… Read more »

YouTube shuts down 210 channels posting about Hong Kong

Posted by & filed under FaceBook, Google, IT and Politics, politics, Twitter.

Google announced Thursday that it had disabled 210 YouTube channels that were uploading videos “in a coordinated manner” about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.The announcement came three days after Twitter and Facebook announced they had shut down a network of hundreds of accounts that were posting content aimed at undermining pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Some of the accounts… Read more »

The Slack origin story How a whimsical online game became an enterprise software giant

Posted by & filed under Software, System development.

  Let’s rewind a decade. It’s 2009. Vancouver, Canada. Stewart Butterfield,  known already for his part in building Flickr,  a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand — again — at building a game. Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. This time, Butterfield would make… Read more »