OkCupid is the latest company to kick white supremacists off of its platform. In a tweet today, the dating service said that it found out Chris Cantwell -- the fascist featured in Vice News' Charlottesville documentary who cried in a video when he thought a warrant was issued for his arrest -- was on its site and subsequently banned him for life. It also said, "There is no room for hate in a place where you're looking for love," and told members to report people they come across who are involved in hate groups. We were alerted that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was on OkCupid. Within 10 minutes we banned him for life. Other companies that have said no thanks to racists this week include Spotify, Google, GoDaddy, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, GoFundMe, Squarespace and Twitter.

Want to know what it's like to interview Jennifer Lawrence? Google Home can tell you. Google and Vogue inked a partnership that brings the magazine's September issue to the voice-activated Home devices by prompting consumers to ask a handful of questions about the issue's celebrity coverage, hinting that Google Home is starting to open up to marketers and publishers. Vogue and Google Home have created voice content with the magazine's writers about the stories they wrote for the issue. For example, saying, "OK Google, ask Vogue to tell me more about Jennifer Lawrence," prompts Jason Gay, who wrote Vogue's cover story about Lawrence, to talk about interviewing the actress.

OKCupid has banned white nationalist Christopher Cantwell from the dating service. SAN FRANCISCO -- Dating service OKCupid says it has banned a white supremacist for life. And it's asking its members to report other OKCupid members who belong to hate groups. OKCupid joins a growing corporate backlash against neo-Nazis in the U.S. after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Technology companies that once tolerated white supremacists are now booting them from their services.

In the wake of last weekend's events in Charlottesville and the ongoing fallout, several popular matchmaking platforms are taking steps to ensure their users feel they're in a safe space by banning hate speech and white supremacists. OKCupid took the unusual step today of announcing that they'd discovered that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was a user. We were alerted that white supremacist Chris Cantwell was on OkCupid. The app itself has been a target of harassment from white supremacist groups.

Whether it's Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women. Hanson Robotics recently demoed Sophia, a learning and expressive robot designed to help humans in areas like healthcare and customer service. Market research is likely the main factor that influences tech companies when constructing AI personalities. Whether its stereotypes about women in service roles, the desire for a female companion, or simply that feeling of trust that a woman's voice instills, female AI personalities are easier for most consumers to adopt.

Smart devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo could be transformed into surveillance tools that track your every move, according to scientists. The CovertBand tracking system uses the built-in microphone as a receiver to pick up reflected sound waves - and is so powerful it can record what you're doing through a wall. The smart device then transmits this information to the attacker, who could be a few feet away or halfway across the globe. The researchers tested CovertBand using a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone hooked up to a portable speaker (pictured). Using a software code called CovertBand researchers turned a smart device into a sonar system which can take over built-in microphones and speakers in a smart device - that can be controlled remotely.

Let's be honest: Reaching for the remote while watching TV isn't a major inconvenience. If you can control your TV by voice instead, why wouldn't you? To that end, Google and Amazon now offer hands-free TV controls through their respective connected speakers. Amazon added Fire TV voice controls to the Echo speaker and other Alexa devices a couple weeks ago, while Google has offered similar voice controls for Chromecast through its own Google Home speaker since last December. Both combos allow you to launch videos, pause, play, rewind, and fast forward without ever touching a remote control.

The hardware now supports Alexa, Amazon's voice-enabled assistant, through an Echo or Echo Dot-equipped speaker. So you can ask, "Alexa, ask EE TV what's on tonight" and hear some suggestions from the Freeview-powered guide. The new Alexa "skill" also supports queries for specific channels and, more importantly, will let you set up recordings, regardless of whether the set-top box is on or in standby mode. Amazon has long touted Alexa as a key part of its Fire TV and Fire TV stick, however those devices are for on-demand apps only. EE TV is designed to be a single solution for people who still like to tune in to live programming.

Google has just pushed an update to its Home smart speaker that lets you make calls to any phone number in the US and Canada for free. As with its other features, you can place a call with your voice: just say, "Hey Google, Call Abhimanyu," or whoever else you've been dying to talk to, and it'll do your bidding instantly over Wi-Fi. It'll recognize your voice to load your own contacts, so when you ask it to "Call Dad," it'll phone your father and not someone else's. Plus, you can also ask Home to ring businesses by name, even if they aren't stored in your contact list. With that, Google might have just replaced your landline and beat Amazon et al to the punch as well. Echo speakers can currently talk to each other, but not to phones; Apple and Microsoft are yet to introduce these features in their upcoming smart speakers.

We're only just over halfway through 2017, but the world of web design moves pretty darned quickly, so it's a good time to step back and take stock of the trends that have emerged so far. In this post, we identify five of the top trends dominating web design right now, and where to go for further reading on each subject. If there's one thread that unites them all it's the idea that in 2017, as Chris Coyier put it in this article, "We're not building pages, we're building systems." In other words, as things like style guides, design systems and pattern libraries become more important than the visual layout of individual pages, we're seeing a seismic shift in what web design actually involves. And these five trends can all be seen, in different ways, as part of that overall transition.