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Hackers made robot vacuums randomly yell racial slurs

Engadget

Robot vacuums across the country were hacked in the space of several days, according to reporting by ABC News. This allowed the attackers to not only control the robovacs, but use their speakers to hurl racial slurs and abusive comments at anyone nearby. All of the affected robots were of the same make and model, the Chinese-made Ecovacs Deebot X2s. This particular robovac has developed a reputation for being easy to hack, thanks to a critical security flaw. ABC News, for instance, was able to get full control over one of the robots, including the camera.


Call of Duty: Vanguard video game will take players back to World War II and the birth of special forces

USATODAY - Tech Top Stories

Call of Duty is parachuting back into World War II. Special operations forces such as SEAL Team Six grew out of Allied experiments with small squads chosen for specialized missions in World War II. In developing the single-player story campaign, Sledgehammer's creative team worked with historians including Marty Morgan, author of "D-Day: A Photographic History of the Normandy Invasion" who served as technical director on the studio's 2017 game Call of Duty WWII. Video games:Fortnite meets Among Us? New Impostors mode rolling out "We were really inspired by these first special forces operators and they seemed like such interesting characters that we wanted to explore," said David Swenson, creative director of the game's single-player story campaign for development studio Sledgehammer Games. Call of Duty: Vanguard's story is fiction, but "even though we are not beholden to history, we are rooted in history," Swenson said. "It feels realistic and authentic."


Chatbot campaign for flu shots bolsters patient response rate by 30%

#artificialintelligence

Communicating with patients can be tough. Reminder pamphlets often go straight into the rubbish and emails are deleted before they are read. But one doctor found that chatbots could be a key to patient outreach. Brett Swenson, MD, is no stranger to digital health. He runs a concierge practice in Arizona and started working with EMRs about 20 years ago when they were first introduced.


The most attractive place for tech outside of Silicon Valley is… Canada

@machinelearnbot

It's no secret that Google searches for "how to move to Canada" surged after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But there's now new data that Canadian startups are seeing more interest from U.S. workers than ever before, as fist reported by Axios -- and many of them are attributing it to dissatisfaction with U.S. politics. MaRS, an innovation hub in Toronto, asked startups in the city if they've seen a surge in applications from U.S. workers since November. Zoom.ai, an enterprise chatbot startup, went from receiving nearly zero U.S. applications to 33 percent of its applications coming from the U.S. in February. "I've been in tech for over 20 years in Canada and in Silicon Valley, too. I've never seen candidates from the U.S. apply for Canadian positions from places like Silicon Valley," Roy Pereira, the CEO of Zoom.ai, an enterprise chatbot startup, told Axios.