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After years of legal skirmishes, an ambitious strategy by film studio Voltage Pictures, to sue alleged BitTorrent pirates through a reverse class action in Canada, has been permanently shut down. The Federal Court of Appeal ruled that these cases, where IP addresses are the main initial evidence, are unsuited to this legal approach. Furthermore, the proposed methods for mass notification are deemed unlawful.

As the global population ages, older adults face growing psychological challenges such as loneliness, cognitive decline, and loss of social roles. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, including chatbots and voice-based systems, offer new pathways to emotional support and mental stimulation. However, older adults often encounter significant barriers in accessing and effectively using AI tools. This review examines the current landscape of AI applications aimed at enhancing psychological well-being among older adults, identifies key challenges such as digital literacy and usability, and highlights design and training strategies to bridge the digital divide. Using socioemotional selectivity theory and technology acceptance models as guiding frameworks, we argue that AI—especially in the form of conversational agents—holds transformative potential in reducing isolation and promoting emotional resilience in aging populations. We conclude with recommendations for inclusive design, participatory development, and future interdisciplinary research.

Despite QUIC handshake packets being encrypted, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) has begun blocking QUIC connections to specific domains since April 7, 2024. In this work, we measure and characterize the GFW’s censorship of QUIC to understand how and what it blocks. Our measurements reveal that the GFW decrypts QUIC Initial packets at scale, applies heuristic filtering rules, and uses a blocklist distinct from its other censorship mechanisms. We expose a critical flaw in this new system: the computational overhead of decryption reduces its effectiveness under moderate traffic loads. We also demonstrate that this censorship mechanism can be weaponized to block UDP traffic between arbitrary hosts in China and the rest of the world. We collaborate with various open-source communities to integrate circumvention strategies into Mozilla Firefox, the quic-go library, and all major QUIC-based circumvention tools.

Despite the extensive, highly detailed and good-faith engagements by rightsholder communities throughout this process, the final outcomes fail to address the core concerns which our sectors – and the millions of creators and companies active in Europe which we represent – have consistently raised. The result is not a balanced compromise; it is a missed opportunity to provide meaningful protection of intellectual property rights in the context of GenAI and does not deliver on the promise of the EU AI Act itself.

The feedback of the primary beneficiaries these provisions were meant to protect has been largely ignored in contravention of the objectives of the EU AI Act as determined by the co-legislators and to the sole benefit of the GenAI model providers that continuously infringe copyright and related rights to build their models. In 2024, the cultural and creative sectors across Europe welcomed the principles of responsible and trustworthy AI enshrined in the EU AI Act, intended to ensure mutually beneficial growth of innovation and creativity in Europe.

Today, with the EU AI Act implementing package as it stands, thriving cultural and creative sectors and copyright intensive industries in Europe which contribute nearly 7% of EU GDP, provide employment for nearly 17 million professionals and have an economic contribution larger than European pharmaceutical, automobile or high-tech industries, are being sold out in favour of those GenAI model providers. The deployment of GenAI models which also make extensive use of scraping is already underway. The damage to and unfair competition with the cultural and creative sectors can be seen each day. The cultural and creative sectors must be safeguarded, as they are the foundations of our cultures and the Single Market. We wish to make it clear that the outcome of these processes does not provide a meaningful implementation of the GPAI obligations under the AI Act.

We strongly reject any claim that the Code of Practice strikes a fair and workable balance or that the Template will deliver “sufficient” transparency about the majority of copyright works or other subject matter used to train GenAI models. This is simply untrue and is a betrayal of the EU AI Act’s objectives.

• Artificial intelligence is driving the promise of autonomy in everything from self-driving cars, to digital health and smart cities.
• True autonomy emerges from the convergence of sensing, connectivity, computing and control – not isolated intelligence.
• Accordingly, biological intelligence must serve as the foundational design principle for building next-generation autonomous systems.

• Artificial intelligence is driving the promise of autonomy in everything from self-driving cars, to digital health and smart cities.
• True autonomy emerges from the convergence of sensing, connectivity, computing and control – not isolated intelligence.
• Accordingly, biological intelligence must serve as the foundational design principle for building next-generation autonomous systems.

• AI represents a transformative phase akin to the Renaissance or Industrial Revolution, with opportunities and risks across various industries.
• Ultimately, humans must decide how AI unfolds in the best way that benefits humans first.
• A collective effort across society is essential to harness the best use cases of human-first AI, enabling it to reach its full potential.

Uber Canada says it has updated its safety protocols for emergency situations after an incident in March where company representatives refused to contact a driver after he drove off with a child.

Julia Viscomi said Uber customer support refused to help her or Toronto police contact the driver after he left with her 5-year-old daughter asleep in the backseat in North York, CBC Toronto reported in April.

Police ended up finding the child without receiving help from Uber, about an hour and a half after the driver left with her, Viscomi said.