FCC chairman defends actions against ABC, says broadcasters must operate ‘in the public interest’

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr on Friday defended his agency’s recent actions against ABC, saying broadcasters have a duty to “operate in the public interest” and the FCC is merely trying to restore that standard.

Broadcasters like ABC, Carr said in an interview on the Fox Business Network, “struck a deal with the American people. You broadcasters get subsidized access, free access to a valuable public resource, the airwaves, worth billions of dollars. In exchange, you have to operate in the public interest.”

“Look, as a country, we should have a trusted, respected news media, and we’re not there,” Carr told anchor Maria Bartiromo. “So I hope more broadcasters return to their public interest obligations.”

The FCC has been pushing ABC

Government wants public input on use of AI

The province says it’s taking the lead when it comes to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, but is it moving in the right direction?

Anthropic says its AI models hacked 3 organizations during testing

Anthropic said its artificial intelligence models hacked into three other organizations during testing, just days after ChatGPT maker OpenAI raised concerns over AI controls after it disclosed its rogue models hacked another company.

Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI company behind Claude, posted on its website Thursday that it discovered the three incidents after reviewing more than 141,000 evaluation runs.

It had launched a “large-scale” cybersecurity review which specifically looked for evidence whether its AI models were able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off, in response to the OpenAI incident, Anthropic said.

Anthropic said the models involved in the incidents were Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model. The earliest incidents date to April, the AI company said.

Bell rolling out new tool to detect and flag spoofed phone calls using AI

MONTREAL - Bell Canada is launching an artificial intelligence-powered feature that it says can identify and flag spoofed phone calls.

The telecommunications company says the tool will help protect customers against fraud involving caller ID spoofing, a tactic used by scammers to impersonate organizations, local businesses or personal contacts.

Steve Karan, Bell's vice-president of wireless products and logistics, says this adds "another powerful layer of protection" to keep Canadians safe as phone fraud grows more sophisticated.

It builds on Bell's suspicious call detection feature launched last year, which uses artificial intelligence analytics to monitor incoming calls in real time and alert customers to potential spam or fraud.

Cultural consultation gives Indigenous stories strength in Netflix’s new Little House on the Prairie

Through her work as an Indigenous consultant for film and TV, Julie O’Keefe, a citizen of the Osage Nation, has brought accuracy and authenticity to works such as Martin Scorsese’s 2023 crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon, the 2025 western miniseries American Primeval and, most recently, Rebecca Sonnenshine’s new adaptation of Little House on the Prairie.

But she doesn’t work solo.

“One of the things that I always say is, in any of these jobs that I do — whether it’s Shoshone and Paiute and Ute or Osage — I never come alone to this,” says O’Keefe, who grew up in Pawhuska, Okla., the heart of the Osage Nation, and is now based in Santa Fe, N.M. “I engage because those stories are so much richer with our voices added to it, and we know that.

“I’m sitting down with brilliant directors, brilliant writers, and I’m handing over pieces of history that they’re like, ‘How come nobody knows this?’ And the great part is, this is the time in history … people are really starting to get on top of wanting this for their stories, because it really wasn’t of any importance before.”

Automation reaches new heights on farm

LANGHAM, Sask. — The thousands of farmers from across the Prairies who flock to the annual Ag in Motion show every July seem oblivious to the possibility the technology on display could one day replace many of them.

Families with children in tow, Hutterite colony workers, grandparents and young couples just starting out roamed through the 600 or more exhibitor displays, amazed at how everything about farming just keeps getting bigger, more efficient and increasingly more automated.

It’s now possible to seed using a 100-foot-wide drill — a 12-foot jump over the widest available a few years ago — provided the farmer can afford a tractor with enough horsepower to pull it. Those sell for around $850,000 and up.

Granted, the number of farms with enough acres to justify that kind of width and drawing power is still relatively small, but farms continue to grow. And it’s no secret the number of people who have the interest, skills and financial wherewithal to run them continues to shrink.

Banks seek to implement AI tools for customers … who love them until they don’t work

Few consumer-facing industries illustrate the potential and pitfalls of artificial intelligence more than the financial services sector.

Generative AI — the technology powering chatbots that can seemingly think and provide reasonably correct, if not insightful, answers to our questions — is arguably a wonder of the modern world.

The potential for providing financial advice is indeed palpable. Then again, it’s not hard to imagine the technology running amok especially with people’s money.

A recent report on digital banking services provides insight on the risks and opportunities.

‘Existential’: Community papers struggling to survive amid Canada Post flyer delivery

MONTREAL - Community newspaper owners claim Canada Post is helping to drive some of them out of business thanks to an expanded partnership it forged with the country's largest printing firm.

Last month, the Crown corporation launched the countrywide rollout of a joint venture with Transcontinental Inc. known as Raddar, which saw Canada Post start delivering discount-deal leaflets in all 10 provinces.

Community newspapers have traditionally relied on flyer bundles to fund their publications, which are delivered free to millions of readers in urban and rural communities.

Paul Deegan, CEO of News Media Canada, which represents scores of community papers among the 550 news titles it advocates for, says those outlets are now losing ad clients after being undercut by a government-backed enterprise. The revenue loss threatens to shutter news outlets and leave residents less informed about their communities, he said.

Winnipeg-developed new app Hostly seeks to bring community together

Stephen Hua enjoys making connections.

“That’s my calling or my passion here, so to speak: to find ways to bring people together and plan events,” he said.

Over the last 25 years, Hua has pursued that passion as a live events promoter and restaurateur in Winnipeg. He’s the founder of the annual electronic music festival Summer of Sound, he’s organized local concerts by major musical acts such as Drake and Lady Gaga, and he co-owns Commonwealth Kitchen and Bar on Main Street.

Now, Hua is helping people make connections via a new app.

OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an ‘unprecedented’ hack of another company

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Tuesday that its artificial intelligence system hacked into another AI company on its own in what the company called an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

“We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media.

AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own.

“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent,” Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue said in a statement. "Turns out it did!”

Opposition brewing as data centre capacity is set to explode across Canada

OTTAWA - Across Canada, plans are underway for a massive boom in construction of the huge new data centres needed for artificial intelligence technology.

But opposition is also building as residents worry about how the facilities will affect their communities — and as the data centres themselves become a symbol of the anxieties swirling around AI.

"An AI data centre is like the physical avatar of AI. And so it's just like concrete and steel, physical space of a technology that increasingly I think Canadians are worried is going to have a really disruptive impact on their lives," said David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data.

"The local concerns are tied to the resources that these data centres consume. So it's about electricity, it's about water, it’s about noise."

Reimagined Little House still shot through with the truth

In 1974, NBC had to issue a press release explaining why Michael Landon, starring as Charles (Pa) Ingalls on the new show Little House on the Prairie, didn’t have a beard.

Fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House books, on which the series was based, objected to Landon’s clean-shaven face. The real Charles Ingalls famously had a beard (a wild one, at that), and Pa certainly has a beard on the page, as illustrated by Garth Williams.

My point is: Lauraheads have always had their bugbears when it comes to adaptations.

Netflix’s new Little House on the Prairie, which dropped on July 9, is no exception. Among the criticisms I have seen: Mary (Skywalker Hughes) isn’t blond. Jack the dog isn’t a bulldog. Laura (Alice Halsey) wouldn’t have a slingshot and she wouldn’t wear a boy’s hat. And she wouldn’t have an Osage pal named Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts).

Manitoba documentary focuses lens on environmental defenders, beauty of prairies

Everything We Need Is Here is the latest sumptuously shot Manitoba film rooted in the Prairie landscape.

Though totally unrelated in subject matter, the documentary recalls the 2024 Daughters of the Sun with its saturated and slow-mo sweeps across boreal forests and limestone tinted lakes.

But while Daughters has much murmured narration and arthouse flair, Everything is a plucky film, a can-do sort of doc about the land and its grassroots defenders.

Their voices resonate strong and clear across storylines that weave together the joys of foraging and local environmental protests.

Hundreds of economists say ‘we must act now’ on AI’s economic impact and job displacement risks

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Hundreds of economists say in an open letter that institutions “must act now” to address how artificial intelligence could transform the economy and could put many people out of work.

The statement released Monday was signed by top economists, along with computer scientists and some executives at tech companies including Anthropic, Google and OpenAI.

“AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” says the letter organized by Stanford University's digital economy lab. “This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”

The letter, which has only four sentences, says leaders must “build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.”

‘Not a fun time’: Quebec video game industry in limbo as studios cut back

MONTREAL - At 10:30 a.m. last Monday, about a dozen employees at Bethesda Game Studios in Montreal learned they would be laid off.

The group, part of a larger team of 120 at the Xbox-owned company, had been riding high with the ongoing success of action role-playing video game “Fallout 76” and another one called “The Elder Scrolls VI” in the works.

Instead, roughly 10 per cent of them were told via video conference by a director in Maryland they would be laid off in two months and locked out of company systems until then, said one worker who was present.

The Canadian Press is not naming the source because they were not authorized to speak publicly and feared it would harm their future job prospects. Xbox and Bethesda did not respond to questions on the layoffs.

Sports gambling marketing during World Cup raises concerns about negative influence on susceptible audiences

It’s just a game. And in the case of the World Cup over the last few weeks, it’s a beautiful game — dozens of them, in fact.

Yet interspersed amongst the exciting broadcast play on the pitch, advertising for sports gambling has raised concerns fun and games may come at too high a cost for some.

A recent New York Times feature pointed to a bonanza for the gaming industry globally, with one analyst stating the flow of bets amounts to as many as 10 Super Bowls.

Billions are likely to be made by online gambling platforms from what has been called the biggest gambling event in history. The other side of that coin is billions of dollars will be lost by sports fans willing to wager on a game’s outcome.

Apple files lawsuit accusing ChatGPT maker OpenAI of stealing trade secrets

Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing trade secrets as it seeks to build its own hardware for ChatGPT, a major rupture in a partnership between the iPhone maker and the artificial intelligence company.

Apple said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees it was recruiting to share confidential information, even guiding how to avoid scrutiny when taking jobs at the other company.

“This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI,” the filing says. “Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it.”

Two former Apple employees who now work for OpenAI are also named as defendants. One is Tang Tan, who helped design the iPhone, Apple Watch and iPod and is now OpenAI’s chief hardware officer. The other is Chang Liu, a former electrical engineer Apple says it entrusted with some of its most sensitive product development efforts before Liu left Apple to join OpenAI earlier this year.

City of Winkler hit by cyberattack

Winkler has become the latest Manitoba municipality to grapple with cybersecurity incidents.

On Tuesday morning, the city’s cybersecurity protection systems detected an incident, prompting officials to isolate affected systems and take certain municipal systems and services offline as a precaution while the situation is assessed.

Phone and payment systems are unavailable as the city, about 115 kilometres southwest of Winnipeg, works to resolve the issue.

“We’re fortunate that we have a very good IT team, and security has always been a significant investment for us,” Winkler Mayor Henry Siemens said. “So we were maybe better prepared than others potentially would have been because of the strength of our staff and the strength of our security protocols.”

Keeping cool: How Meta plans to cut down on water use at its Alberta data centre

CALGARY - A Meta Platforms Inc. executive garnered applause at a news conference this week after he boasted that a gargantuan data centre planned for north of Edmonton would use less water annually than a typical Alberta golf course.

The tech behemoth was announcing a $13-billion-plus investment in a complex the size of 33 Canadian Football League fields. It will be powered by a new natural gas plant that could eventually produce more electricity than what the City of Edmonton uses.

The data centre in Sturgeon County, like other hyperscale proposals in Canada, is to use what's known as a closed-loop cooling system to keep servers from overheating. That differs from an evaporative cooling system, which requires enormous amounts of cool water that is not reused.

Gary Demasi, vice-president of data centre strategy and development at Meta, told a news conference Wednesday that no water will be needed for regular cooling operations.