Tech giants are battling to position their smart speakers as the center of the digital home. But Microsoft, which lost the mobile wars to Apple and Google, is trying to ensure that it will have a place, no matter who wins. Microsoft has its own voice-based digital assistant, Cortana, that could theoretically power a challenger to the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod for countertop space. Indeed, Cortana is already core to a smart speaker from Harman Kardon.

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In high school, Mackenzie Leake shot a movie about being afraid to get her driver’s license. “A very millennial subject,” she jokes. It gave her a punishing lesson in editing video: Leake spent countless hours, over the course of weeks, “scrubbing” through her footage to find the best shots, then painstakingly assembling them. “It’s a ton of grunt work,” she notes. Now, seven years later, she’s trying to accelerate the process.

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New rules proposed by the Indian government to rein in tech giants and combat fake news could have a profoundly chilling effect on free speech and privacy online. The proposed changes involve Section 79 of the IT Act, a safe harbor protection for internet “intermediaries” that’s akin to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the US.

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Prominent Silicon Valley companies spend liberally to protect their intellectual property. Some also shell out considerable amounts to protect their executives. Apple’s most recent proxy statement, filed earlier this month, shows the company spent $310,000 on personal security for CEO Tim Cook. But that’s a fraction of other tech giants’ expenditures. Amazon and Oracle spent about $1.

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Bad news keeps piling up for Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Last week an employee was arrested in Poland on espionage charges. This week, the company's products, which include both phones and network gear, were banned from Taiwanese government systems, the South China Morning Post reported, over concerns that Huawei could build backdoors into its products on behalf of the Chinese government.

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Earlier this month, I spent my last days of notification-free vacation by KonMari-ing my closets. The sun was hiding, burnout was in the air, and the winds of change shoved me toward self-optimization---pack light for the apocalypse, purge my way to an uncluttered mind. Marie Kondo’s maxim---keep only items that spark joy–promised a sense of agency. Unlike anxiety baking, bath bombs, sheet masks, it was a not retreat from the world, but a chance to prep for some inevitable fight.

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On Wednesday, a group of hoaxsters affiliated with the progressive non-profit group The Yes Men circulated fake versions of The Washington Post, dated May 1, 2019, imagining a world in which President Trump has suddenly left office. Throughout the morning, the activists distributed print copies of the edition in front of the White House and debuted a website called My-WashingtonPost.

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In 2017, a poker bot called Libratus made headlines when it roundly defeated four top human players at no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. Now, Libratus’s technology is being adapted to take on opponents of a different kind—in service of the US military. Libratus—Latin for balanced—was created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to test ideas for automated decision-making based on game theory.

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Diagnosing psychiatric and neurological conditions is tricky. Physicians have long reported that diagnoses are fraught with complications and subtleties. Anywhere from 35 percent to 85 percent of mental health conditions go undetected and undiagnosed, according to the World Health Organization, depending on where you live in the world. Needless to say, in order to treat depression, Alzheimer's, or autism, it must first be detected.

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Tech workers may be new to labor organizing, but they’re learning quickly. When a November walkout by 20,000 Google employees protesting the company’s mishandling of sexual harassment claims led to small changes that fell short of the organizers’ demands, some activists inside Google decided to broaden the fight.

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