Terms

December 14, 20234min readRetrieving isn’t just for dogs, but the emerging science of cat play can’t fully explain the feline phenomenonBy Lauren Leffer Growing up, James Serpell had a cat named Mungo with a penchant for pencils. “If a pencil or pen was on the floor, the cat would bring them to us,” he says. Then Mungo would sit and wait, hoping for a toss. “If you picked up the pencil and threw it across the room, he would run and bring it back. He would go on like that for quite a long time,” says Serpell, a professor…

Microsoft has agreed to union contract language regarding its use of artificial intelligence, which should give workers a voice when challenging how the technology’s deployed, This is the first US instance of collective bargaining in Microsoft’s history and could be a huge step for those employed with the tech giant.This came to pass as part of negotiations with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union and involves contract language that covers a few hundred staffers at which includes well-known subsidiaries…

Genetic testing company 23andMe changed its terms of service to prevent customers from filing class action lawsuits or participating in a jury trial days after reports revealing that attackers accessed personal information of nearly 7 million people — half of the company’s user base — in an October hack.In an email sent to customers earlier this week viewed by Engadget, the company announced that it had made updates to the “Dispute Resolution and Arbitration section” of its terms “to include procedures that will encourage…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain In 2019, a travel insurance company held a secret contest in which they included a line in the fine print of their policy promising $10,000 to the first person who spotted it. Seventy-three policies were bought before the award was finally claimed. But those 73 who had obviously not read the…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the buzzword of the year with rapid developments taking place. The world's biggest companies are making efforts to incorporate this technology into their suite of products. Even smartphone makers have benefited from this AI boom, as evidenced by the latest Google Pixel devices which carry a plethora of AI features courtesy of the new Tensor G3 SoC. Aiming to bring generative AI to its own suite of products, MediaTek, at its annual Executive Summit 2023, announced that the chipmaker…

PC gaming is filled with jargon that mixes together marketable names with scientific descriptions to create a pile of terms that are next to impossible to decipher. Knowing the vocabulary of graphics terms is important for optimizing your performance, understanding your games, and tweaking your graphics menus, and we’re here to define all of the labels flying around. We’re focusing on terms that you’ll find commonly in games that don’t have an obvious definition — we trust you can figure out what “reflection quality”…

In a move to combat the rising threat of deepfake technology, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, addressed the media on Friday, and announced that the government has urged social media platforms to align their terms of use with the 12 areas prohibited on the Indian internet.Emphasizing the dangers of deepfakes, Chandrasekhar stated that these manipulated videos pose a clear and present danger to a safe and trusted internet.India to establish government watchdog to combat deepfakes…

The government has advised social media and internet intermediaries to “align” the terms of service on their platforms within the next seven days to alert users about the consequences of creating, uploading and sharing prohibited information including deep fake content or child sexual abuse material (CSAM), a senior government official said on Friday. Intermediaries have to “explicitly” warn users that they cannot “host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share” any content that belongs to…

SAG-AFTRA has released more detailed contract terms than the previous summary of the agreement that was released following the end of the 118-day actors strike. The performers union released a 128-page document featuring a memorandum of agreements after it received some pressure from members to release the terms of the contract between SAG and the AMPTP ahead of the ratification vote. “These contracts achieve more than $1 billion in NEW compensation and benefit plan funding (including an…

Given the hype surrounding it prior to release, pretty much everyone expected Starfield to be a rousing success. However, most probably expected (hoped, even) it would have a healthy amount of staying power. But as recent stats show, Bethesda’s newest IP is experiencing a drop in popularity. According to the data on SteamDB (as spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun), Starfield has fewer people playing the game right now than Skyrim. At the time of writing, the former is just shy of 14,000 concurrent players, while the latter has…