Tag Archives: bots

They’re on everyone’s holiday shopping list: gift cards. Swankier than straight cash, gift cards are all about convenience. They’re available for a zillion different stores, they’re lined up waiting for you right by the checkout and you don’t have to worry about fit or fashion or maybe even that hard-to-please relative. They’re great for kids, …

Given the limited supply of the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S video game consoles, they’ve been selling out quickly whenever a retailer gets new stock. Walmart announced plans Tuesday to make sure its stock gets in the hands of actual customers instead of bots.  Walmart says it has built and optimized its bot detection tools to …

Bouquets of brightly colored flowers and prayer candles rest at the door of a small windowed guard booth in downtown Oakland, California. A ribbon with an American flag motif waves from the door handle. Two bullet holes pockmark the booth’s windows. This is where Dave Patrick Underwood, 53, was fatally shot around 9:45 p.m. on May 29 while working as …

Twitter isn’t adding an edit button anytime soon, but Jack Dorsey is open to change. The microblogging site’s CEO asked Tesla and SpaceX boss Elon Musk — a constant tweeter and one of its most popular users, with more than 30 million followers — to suggest some improvements. Thousands of Twitter employees watched as Dorsey video-called Musk from a company …

Starship Technologies launched a new service earlier this year to deliver food and groceries at two US universities using self-driving robots. It’s now planning on doing a whole lot more. The San Francisco-based startup announced Tuesday it will expand this service to 100 universities over the next two years, thanks to an infusion of $40 million in new funding. The …

Next time you hear “Cleanup on aisle 5,” it could be a robot making that observation. AT&T is working on 5G autonomous robots for retail stores that would identify any out-of-stock, mispriced or misplaced products in a store, as well as finding store hazards. AT&T has partnered with Badger Technologies for the project, which was announced Tuesday.  5G, the next-generation mobile technology, …

Sean Scott is almost poetic when describing his intense interest in sidewalks. “Each sidewalk is like a snowflake,” Scott, who’s soft-spoken with a friendly smile, told me with a bit of excitement in his eyes. “Because the textures are different, the way they’re laid out is different, what we see on the sidewalk is different.” Scott, vice president of the …

Twitter reportedly suspended a bot network pushing a pro-Saudi Arabia message regarding vanished journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The social network was reportedly alerted to the bots by NBC News, which on Thursday gave them a list of hundreds of accounts that “tweeted and retweeted the same pro-Saudi government tweets” simultaneously. An unidentified Twitter spokesperson told the outlet that the accounts were …

You already know bots are capable of shaping our political views. Now new research shows they were more powerful than we thought. Fake accounts were around 2.5 times more influential than humans during the 2016 US presidential debate, according to researchers from the Australian National University Wednesday. The study was based on an analysis of 6.4 million tweets posted over a 90-minute …

Thunderous applause erupts as I enter the building. I look around and blanketing my field of vision is a small army of black-and-magenta-garbed T-Mobile employees shouting, screaming and waving thunder sticks at me. They form a path deeper in, yet I’m already dizzy and overwhelmed from the sensory overload. As far as greetings go, this is insane. I walk through …