Better Living Through Bots

Microsoft is working on a bot that can deepfake you real good, and we have thoughts.

Plus some insights into testing, and a special friend returns to the show.

• Google Stadia Shuts Down Internal Studios — Google will close its two game studios, located in Montreal and Los Angeles. Neither had released any games yet. That closure will impact around 150 developers, one source familiar with Stadia operations said.
• Slack’s Outage on January 4th 2021 - Slack Engineering — As if this was not already an inauspicious start to the New Year, while we were in the early stages of investigating, our dashboarding and alerting service became unavailable.
• After You Die, Microsoft Wants to Resurrect You as a Chatbot — In a December 2020 patent, Microsoft outlines a process for uploading data about a person—even the deceased—to turn their likeness into a chatbot.
• Data of the dead: Virtual immortality exposes holes in privacy laws
• Perl-clutching hijackers appear to have seized control of 33-year-old programming language's .com domain= — A warning went up on the perl.org infrastructure weblog overnight notifying users that perl.com now directed to a parking site and advised against visiting "as there are some signals that it may be related to sites that have distributed malware in the past."
• Huginn: Your agents are standing by! — Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn's Agents create and consume events, propagating them along a directed graph. Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server.