Tea

For people who pirate HBO service products, no changes, your lifetime subscription to piracy is still valid.

Our artificially intelligent future, which is rapidly arriving, is none of these conscious robots with lethal ambition. Our AI future is much more mundane and much more insidious.

This should not be a surprise. Hints of this future were predicted very early in the day. In 1909, for example, in a short story titled The Machine Stops, the great EM Forster painted a prophetic picture of our digital future. The story gets a lot right. It predicts globalisation, the internet, videoconferencing and many other aspects of our current digital reality, from more than a century ago. It is a haunting tale of a high-tech haven that hurtles towards a horrifying bloody halt. Without noticing, humans in the story become so dependent on the technology mediating their society that society itself breaks when the machines do.

Before the Oscars are handed out early March, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) has announced its own annual awards. Wicked director Jon Chu is a proud recipient, but the bulk of the accolades go to lawmakers and the U.S. Government's IPR Center, who helped to combat online piracy. Perhaps not coincidentally, those lawmakers could help to push a pirate site blocking bill over the line.

WTF!

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Google says it is in the process of removing the "state" designation from Canadian government buildings, as well as provincial parks, following widespread backlash.

On Monday, the company said it would be updating its categorization of provincial parks after receiving hundreds of complaints over the weekend from Canadians upset about the designation.

Although the locations were titled "provincial park" in large text, in small print, many across the country were labelled as "state parks" — a longstanding practice, according to the company.

However, that language came under increased scrutiny in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's repeated threat that he wants to annex Canada against the wishes of Canada's political leaders and widespread public opinion.

In 2025, we find that the student use of AI has surged in the last year, with almost all students (92%) now using AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024, and some 88% having used GenAI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024. The main uses of GenAI are explaining concepts, summarising articles and suggesting research ideas, but a significant number of students – 18% – have included AI-generated text directly in their work.