The great Cloudflare outage, Russian robots, and the rebirth of Zork

Much of Cloudflare’s services went down due to a change to one of its database systems’ permissions, which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by its Bot Management system, according to a company blog post. 

The feature file became larger than expected, and when it was sent to all the machines on its network, it caused the software to fail.

Property Brother Drew Scott is an investor in California-based, Canadian-led smart heat pump company Quilt. The company launched its product in Canada this week. 

“Anything I can bring back to Canada is fun for me, and I think you’re going to keep hearing the name Quilt come up in the coming years,” Scott told BetaKit in an interview. 

The Canadian government warns of “security, liability, and privacy risks” when using FinTech apps that access data through screen-scraping.

This week, the government opened the door to a ban on screen-scraping as part of legislation to move forward on the long-awaited open banking system. However, a spokesperson for the finance minister told BetaKit that the government might not totally do away with the practice. 

An AI-powered robot danced for Russian President Vladimir Putin on state television on Wednesday as part of an exhibition put on by Russia’s largest bank.

The humanoid robot explained what it was to Putin before dancing to what it said was its favourite track, the folk-pop song “The Sun Rose High.”

BMO has dropped the word diversity from its core values amid broader backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. CEO Darryl White made the announcement during an internal presentation, where he replaced the word with inclusion.

“Inclusion is more holistic, more outcome focused,” he said.

Karlin said that “The dataset you collect now may become a weapon in the not-too-distant future.”

Karlin and his team are prototyping an AI chatbot to navigate the Government of Canada’s website, and balancing a number of security and equity considerations in the process.

David Baszucki, CEO of popular online gaming platform Roblox, announced his company will require users to undergo an AI-powered age estimation process in order to chat with others on the platform.

Baszucki explained on the Hard Fork podcast that AI will estimate age based on an image of the user’s face, complemented by other “signals” like behaviour, photo ID, and user suggested age. 

Toronto-based Questrade revealed a suite of new investment offerings at its inaugural product showcase, dubbed “The Dawn of Investing.” 

The FinTech firm is looking to pick up the pace on product development and double down on advanced retail traders, the most engaged segment of its customer base.

“You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here.”

The iconic opening lines and the game’s novel Z-Machine engine have been made open source through a collaboration between Microsoft, Xbox, and Activision. The initiative aims to allow students, teachers, and developers to study the code and learn from it.