Lately: AI election interference, Skype’s retirement and Alberta prof wins Turing award

Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.

In this week’s issue:

🥸 Experts worry foreign governments could use AI to interfere in federal election

🌐 An inside look at the data centres that keep the internet running.

👋 Goodbye, Skype

🏆 Alberta AI pioneer Richard Sutton wins coveted Turing award

CYBERSECURITY

Cybersecurity agency warns AI could be used to interfere with federal election

Canada’s cybersecurity agency warned this week that China, Russia and Iran will “very likely” use AI in an attempt to interfere with the 2025 federal election. The report by Communications Security Establishment said that foreign actors could use AI tools to spread disinformation, conduct espionage and target politicians in phishing attacks to access private e-mails and text messages. Canadians in the public eye, especially women and members of the 2SLGBTQI+ community, are at heightened risk of being targeted by deepfake pornography, the report found. But despite these threats, the CSE said it’s still very unlikely that AI-enabled activities will “fundamentally undermine the integrity of Canada’s next general election.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Canadian AI pioneer Richard Sutton wins Turing award

Richard Sutton, a University of Alberta professor and research scientist at Edmonton-based Keen Technologies, has won the world’s top prize in computer science. The Turing Award honours scientists and engineers who have made exceptional contributions to the development of information technology. The US$1-million award is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computer science. “It’s gratifying,” Sutton told The Globe’s science reporter Ivan Semeniuk in an interview. “I think it’s sort of a validation of what we’ve been trying to do in Edmonton.”

Together with his co-winner, Andrew Barto, Sutton is best known for helping to lay the foundations for reinforcement learning, a branch of AI that’s led to the breakthrough technologies like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

INFRASTRUCTURE

An inside look at a data centre that helps keep the internet running

In downtown Toronto, an unassuming brown building conceals a fortress-like web of critical technology humming inside. It’s the TR2 data centre, which at any given time, consumes roughly 0.5 per cent of all the power being used by the City of Toronto. Data centres are the beating heart of the digital services that permeate our lives: web traffic, cloud computing, data storage and financial markets transactions. They’re considered critical infrastructure, similar to hospitals, given just how many core services they connect.

The TR2 data centre is a high-security operation, with bulletproof doors and some 800 cameras, backup power stations, elaborate cooling systems and mazes of evaporators that pump the massive amounts of heat generated by the equipment – mostly racks of computer servers – outside. Reporter James Bradshaw and photographer Fred Lum recently visited TR2 to get an inside look on how it works. See the full photo essay here.

SOFTWARE

Goodbye, Skype

Skype will ring for the last time on May 5. Microsoft said it’s retiring the two-decade old internet calling service to focus on Teams, the software giant’s meeting app. When Skype first launched in 2003, it disrupted the landline industry and had hundreds of millions of users at its peak. But as Zoom and other calling software emerged, Skype’s technology failed to keep up. Now Skype is going to that big floppy disk in the sky, alongside Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger.

What else we’re reading this week:

Chatbots, like the rest of us, just want to be loved (Wired)

The chatroom behind the Pelicot rape trial (The New Yorker)

Will the future of software development run on vibes? (Ars Technica)

Adult Money

ONLINE SHOPPING

For this week’s Adult Money column, instead of pontificating about a tech gadget or overpriced wellness contraptions I’m coveting, I’d like to highlight an essay written by my colleague Kasia Mychajlowycz about her resolution to give up online shopping to become a more mindful consumer.

“I’m old enough to remember a world before rental vans parked askew all over the city, delivering packages from Amazon, Temu and everywhere else. I liked that world just fine,” she writes. “Sometimes a little friction – like the task of leaving your house and going to a store – gives you time to rethink your purchases. That’s a good trade.” Although, spoiler alert, she has bought one thing online already this year: a $119 acupressure mat “that feels like a bed of nails” to cure her sleep problems and headaches.

Culture radar

ANIMATION

Oscar-winning film Flow made using free, open-source software

Last weekend, the wordless, cat parable Flow won the Oscar for best animated feature. The movie follows a black cat trying to survive a flooded post-apocalyptic world, alongside a capybara, ring-tailed lemur and a labrador retriever. It sounds bleak, but I promise it’s beautiful and isn’t a total downer.

What makes Flow’s win especially impressive is that it was made with Blender, a free open-source graphics software tool that can be used for animation, visual effects and 3D models. It cost a reported US$3.7-million to make. In comparison, Disney’s Inside Out 2, also nominated in the category, cost US$200-million. Because Blender is free to use, it’s popular with indie filmmakers who can make advanced animations on a budget. Another case in point: After 14-year-old Canadian animator Preston Mutanga made a Lego-style recreation of the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse trailer using Blender that went viral online, Sony hired the teen to create a scene for the final movie.