Kathmandu Boudhanath

TikTok has been banned in Nepal’s sacred sites for visitors

Kathmandu’s Boudhanath Stupa is one the sacred sites that have banned visitors from making TIkToks. Source: Wikimedia Commons. TikTok has been banned in Nepal’s sacred sites, with visitors now prohibited from using the app in prominent tourist and religious locations. Security and Buddhist groups from Kathmandu and elsewhere are imposing “no TikTok” zones around sacred…

Smoking

Member of criminal network sentenced to jail over mass importation of illegal cigarettes

“Attempted importations of illicit tobacco are often concealed within cargo consignments amongst other commodities or declared as goods other than tobacco,” said the Australian government. A man has been sentenced to three and a half years in jail after the Australian Border Force (ABF) intercepted almost 500,000 cigarettes coming from China in 2019. The ABF…

Artificial intelligence

Google fires the engineer who claims their AI chatbot has sentience

Last month, Blake Lemoine claimed Google’s advanced chatbot has sentience which was denied by the tech giant. Google has fired the software engineer and artificial intelligence researcher who said their advanced chatbot system, LaMDA, is sentient. Google called The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) “breakthrough conversation technology”, an advanced chatbot that can engage in…