Munky101 tipped us off to some interesting comments from New York's activist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. TechCrunch reports: It's impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation without a conversation about job loss. Opponents of these technologies criticize a displacement that could someday result in wide-scale unemployment among what is often considered "unskilled" roles. Advocates, meanwhile, tend to suggest that reports of that nature tend to be overstated. Workforces shift, as they have done for time immemorial. During a conversation at SXSW this week, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered another take entirely.

"We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work," she said in an answer reported by The Verge. "We should be excited by that. But the reason we're not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don't have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem... We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in," The Verge quoted Ocasio-Cortez as saying. "Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage."

And Ocasio-Cortez cited Bill Gates' suggestion (first floated in a presentation on Quartz) that a robot tax might be a way to make that vision real. "What [Gates is] really talking about is taxing corporations," she reportedly said. "But it's easier to say: 'tax a robot.' "
Science fiction writer William Gibson called her comments "shockingly intelligent" for a politician. Fast Company adds that robots "have put half a million people out of work in the United States, and researchers estimate that bots could take 800 million jobs by 2030" -- then quotes Ocasio-Cortez's assessment of the unfair state of labor today.

"We should be working the least amount we've ever worked, if we were actually paid based on how much wealth we were producing, but we're not," she said. "We're paid by how little we're desperate enough to accept. And then the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire."

President Trump announced an emergency order from the Federal Aviation Administration on Wednesday grounding Boeing 737 Max jets in the wake of an Ethiopian Airlines crash Sunday and a Lion Air accident in October that together killed 346 people. The emergency order comes two days after the FAA said the Boeing 737 Max planes are still airworthy. NBC News reports: Trump's announcement came as the FAA faced mounting pressure from aviation advocates and others to ban flights of the planes pending the completion of investigations into the deadly accidents. Sunday's crash killed 157 people and the one in Indonesia in October left 189 dead. "We're going to be issuing an emergency order of prohibition to ground all flights of the 737 Max 8 and the 737 Max 9 and planes associated with that line," Trump announced, referring to "new information and physical evidence that we've received" in addition to some complaints.

The FAA said it decided to ground the jets after it found that the Ethiopian Airlines aircraft that crashed had a flight pattern very similar to the Lion Air flight. "It became clear that the track of the Ethiopian flight behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight," said Steven Gottlieb, deputy director of accident investigations for the FAA. United States airports and airlines reacted to the order Wednesday, acknowledging that it will lead to canceled flights. American has roughly 85 flights a day on the Boeing Max 8 and Max 9 jets. United Airlines has about 40 such flights. Southwest Airlines has the most, about 150 flights per day on these types of jets out of the airline's total of about 4,100 flights daily.

"In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind transaction, two developers working in separate countries have successfully sent a bitcoin lightning payment over radio waves," writes CoinBase.

An anonymous reader quotes their report: The completed payment effectively moved real bitcoin from Toronto, Canada, to San Francisco, California... But sending bitcoin over radio isn't just fun. Some researchers argue it actually has a necessary use case... The idea is that, while the internet can potentially be censored, it's not the only form of technology that can be used to send data from one part of the world to another, "in case China decides to censor bitcoin via the Great Firewall, or places like North Korea where there is no internet at all," as Bloomberg columnist Elaine Ou put it in an email to CoinDesk.

Technology infrastructure startup Blockstream licensed satellites that beam bitcoin to users around the world for similar reasons.

dryriver quotes the BBC: A doctor in California told a patient he was going to die using a robot with a video-link screen. Ernest Quintana, 78, was at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont when a doctor — appearing on the robot's screen — informed him that he would die within a few days. A family friend wrote on social media that it was "not the way to show value and compassion to a patient". The hospital says it "regrets falling short" of the family's expectations.

Mr Quintana died the next day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Millions of dollars were missing when the CEO of a crypto exchange died without sharing the passwords to his accounts. Investigators recently cracked his laptop -- only to find the money was gone. Gerald Cotten, the founder of QuadrigaCX, was thought to have had sole access to the funds and coins exchanged on it. After his death in December, his colleagues said that about $137 million in cryptocurrency belonging to about 115,000 customers was held offline in "cold storage" and inaccessible. The case has sparked numerous theories, including that Cotten faked his own death and ran off with the cash. A court-appointed auditor, Ernst & Young, was able to crack Cotten's laptop and found that the accounts were emptied in April, eight months before his death, it said in a report last week.

The investigators said they found other issues too, such as that Quadriga kept "limited books and records" and never reported its financials. Ernst & Young also said it found 14 user accounts linked to Cotten that traded on Quadriga's exchange and withdrew cryptocurrency to addresses not tied to Quadriga. Burdened with $190 million in debt and unable to find or access the money, Quadriga filed for creditor protection in late January. A Nova Scotia court threw the company a lifeline this week, granting it a 45-day extension that prevents creditors from filing lawsuits against it until mid-April.

Google Maps is warning drivers in Canada as they approach some photo radar camera locations. "The feature, which is currently being rolled out by Google, allows users to see speed limits, speed cameras and mobile speed cameras on the map before they leave," reports HuffPost Canada. "It also gives a verbal warning -- an automated voice saying 'speed camera ahead' -- when drivers are near a fixed speed camera." From the report: Police in Calgary say the feature is useful to them. "The biggest thing we love ... is we place those (cameras) by collision statistics," said Sgt. Joerg Gottschling of the Calgary Police Service traffic section. "If we do a new site, if we are going to install a new camera, the next site is always selected by the next highest crash site. "Our intersection locations are all determined where we are trying to eliminate collisions."

Gottschling said they've had up to a 50 per cent reduction in collisions in some areas where those cameras are stationed. With Google Maps, he noted, all drivers approaching the fixed camera intersection get the warning. "That camera is only facing one way," said Gottschling. "Let's say it's only facing northbound, but you can approach southbound or eastbound ... you are still going to get Google telling you caution. "So you're going to go slowly and cautiously through there which, lo and behold, is actually what we want." Google said in an email that there will also be an ability for android users to report mobile speed cameras and stationary cameras.

MIT Technology reports of how Huawei's technology road map, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, is progressing more rapidly than any other business in the world. "The [Chinese] government and private sector approach is to build companies that compete across the full tech stack," says Samm Sacks, who specializes in cybersecurity and China at New America, a Washington think tank. "That's what Huawei is doing." Huawei's AI strategy "will also raise a host of new security issues," the report notes. "The company's technological ubiquity, and the fact that Chinese companies are ultimately answerable to their government, are big reasons why the U.S. views Huawei as an unprecedented national security threat." From the report: In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review, Xu Wenwei, director of the Huawei board and the company's chief strategy and marketing officer, touted the scope of its AI plans. He also defended the company's record on security. And he promised that Huawei would seek to engage with the rest of the world to address emerging risks and threats posed by AI. Xu (who uses the Western name William Xu) said that Huawei plans to increase its investments in AI and integrate it throughout the company to "build a full-stack AI portfolio." Since Huawei is a private firm, it's tricky to quantify its technology investments. But officials from the company said last year that it planned to more than double annual R&D spending to between $15 billion and $20 billion. This could catapult the company to between fifth and second place in worldwide spending on R&D. According to its website, some 80,000 employees, or 45% of Huawei's workforce, are involved in R&D.

Machine-learning services are a new source of risk, since they can be exploited by hackers, and the data used to train such services may contain private information. The use of AI algorithms also makes systems more complex and opaque, which means security auditing is more challenging. As part of an effort to reassure doubters, Xu promised that Huawei would release a code of AI principles in April. This will amount to a promise that the company will seek to protect user data and ensure security. Xu also said Huawei wants to collaborate with its international competitors, which would include the likes of Google and Amazon, to ensure that the technology is developed responsibly. It is, however, unclear whether Huawei might allow its AI services to be audited by a third party, as it has done with its hardware. In other Huawei-related news, Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is suing Canada for violating her constitutional rights when border officials detained and interrogated her for hours. "Meng, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom firm Huawei, was arrested by Canadian officials in December at the request of the United States," reports NPR. "The U.S. had sought Meng's arrest on charges of fraud, arguing Huawei had violated U.S. sanctions on Iran."

"Facebook threatened to pull investment projects from Europe and Canada if lobbying demands from COO Sheryl Sandberg were not met," reports Business Insider, adding "Canada buckled immediately."

And that's just the beginning. The Observer reports: Facebook has targeted politicians around the world -- including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne -- promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook's behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed. The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU...

The documents appear to emanate from a court case against Facebook by the app developer Six4Three in California, and reveal that Sandberg considered European data protection legislation a "critical" threat to the company. A memo written after the Davos economic summit in 2013 quotes Sandberg describing the "uphill battle" the company faced in Europe on the "data and privacy front" and its "critical" efforts to head off "overly prescriptive new laws...." John Naughton, a Cambridge academic and Observer writer who studies the democratic implications of digital technology, said the leak was "explosive" in the way it revealed the "vassalage" of the Irish state to the big tech companies. Ireland had welcomed the companies, he noted, but became "caught between a rock and a hard place... Its leading politicians apparently saw themselves as covert lobbyists for a data monster."

A spokesperson for Facebook said the documents were still under seal in a Californian court and it could not respond to them in any detail: "Like the other documents that were cherrypicked and released in violation of a court order last year, these by design tell one side of a story and omit important context."

Winnipeg's police department used encrypted radios to stop the public from listening in to their conversations with police scanners. But did they pirate their software keys?

Long-time Slashdot reader Curtman shares this report from CBC News: Winnipeg police have arrested a manager with the city for allegedly updating police radios with fraudulent software he got from a person considered to be a security threat by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CBC News has learned. Back in 2011, Ed Richardson allegedly obtained millions of dollars worth of illegal software and instructed city employees to use it, police said in a January 2018 sworn affidavit, submitted to the Provincial Court of Manitoba when officers were seeking permission to search the man's emails...

In the affidavit, police said the Motorola radios needed frequent updating, which could only be done if the city purchased a "refresh key" or licence from the company to unlock the proprietary software. Motorola charged about $94 per update per radio, the document said, and a radio shop employee told police Richardson didn't like that. "[The employee] does not believe his actions were for personal gain; he believes that Richardson likes the idea of not giving more money to Motorola," the affidavit said.
The affidavit alleges that Richardson gave one employee 65,000 refresh keys, and told him that "you don't want to know where these came from."

In the affidavit, the employee adds that they "clearly" didn't come from Motorola.

The Canadian government has allowed for the extradition proceedings against the CFO of Huawei to proceed. "Today, department of Justice Canada officials issued an authority to proceed, formally commencing an extradition process in the case of Ms. Meng Wanzhou," the government said in a statement. Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada in December at the request of American authorities, who allege that she violated U.S. sanctions against Iran. From the report: China, whose relations with Canada have deteriorated badly over the affair, denounced the decision and repeated previous demands for Meng's release. Legal experts had predicted Ottawa would give the go-ahead for extradition proceedings, given the close judicial relationship between Canada and the United States. It could be years though before Meng is ever sent to the United States, since Canada's slow-moving justice system allows many decisions to be appealed. Meng's lawyers said they were disappointed and described the U.S. charges as politically motivated.

The Polestar 2 is the first all-electric car from Volvo, and the first car to feature Google's new native version of Android Auto. Billed as a competitor to Tesla's Model 3, "the Polestar 2 should be able to travel up to 275 miles (about 443 kilometers) on a single charge thanks to a 78kWh battery that makes up the entire floor of the car," reports The Verge. "It will be quick, too; Polestar says there's 300kW (about 408 horsepower) to play with, spread across dual electric motors. That all-wheel drive power should help the car get from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 5 seconds." From the report: All this will eventually cost about 39,900 euros, or about $45,000, at the cheapest. Polestar will sell versions of the car that cost as much as 59,900 euros, or about $68,000. But none of that will happen until the second year of production. The version available when the car launches later this year will cost $63,000, and Polestar will make only that "launch edition" car for the first 12 months. Pre-orders are open now, and production begins next year in China (where Volvo's Chinese parent company Geely is headquartered). Polestar's launching the car with in an ambitious slate of markets, too: China, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Belgium.
[...]
[T]he Polestar 2's interior looks more fully developed and coherent than the one in the Polestar 1, to my eyes at least. The centerpiece is an 11-inch portrait oriented touchscreen where the company's Android-based infotainment system lives. Car companies have built infotainment systems on Android in the past, but they essentially had to fork the open source operating system and build their own solution on top. What's more, Google wasn't involved in those efforts. This meant the cars would wind up with outdated versions of Google's operating system, which complicated upgrades and security. [...] A big benefit to this embedded approach is customers will have instant access to Android Auto-approved apps like Google Maps, or Play Music, or Google Assistant without needing to use their smartphones. Another is that it will have access to the car's functions, meaning it can control climate settings, or send you maintenance alerts. This native version of Android will also be updatable, meaning Polestar and Google can push over-the-air software updates to improve the car's functions long after it's sold.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Police, social services, and health workers in Canada are using shared databases to track the behavior of vulnerable people -- including minors and people experiencing homelessness -- with little oversight and often without consent. Documents obtained by Motherboard from Ontario's Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (MCSCS) through an access to information request show that at least two provinces -- Ontario and Saskatchewan -- maintain a "Risk-driven Tracking Database" that is used to amass highly sensitive information about people's lives. Information in the database includes whether a person uses drugs, has been the victim of an assault, or lives in a "negative neighborhood."

The Risk-driven Tracking Database (RTD) is part of a collaborative approach to policing called the Hub model that partners cops, school staff, social workers, health care workers, and the provincial government. Information about people believed to be "at risk" of becoming criminals or victims of harm is shared between civilian agencies and police and is added to the database when a person is being evaluated for a rapid intervention intended to lower their risk levels. Interventions can range from a door knock and a chat to forced hospitalization or arrest. Data from the RTD is analyzed to identify trends -- for example, a spike in drug use in a particular area -- with the goal of producing planning data to deploy resources effectively, and create "community profiles" that could accelerate interventions under the Hub model, according to a 2015 Public Safety Canada report. Saskatchewan and Ontario officials say the data in the database is "de-identified" by removing details such as people's names and birthdates, but experts Motherboard spoke to say that scrubbing data so it may never be used to identify an individual is difficult if not impossible.

Canada is the newest frontier in the fight for the "right to repair" after an Ontario politician introduced a bill on Thursday that would ensure individuals and independent professionals can repair brand-name computers and phones cheaply and easily. From a report: Manufacturers make it incredibly difficult to repair our broken devices ourselves. Instead of taking a smashed phone to a local repair professional for an affordable fix, a complex matrix of trade secrets and government intervention often means consumers have to make a pricey trip to the Genius Bar or buy a new device entirely. This is bad for your wallet, but also bad for the planet.

Ontario Liberal Party MPP Michael Coteau ran into this issue head-first after his daughter dropped his Samsung smartphone. An official repair job from the manufacturer was more expensive than just getting a new phone from his carrier, he told me over the phone. "It's a shame," Coteau said, "because the Samsung S8 was very good for me. Everything was perfect. I would've kept using it. But now I've replaced it." On Thursday, Coteau introduced a private member's bill in provincial parliament that, if passed, would be the first "right to repair" law for electronic devices in North America. More than a dozen US states are currently considering similar bills, but nothing is on the books yet in the US or in Canada.

The founder of Huawei has said there is "no way the US can crush" the company, in an interview with the BBC. From the report: Ren Zhengfei, founder and president of Huawei, described the arrest of his daughter Meng Wanzhou, the company's chief financial officer, as politically motivated. The US is pursuing criminal charges against Huawei and Ms Meng, including money laundering, bank fraud and stealing trade secrets. Huawei denies any wrongdoing.

Mr Ren spoke to the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in his first international broadcast interview since Ms Meng was arrested -- and dismissed the pressure from the US. "There's no way the US can crush us," he said. "The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit." However, he acknowledged that the potential loss of custom could have a significant impact. [...] Mr Ren warned that "the world cannot leave us because we are more advanced". "If the lights go out in the West, the East will still shine. And if the North goes dark, there is still the South. America doesn't represent the world. America only represents a portion of the world."

Motorola is releasing three versions of the Moto G7 this year: the G7, the G7 Power, and the G7 Play (a fourth, more powerful G7 Plus model will also be released internationally). These new devices offer slimmer bezels, bigger displays, and larger batteries than their predecessors. The Verge reports: [T]he $299 G7 (not to be confused with LG's G7 ThinQ) is the top-of-the-line model, with a 6.2-inch Gorilla Glass display that features a 2270 x 1080 resolution and a more subtle teardrop notch. The G7 also has more RAM (4GB), and more internal storage (64GB) than its siblings, along with a dual-camera setup on the back that offers a 12-megapixel main lens along with a 5-megapixel depth sensor for a better portrait mode experience (the other G7 phones will have a software-based portrait mode instead). The G7 also supports Motorola's 15W TurboPower charging spec, which promises nine hours of battery life from a 15-minute charge.

The next phone in the lineup, the $249 G7 Power, may not offer the same level of premium upgrades as the G7, but it does offer an intriguing feature that its pricier counterpart doesn't: a massive 5,000mAh battery that Motorola promises should last for up to three days, besting the 3,000mAh battery in the G7 by a considerable amount (it also supports Motorola's TurboPower charging). The G7 Power also features a 6.2-inch display, but at a lower 1520 x 720 resolution and with a larger notch, and only a single 12-megapixel camera on the back. It also drops down to 3GB of RAM and a base storage of 32GB, and is a bit bulkier than the main G7 -- but if sheer battery life is your goal, it seems like the G7 Power will be tough to beat. Lastly, there's the $199 G7 Play, the smallest and cheapest model in the 2019 Moto G lineup. There are more cuts here: a smaller 5.7-inch 1512 x 720 display with an even larger notch than the G7 Power, a cheaper plastic case, and just 2GB of RAM. All three devices will feature Qualcomm's mid-tier Snapdragon 632 processor, Android 9.0 Pie, 8-megapixel front-facing cameras, charge via USB-C, and offer rear-mounted fingerprint sensors. Lastly, the 3.5mm headphone jack is still included on all three models. Motorola is promising a release date sometime in the spring for both the U.S. and Canada.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Many major companies, like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia, are recording every tap and swipe you make on their iPhone apps. In most cases you won't even realize it. And they don't need to ask for permission. You can assume that most apps are collecting data on you. Some even monetize your data without your knowledge. But TechCrunch has found several popular iPhone apps, from hoteliers, travel sites, airlines, cell phone carriers, banks and financiers, that don't ask or make it clear -- if at all -- that they know exactly how you're using their apps. Worse, even though these apps are meant to mask certain fields, some inadvertently expose sensitive data.

Apps like Abercrombie & Fitch, Hotels.com and Singapore Airlines also use Glassbox, a customer experience analytics firm, one of a handful of companies that allows developers to embed "session replay" technology into their apps. These session replays let app developers record the screen and play them back to see how its users interacted with the app to figure out if something didn't work or if there was an error. Every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded -- effectively screenshotted -- and sent back to the app developers. [...] Apps that are submitted to Apple's App Store must have a privacy policy, but none of the apps we reviewed make it clear in their policies that they record a user's screen. Glassbox doesn't require any special permission from Apple or from the user, so there's no way a user would know. When asked, Glassbox said it doesn't enforce its customers to mention its usage in their privacy policy. A mobile expert known as The App Analyst recently found Air Canada's iPhone app to be improperly masking the session replays when they were sent, exposing passport numbers and credit card data in each replay session. Just weeks earlier, Air Canada said its app had a data breach, exposing 20,000 profiles.

A cryptocurrency exchange in Canada has lost control of at least $137 million of its customers' assets following the sudden death of its founder, who was the only person known to have access to the offline wallet that stored the digital coins. British Columbia-based QuadrigaCX is unable to access most or all of another $53 million because it's tied up in disputes with third parties. Ars Technica reports: The dramatic misstep was reported in a sworn affidavit that was obtained by CoinDesk. The affidavit was filed Thursday by Jennifer Robertson, widow of QuadrigaCX's sole director and officer Gerry Cotten. Robertson testified that Cotten died of Crohn's disease in India in December at the age of 30. Following standard security practices by many holders of cryptocurrency, QuadrigaCX stored the vast majority of its cryptocurrency holdings in a "cold wallet," meaning a digital wallet that wasn't connected to the Internet. The measure is designed to prevent hacks that regularly drain hot wallets of millions of dollars. Thursday's court filing, however, demonstrates that cold wallets are by no means a surefire way to secure digital coins. Robertson testified that Cotten stored the cold wallet on an encrypted laptop that only he could decrypt. Based on company records, she said the cold wallet stored $180 million in Canadian dollars ($137 million in US dollars), all of which is currently inaccessible to QuadrigaCX and more than 100,000 customers. "The laptop computer from which Gerry carried out the Companies' business is encrypted, and I do not know the password or recovery key," Robertson wrote. "Despite repeated and diligent searches, I have not been able to find them written down anywhere."

The mismanaged cold wallet is only one of the problems besieging QuadrigaCX. Differences with at least three third-party partners has tied up most or all of an additional $53 million in assets. Making matters worse, many QuadrigaCX customers continued to make automatic transfers into the service following Cotten's death. On Monday, the site became inaccessible with little explanation, except for this status update, which was later taken down. On Thursday, QuadrigaCX said it would file for creditor protection as it worked to regain control of its assets. As of Thursday, the site had 115,000 customers with outstanding balances.

It might look dangerous, but flames have kept switches moving and rails intact for a century. From a report: As if the horrors of the polar vortex were not already enough -- temperatures that look like typos, Canada Goose robbers, and something called frost quakes -- the nation's railroad system took a turn for the apocalyptic this week, too. Rails broke in three different places between Baltimore and Washington on Thursday, causing severe delays. Amtrak canceled dozens of trains passing through Chicago, and viral videos appeared to show commuter tracks in the city on fire. Of course, the tracks themselves were not burning -- they are made out of steel, prized for its tendency to rarely go up in flames. But the sight is still dramatic. The videos of the fires in Chicago last week show flames smoldering in patches of melted snow around the tracks.

Fires have been employed on railroads -- and remained the preferred fix for many a winter hazard -- for most of their roughly two-century history. While railroads have developed impressive tools for dealing with snow on the tracks, extreme temperatures remain a challenge. Though steel is flame-resistant, it's subject to cold, which can jam up railroads' many moving parts. When cold weather does wreak havoc on railroads, lighting fires on train tracks can serve a couple of uses. One is to thaw the switches that determine which track a train goes down, which is what Metra, the Chicagoland commuter-rail authority, said was going on this week. Switches are moving parts, and if ice gets into them, they can freeze in place. There are various types of switch heaters, which might use electric current or gas to melt ice -- or even an open gas flame, which is what's appearing in the Metra videos. Where there aren't switch heaters, crews might use temporary torchlike devices with a flame, the railroad equivalent of the smudge pots farmers use to keep citrus groves and apple orchards from freezing on cold nights.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Contrary to popular Anglocentric belief, English isn't the world's most-spoken language by total number of native speakers -- nor is it the second. In fact, the West Germanic tongues rank third on the list, followed by Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Bengali, and Russian. (Mandarin and Spanish are first and second, respectively.) Surprisingly, Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana recognize only a relatively narrow slice of these.

Google Assistant: With the addition of more than 20 new languages in January, the Google Assistant took the crown among voice assistants in terms of the number of tongues it understands. It's now conversant in 30 languages in 80 countries, up from 8 languages and 14 countries in 2017.
Apple's Siri: Apple's Siri, which until January had Google Assistant beat in terms of sheer breadth of supported languages, comes in a close second. Currently, it supports 21 languages in 36 countries and dozens of dialects for Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Microsoft's Cortana: Cortana, which made its debut at Microsoft's Build developer conference in April 2013 and later came to Windows 10, headphones, smart speakers, Android, iOS, Xbox One, and even Alexa via a collaboration with Amazon, might not support as many languages as Google Assistant and Siri. Still, it has come a long way in six years.
Amazon's Alexa: Alexa might be available on over 150 products in 41 countries, but it understands the fewest languages of any voice assistant: English (Australia, Canada, India, UK, and US), French (Canada, France), German, Japanese (Japan), and Spanish (Mexico, Spain).
Samsung's Bixby: Samsung's Bixby -- the assistant built into the Seoul, South Korea company's flagship and midrange Galaxy smartphone series and forthcoming Galaxy Home smart speaker -- is available in 200 markets globally but only supports a handful of languages in those countries: English, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Korean, and Spanish.

Telecom company Bell urged the Canadian government to formulate rules that would make some VPN services illegal in the country ahead of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations. The rationale behind the request? It doesn't want people in the country to use VPNs to access the US catalog of some streaming services like Netflix. TechDirt, quotes a paywalled report: "In its submission, Bell argued that Canadians accessing content from a US service with a VPN 'unjustly enriches the US service, which has not paid for the Canadian rights' but nonetheless makes that content available to Canadians. Bell's media arm reportedly spends millions on content for it streaming service, Crave TV, which allows Canadians to stream content from American networks such as HBO and Showtime."

Again though, it's not the VPN doing that. And if you want to stop users from flocking to better content catalogs elsewhere on the continent, you should focus your ire on the things causing that to happen -- like increasingly dated and absurd geo-viewing restrictions, and your own substandard content offerings that fail to adequately match up.