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Russians seeking an online window to the outside world are finding their options rapidly diminishing as Vladimir Putins government strips app stores of VPNs. Last week, Roskomnadzor, Russias internet authority, ordered three major app stores to remove virtual private networks (VPNs) from public availability. Roughly one in four Russians report using VPNs to avoid detection by Russias pervasive internet monitoring toolssystems designed to suppress dissent within the country. The VPN bans are the latest in a long series of similar crackdowns. According to TechRadar, more than 50 VPNs available elsewhere are inaccessible in the Russian Google Play Store. This is despite Google showing more resistance than many other app store providers to Russias censorship demands. Still, the trend signals a worrying shift toward sweeping digital restrictions. Russias increasing push to remove VPN apps from major app stores is part of a coordinated strategy to cut citizens off from uncensored information and secure communication tools, warns Alexey Kozliuk, chair of the VPN Guild, an industry group. According to Yevgeniy Golovchenko, a researcher specializing in online censorship at the University of Copenhagen, Russia’s efforts to block VPNs represent one of the final and most extreme steps in a long campaign to control the internet. He likens online censorship to a ladder, suggesting that the country is now reaching its upper limits in terms of how far it can go to restrict digital freedom. “Were reaching the top of the censorship ladder,” he says. While this crackdown on VPNs represents the regimes most aggressive action yet, Golovchenko sees it as part of a long-standing effort by the Kremlin to eliminate online dissent entirely. The Russian authorities have been trying to establish control over the internet during the last two decades, he says. That effort intensified after Russia’s spring 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as public discontent over Putins decisions grew. The Russian president is determined to extinguish opposition to his actions in Ukraine and prevent any potential uprising. Those most likely to be draftedand most opposed to the wartend to be frequent internet users. Thus, controlling the web is viewed as key to maintaining total authority. The Russian government is definitely trying to splinter the internet, Golovchenko says. Theyve been passing the so-called sovereign internet law with a clear goal of trying to splinter the Russian internet. In this way, Russia is emulating its ally China, Golovchenko says, “not just through censorship, but through efforts to push users away from Western platforms toward Russian platforms that are more likely to comply with Russian law. Russias broader approach to censorship is also telling. The government has allocated 60 billion rubles (around $600 million) in its 20252027 budget to expand its censorship infrastructure. This includes the deployment of advanced Deep Packet Inspection systems known as TSPU. These systems are capable of blocking entire VPN protocols and have been tested during regional internet shutdowns to suppress encrypted traffic, adds VPN Guild’s Kozliuk, who says that some VPN providers have created robust technologies specifically designed to function in heavily censored countries such as Russia, Belarus, and Iran. However, he notes that the Russian government is increasingly countering these efforts by blocking information about VPNs and pressuring tech companies to halt their distribution. For ordinary Russians, the consequences are severe, Kozliuk says. Citizens are increasingly cut off from the outside world, as the tools they once used to circumvent state censorship are being dismantled through tighter enforcement. These actions, he says, mark another step toward a splinternet, reflecting the Kremlins enduring aim to build a self-contained, tightly regulated Russian web modeled on Chinas. What were witnessing is not just censorship, but the systematic construction of digital borders,” he tells Fast Company, “enforced by the state and increasingly by complicit global tech companies.
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Follow your dreams.Its the first piece of advice most of us are ever given: as kids in the classroom, as students on campus, as graduates preparing to enter the workforce, and as working adults. We are told that jobs are for pursuing passions, not just paychecks. If we do what we love, money and success will follow. If we love what we do, well never work a day in our lives. And the corollary to all that dreaminess? If we dont find employment doing whatever we find most fulfilling, were somehow failures. We dont have to follow our dreams to end up with our dream jobs. In fact, Id argue the opposite. When it comes to careers, follow your dreams can be nightmare advice. Thats because most of us enter the working world without knowing what those dreams are.Instead, Id suggest its better to follow your opportunities. A culture of dreams We might think we know what our dreams are. We might even feel certain of them. After all, Americans are spoon-fed a diet high in dreams. Theyre the cornerstone of our cultural canon, the basis of fairy tales, superhero stories, and countless Disney and DreamWorks movies. And they arent just relegated to fiction and fantasy. Phrases like Im living the dream, Its a dream come true, The man (or woman) of my dreams, and Beyond my wildest dreams are part of our lexicon. Athletes say these words in post-game interviews after winning big and making it to the finals. Actors repeat them in acceptance speeches as they clutch a shiny statuette. Even contestants on dating shows utter them after receiving a rose and surviving for another week. From our youngest years, we are asked about our career dreams: What do you want to be when you grow up? Obviously, we have no experience at being anything other than a kid. So why not aspire to be a pro athlete or a pop star? A grab bag of options As we get older and prepare to enter the workplace, some of us still hold on to our childhood or teenage dreams, or we find new ones. Certainly, we are more mature and thoughtful at age twenty-two than we were at age five or fifteen. The sources influencing us are likely to be more logical: our favorite course in college, the recruiter we talked to at an on-campus career fair, or a summer internship that stimulated us intellectually or socially. But like our younger selves, were still picking from a grab bag of options largely chosen for us by others or offered from limited experiences. Even if we have a better understanding of what work is, our understanding of who we are is still limited. Consequently, most of us dont have a clear idea of what we truly want to be when we grow upespecially not at the start of our careers. And thats a cause for celebration! The point of living is to learn as we go (and grow). That should be the point of working, too: to try new things, to meet different people, to understand ourselves betterwhat we like and what we cant stand, what excites us and what bores us, what fills us with joy on a Monday morning and what fills us with dread on a Sunday night. We spend a third of our lives on the job. It just makes sense that whatever we fantasized about doing while dozing off in Econ 101 probably isnt what well want to be doing thirty years later. But instead of understanding how lucky this makes us, how much freedom we have, all too often we just feel lost. Because weve been taught to find direction in our dreamsthat they should be like a North Star to guide us. We may feel envious of people who seem to have a fixed dream to follow to help them on their way. Missed opportunities Heres the thing: Professional dreams can be incredibly limiting. When we enter the workplace convinced that we already know what we want to doand are committed to doing it at all costswhat were saying, in essence, is that theres nothing left for us to learn or be curious about, nothing that could change our minds, nothing else that would make us happier or more fulfilled. Were saying that even though our careers are only just beginning, we already know what we want out of them. With that mindset, we risk sleepwalking through life and hitting snooze on a host of bigger, better opportunities that come our way, opportunities that we never could have dreamed up. Just like we cant be what we cant see, we cant dream what we dont know. So, at any one time, our wants and wishes for the future have a near-infinite number of blind spots. They include every industry we havent yet worked in, every company we havent yet encountered, and every job we havent tried doing ourselves. Unfamiliar territory The world of I dont know is big and always getting bigger. New industries emerge all the time. New companies launch every day. The newer they are, the less likely we are to know about them. Even if we do, the more entrenched we are in our dreams, the less likely we are to want to step foot on unfamiliar territory. Instead, we live in the comfort of a decision we made years ago. But what feels like a seatbelt keeping us secure can also be a trap confining us. Those of us who arent committed to a specific dream, on the other hand, have the opportunity to follow new opportunities. Where the dreamers close themselves off, the non-dreamers stay open. Our culture likes to think of themof usas lost, but the best way to make ones way has always been to stay alert and be willing to turn left, right, or back to try a new route when necessary. We cant do that when our eyes are closed and we are dreaming about something else. Possessing dreams versus allowing them to possess us Does that mean we should discard dreams wholesale? Of course not. Theres nothing wrong with having them and holding on to them, even when they seem unlikely, and the odds are stacked against them coming true. Dreams can motivate us, guide us, and serve as reminders of whats most important to us. And achieving them feels great in a way thats hard to top. But theres a difference between possessing dreams and allowing dreams to possess us. Theres a difference between keeping a dream alive while remaining open to other opportunities and closing ourselves off to everything other than our capital-D dream. All of usand all our careerswould be better off if we did way more of the former and way less of the latter. Lifes most exciting and least expected adventures are found when we refuse to be restricted and restrained by what weve previously imagined. Maybe the random opportunity we say yes to gets us nowhere. Or maybe were great at it. Maybe it makes us truly happy. Maybe it ends up exceeding our wildest dreams. Maybe it becomes our wildest dream. Only now, unlike our childhood fantasies, well be equipped with a real understanding of what it entails, what it requires of us, and whether were up for itwhich makes it a whole lot more likely to become our reality and, quite literally, a dream come true.Excerpted with permission from 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work
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E-Commerce
After years of AI disrupting industries and streamlining repetitive workflows, the technology is now poised to transform animation. In 2024, director and writer Tom Patons AiMation Studios released Where the Robots Grow, a fully AI-animated feature film. Everything from animation and voice acting to music was generated using AI, at a cost of just $8,000 per minutetotaling around $700,000 for the 87-minute production. While IMDB reviewers criticized the film as soulless and uninspired, it proved that AI can deliver full-length animated features at a fraction of traditional budgets. But its not just filmmakers driving this shift. Indie game developers want to prototype characters and worlds in hours, not weeks. TikTok and social media creators are looking to animate original characters without studio resources. Major brands, too, seek emotionally resonant storytelling without monthslong timelines or ballooning 3D animation costs.The challenge: most 3D animation tools are still slow, technical, and expensive. Hoping to remove these barriers, a team of developers from OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and Riot Games launched Cartwheel, an AI-powered 3D animation platform.Cartwheel promises to make high-quality 3D character animation 100 times faster, simpler, and more affordable. Users can record motion with a smartphone, describe a scene with a text prompt, or pull from a library of expressive 3D movements. The platforms AI transforms input into production-ready animations. Artists can refine them in Cartwheel or export into tools like Unity, Unreal Engine, Maya, or Blenderwithout disrupting their pipeline.The startup was cofounded by Andrew Carr, a former OpenAI scientist who helped develop Codex and ChatGPTs code generation, and Jonathan Jarvis, former creative director at Google Creative Lab and founder of the animation studio Universal Patterns.The two met after OpenAI, intrigued by Jarviss concept for a generative animation tool, introduced him to Carr, who had just left the company to explore how AI could make animation more accessible.I had a unique job, where I used animation to share complex research concepts clearly within Google, and make prototypes that couldnt yet be built by software. Andrew always wanted to animate, and later invented a way to talk to Blender, a popular open-source 3D software, with computer code, says Jarvis. We always wanted to build tools to help others get ideas moving and sensed the potential to animate in new ways using gen AI, that it would be centered around creative control.After two years in stealth, Cartwheel is gaining traction. The company recently closed a $10 million funding round led by Craft Ventures, with support from WndrCo (Jeffrey Katzenberg), Khosla Ventures, Accel, Runway, and Tirta Ventures (Ben Feder), bringing total funding to $15.6 million.Over 60,000 animators, developers, and storytellers joined Cartwheels wait-list during stealth. Early adopters from DreamWorks, Duolingo, and Roblox are already using the platform.All of our AI models are developed in-house. Behind the scenes, weve employed careful software engineering to ensure that all the pieces of our system work together in a way that can be plugged into existing animation pipelines, Carr says. Ensuring that the generated animation is properly scaled, moves naturally, and remains consistent throughout has been one of our biggest challenges.[Image: Cartwheel]A Creator-First AI Animation ToolWhile the generative AI field is increasingly crowded, Cartwheel positions itself differently: not as a replacement for artists, but as a tool that amplifies their creativity.Animators and creatives dont care if motion is generated, done by hand, motion-captured, or drawn from a library. They just want it to move to tell their story, make their game, or get their job done, Jarvis says. Our motion models can generate a lot of useful animation quickly, but they cant do everything. Thats why we love a hybrid approach. Computers are great at finding patterns, but its the artist who brings the soul.A key differentiator for Cartwheel is its team. Carr and Jarvis are joined by industry veterans with experience in film, games, and interactive design. Catherine Cat Hicks, former Pixar animation director on Coco, Inside Out, and Toy Story 3, serves as head of Animation Innovation. Neil Helm, head of Interactive Animation, worked on crowd systems at Pixar for Turning Red, Lightyear, Up, and Inside Out 2.The platforms design is shaped by Steven Ziadie, former Sony and Riot designer, while production is led by Buthaina Mahmud, who helped define Unitys real-time animation workflows and developed shaders used in the Spider-Verse films.We reached out, and some reached out to us. Over time, we realized we all shared the goal to make storytelling faster, easier, and more powerful, Carr and Jarvis tell Fast Company. Culture is being shaped in increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immersive spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Robloxall animation-driven experiences. Were building tools for where animation is headed, and thats resonating with industry veterans.User feedback has helped shape Cartwheels interface.We began with a focus on text to animation. In beta, we learned that while thats compelling in many situations, often folks want to browse motions for inspiration, use video reference, or act out the motion themselvesso weve moved to a multimodal interface, Carr says.Whats Next for Cartwheel?High-quality animation data remains scarce, with most data sets proprietary or lacking in diversity and detail. To address this, Cartwheel is using synthetic dataAI-generated animations that mimic real-world motionto train and refine its models.The next generation of AI companies has to find and curate the hard data types, and do the hard work to refine it and make it useful to people in that field. Thats where the value is, Carr says. While at OpenAI, I worked on the science of data quality and was able to generate millions of dollars of model improvements with just a few lines of code. We are following the same path at Cartwheel to ensure we produce he styles, qualities, and delightfulness in our motion data that artists need.With fresh funding, Cartwheel plans to deepen R&D, grow its team, and bring its platform to broader markets.Over the next 12 months, we aim to be a catalyst, enabling both large and small animation projects to flourish, Jarvis says. Ensuring ethically sourced data that empowers artists is fundamental to our approach. We are a team of artists building tools for artists.
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E-Commerce
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