Phillies' reliever Alvarado rejoins team following PED ban, will be eligible later this month
Alvarado was back in Philadelphia before Tuesday night's home game against Baltimore and is expected to begin a minor league rehab assignment soon. The Venezuelan left-hander is eligible to return to the big leagues on Aug. 19, but can't pitch in the postseason if the Phillies qualify due to Major League Baseball rules on PED bans.
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Toronto Sun
24 minutes ago
- Toronto Sun
Roblox rolls out open-source AI system to protect kids from predators in chats
Published Aug 07, 2025 • 3 minute read The gaming platform Roblox is displayed on a tablet. Photo by Leon Keith / AP Roblox, the online gaming platform wildly popular with children and teenagers, is rolling out an open-source version of an artificial intelligence system it says can help preemptively detect predatory language in game chats. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account The move comes as the company faces lawsuits and criticism accusing it of not doing enough to protect children from predators. For instance, a lawsuit filed last month in Iowa alleges that a 13-year-old girl was introduced to an adult predator on Roblox, then kidnapped and trafficked across multiple states and raped. The suit, filed in Iowa District Court in Polk County, claims that Roblox's design features make children who use it 'easy prey for pedophiles.' Roblox says it strives to make its systems as safe as possible by default but notes that 'no system is perfect, and one of the biggest challenges in the industry is to detect critical harms like potential child endangerment.' The AI system, called Sentinel, helps detect early signs of possible child endangerment, such as sexually exploitative language. Roblox says the system has led the company to submit 1,200 reports of potential attempts at child exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the first half of 2025. The company is now in the process of open-sourcing it so other platforms can use it too. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Preemptively detecting possible dangers to kids can be tricky for AI systems — and humans, too — because conversations can seem innocuous at first. Questions like 'how old are you?' or 'where are you from?' wouldn't necessarily raise red flags on their own, but when put in context over the course of a longer conversation, they can take on a different meaning. Roblox, which has more than 111 million monthly users, doesn't allow users to share videos or images in chats and tries to block any personal information such as phone numbers, though — as with most moderation rules — people constantly find ways to get around such safeguards. It also doesn't allow kids under 13 to chat with other users outside of games unless they have explicit parental permission — and unlike many other platforms, it does not encrypt private chat conversations, so it can monitor and moderate them. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'We've had filters in place all along, but those filters tend to focus on what is said in a single line of text or within just a few lines of text. And that's really good for doing things like blocking profanity and blocking different types of abusive language and things like that,' said Matt Kaufman, chief safety officer at Roblox. 'But when you're thinking about things related to child endangerment or grooming, the types of behaviors you're looking at manifest over a very long period of time.' Sentinel captures one-minute snapshots of chats across Roblox — about 6 billion messages per day — and analyzes them for potential harms. To do this, Roblox says it developed two indexes _ one made up of benign messages and, the other, chats that were determined to contain child endangerment violations. Roblox says this lets the system recognize harmful patterns that go beyond simply flagging certain words or phrases, taking the entire conversation into context. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'That index gets better as we detect more bad actors, we just continuously update that index. Then we have another sample of what does a normal, regular user do?' said Naren Koneru, vice president of engineering for trust and safety at Roblox. As users are chatting, the system keeps score — are they closer to the positive cluster or the negative cluster? 'It doesn't happen on one message because you just send one message, but it happens because of all of your days' interactions are leading towards one of these two,' Koneru said. 'Then we say, okay, maybe this user is somebody who we need to take a much closer look at, and then we go pull all of their other conversations, other friends, and the games that they played, and all of those things.' Humans review risky interactions and flag to law enforcement accordingly. Columnists Sunshine Girls Sunshine Girls World Canada
Winnipeg Free Press
24 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Prosecutors in Thailand issue indictments for dozens in deadly building collapse
BANGKOK (AP) — State prosecutors in Thailand have formally indicted 23 individuals and companies on charges related to the collapse of a Bangkok office building that collapsed after an earthquake, killing at least 92 people. The partially built high-rise, which was to house the new State Audit Office, was the only one in Thailand to completely collapse on March 28 due to the 7.7 magnitude earthquake, which was centered in neighboring Myanmar. Those indicted include the lead contractors for the project: Italian-Thai Development Co. and its Chinese joint venture partner for the project, the China Railway No. 10 company. Italian-Thai Development's president, Premchai Karnasuta, and China Railway No. 10's local director, Zhang Chuanling, were also indicted along with others, including designers, engineers and several other companies. The charges in the various indictments include professional negligence in design, supervision, or construction practices that failed to comply with engineering standards, resulting in danger to others and causing deaths, according to a statement from the Office of the Attorney General. Additional charges include forgery and use of forged documents. Several of those indicted Thursday had already surrendered to police and denied any wrongdoing. An investigation by police and other officials found design and structural flaws were behind the building's collapse and that some of the officially approved designs were not implemented. The epicenter of the quake was in central Myanmar, where it killed more than 3,700 people and caused major damage in Mandalay, the country's second-biggest city, and in the capital Naypyitaw. The indictment of Italian-Thai Development's Premchai is his second major tangle with the law. In 2019, he was convicted of killing protected animals and illegal possession of weapons while hunting in a wildlife sanctuary for which he served about three years in prison.
Toronto Star
2 hours ago
- Toronto Star
The Paris office of Israeli airline El Al is vandalized with graffiti
PARIS (AP) — Israeli airline El Al said Thursday that its Paris office was vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti, calling the act a 'deeply disturbing' incident as tensions between France and Israel run high. The graffiti was discovered Thursday morning. El Al said the offices were unoccupied at the time of the incident and no one was harmed. Photos shared on social media showed red spray paint across the glass doors and walls, including the phrase 'El Al genocide airline.'
