Shell agrees to take 30% stake in Bay du Nord ahead of 2027 decision
Shell Canada Energy has agreed to acquire a 30 per cent non-operated interest in the Bay du Nord project from Equinor, adding a new partner to the proposed C$14 billion …
Tech Help Canada Staff
The verified fan account behind Mia Goth’s fake AI photo
An image of Mia Goth that spread on Instagram this month was AI-generated, according to her representatives. Goth filed a petition for divorce from Shia LaBeouf in Los Angeles County …
ElevenLabs adds live AI caller detection for business phone agents
ElevenLabs is adding synthetic voice detection to ElevenAgents, its enterprise platform for conversational AI, the company announced October 9. ElevenLabs framed the feature less as a consumer scam blocker and …
Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine buyback resets a big streaming-era bet
Reese Witherspoon and French production group Mediawan said on Oct. 13 that they are buying Hello Sunshine, the women-focused studio Witherspoon founded in 2016, from Candle Media. Hello Sunshine is …
Oil tanker rates surge past $1 million a day as Hormuz disruption strains crude shipping
Oil tanker charter rates have moved past $1 million a day on key crude routes. Bloomberg reported in mid-September that the cost of hiring a tanker on the benchmark Persian …
PC market drops more than 20% as component costs bite
Worldwide PC shipments fell by roughly one-fifth in the third quarter of 2026, according to preliminary estimates from IDC, Gartner and Omdia. IDC reported worldwide PC shipments of 62.7 million …
Why Greta Gerwig’s Narnia trailer matters for Netflix’s movie strategy
Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew now has its first trailer. The trailer leans into the creation of Narnia rather than a battle-driven franchise reset. The footage centers on the …
EY breach exposes tax data held for major financial clients
Recent reporting by the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and The Economic Times has linked records affected by Ernst & Young LLP’s 2026 data breach to clients or investors connected with Goldman …
UK Parliament hears its first AI-voiced speech using ElevenLabs technology
Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, a Crossbench peer and disability rights campaigner who has spinal muscular atrophy, used an AI-generated recreation of her own voice in the House of Lords on …
Why AI coding agents may not speed up software delivery yet
AI coding agents are generating more code, according to a new Harvard working paper. The paper, by Harvard researchers Fiona Chen and James Stratton, uses aggregated Jellyfish engineering data covering …
Shopify says AI-referred shoppers convert 80% better on product pages
In an Aug. 11, 2026 report based on Q2 commerce data, Shopify said AI-referred shoppers who reached a product page converted about 80% better than shoppers referred by organic search. …
Google gives Gemini a workplace identity
Google Cloud introduced the Gemini agent on Oct. 8 at Gemini at Work 2026, describing the new workplace AI system as a “single, universal agent for work.” According to Google …
7-Eleven may bring more supply-chain work in-house as inflation bites
7-Eleven Inc. is considering bringing parts of its North American supply chain back in-house. Reuters reported on Oct. 9 that new 7-Eleven Inc. CEO Mauricio Leyva said the company is …
Los Angeles port hits cargo record as shippers reroute freight
The Port of Los Angeles handled 1,042,652 twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs, in September, the busiest month in its 118-year history, as importers replenished inventories and shippers routed more cargo …
Meta blocks TikTok-linked ads from third parties in seven countries
Meta has blocked ByteDance and TikTok-linked advertising from running across Facebook and Instagram in seven countries. The restriction took effect on October 8 in the United States, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, …
Canada loses 68,000 jobs as hiring weakens for second month
Canada’s labour market lost 68,000 jobs in September, marking a second straight monthly decline and pushing the unemployment rate to 6.5%, according to Statistics Canada’s latest Labour Force Survey. Employment …
Anthropic’s agent tests reached live police and government forms
In a report published October 9, Anthropic said Claude Haiku 4.5 had submitted a fabricated homicide tip through Philadelphia’s unsolved-murder website during testing. Anthropic said the incidents came from evaluations …
Street Fighter turns Times Square into a live-action arcade cabinet
Videos circulated on Oct. 7 showing an oversized Street Fighter arcade cabinet in New York’s Times Square. Inside the cabinet’s apparent screen, performers dressed as Ryu and Ken staged a …
Tesla drops Full Self-Driving name in Europe after German pushback
Tesla’s long-running Full Self-Driving label is being replaced by Tesla Assisted Driving in European materials after Germany’s Transport Ministry said the FSD name was misleading. In an October 6 statement, …
Fake Claude installer hid behind a Google ad and a Bing redirect
Security firm Push Security reported on October 9, 2026, that a fake Claude installer campaign began with a Google sponsored result for claude mac. Push called the technique Adception, a …
Shopify’s holiday report shows shoppers want AI help, not AI control
Shopify’s 2026 Global Holiday Retail Report, based on surveys of 18,000 shoppers and 7,500 business leaders across nine markets, says 65% of shoppers expect to use AI for at least …
The Exorcist: Martyrs trailer reveals a Scarlett Johansson-led franchise reset
Universal Pictures and Blumhouse have released the full trailer for The Exorcist: Martyrs, putting Scarlett Johansson at the center of Mike Flanagan’s new attempt to restart the long-running horror franchise. …
Shopify automated policies now cover more store pages
Shopify has added broader policy automation to the Shopify admin, giving merchants a way to generate and maintain several customer-facing policy pages from store settings instead of writing each one …
Low-cost Android phones found shipping with malware in firmware
Bitdefender said its researchers identified Midnight Mimosa, a malware campaign running on low-cost, multi-brand Android devices built on MediaTek platforms. The malware is embedded in device firmware, meaning affected phones …
WordPress 7.1.3 fixes seven security issues, including comment-related flaws
WordPress 7.1.3 was released on October 6, 2026, with seven security fixes and four bug fixes, making it the second core security update in two weeks after WordPress 7.1.2 addressed …
What the ASOS breach says about connected marketing systems
ASOS has confirmed that customer information was accessed after an unauthorized party used stolen employee credentials to reach third-party platforms used by the retailer. The incident became public in an …
20 problem solving quotes and the business lessons inside them
Most problem solving quotes look great on a poster and do very little when a client is upset, the numbers look wrong, and you’ve got an hour to decide what …
The dumbest apps ever made: 11 flops, fads, and stunts worth learning from
Most of the apps on this list became punchlines at some point. Some deserved it. Some got the last laugh, and a few cost their backers far more than any …
What changes as your business grows from $100K to $1B
Early revenue often feels like a test of talent. Then the same habits that got the business moving start turning into the ceiling. The revenue milestones below are a map …
China, Singapore and Korea are taking different bets on AI filmmaking
Asia’s most visible AI filmmaking experiments are no longer just short demos. Singapore became the most visible case in August, when two AI-generated productions timed to National Day drew praise, …
Atlassian raises Jira and Confluence Cloud prices on Oct. 13
Atlassian will raise Cloud list prices for Jira, Confluence and several related products on Oct. 13, 2026 PT. The update applies to new purchases, renewals and upgrades of existing subscriptions, …
Google Ads’ September AI Max migration window has closed
Google Ads’ scheduled September AI Max migration window has closed, moving eligible Search campaigns that used campaign-level broad match or legacy automatically created assets into the AI Max framework. Google’s …
ElevenLabs plans major India investment for multilingual voice agents
ElevenLabs is preparing a large India expansion, with co-founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski telling Reuters that the voice AI company plans to invest “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the …
The Paramount-Warner deal is closed. The hard part starts now
Skydance Corporation, formerly Paramount Skydance Corporation, announced on Oct. 6, 2026, that it had completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. WBD shareholders received $31.01666668 per share in cash, WBD …
Spielberg to oversee Transformers as Paramount reaches back to the franchise’s early tone
Steven Spielberg is being moved into a larger creative role on Paramount’s next live-action Transformers film, with longtime producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura working beside him. Deadline reported on October 6 …
U.S.-bound freight demand stays firm as shipping costs remain high
U.S.-bound freight demand is still holding even as key transpacific spot rates remain expensive. The latest Descartes Global Shipping Report said U.S. containerized imports reached 2,546,261 TEUs in September 2026. …
Anthropic’s 129,000 vulnerability count shifts the AI cyber debate
Anthropic said on Oct. 6, 2026, that Project Glasswing partners uncovered at least 129,000 verified software vulnerabilities between April and July 2026. Anthropic also said its own open-source scanning efforts …
SpaceX’s reported $40 billion Nvidia chip financing puts AI debt in focus
SpaceX is in talks with banks and asset managers to raise $40 billion to buy Nvidia artificial intelligence chips, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter and confirming …
Micron strike authorization raises pressure at Taiwan AI memory hub
Micron Technology’s labour dispute in Taiwan moved from a threat to a formal strike authorization after the union representing workers at its Taoyuan operations said 1,994 members voted in favour …
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra is a bet on local AI
Microsoft opened preorders for Surface Laptop Ultra on October 7, 2026, with availability beginning October 16. The Microsoft Store in Canada lists the laptop from CAD $3,899.99, while Microsoft’s U.S. …
Canada’s C$4.2 billion trade surplus was lifted by a tariff rush
Statistics Canada reported on Oct. 6 that merchandise exports rose 2.5 per cent in August, while imports fell 2.0 per cent. That widened Canada’s global merchandise trade surplus from C$787 …
Ninja Forms flaw exploited to plant hidden WordPress admins
Attackers are exploiting a stored cross-site scripting flaw in Ninja Forms, a WordPress form plugin with more than 500,000 active installations, as part of a campaign that can create hidden …
LNG freight rates slide as new carriers crowd the Atlantic
LNG freight rates are weakening again, even as gas buyers prepare for winter. Spark Commodities said on Oct. 8 that its Spark30S Atlantic spot assessment for a modern 174,000-cubic-metre two-stroke …
Apple plans stricter Mac permission checks as AI agents raise privacy risks
Apple plans to make one of the Mac’s broadest privacy permissions harder to grant. In an October 2 Apple Developer News notice, the company said it will add controls so …
Google gives realistic timelines for crawling, indexing and recovery
Google has given site owners and SEO teams unusually specific timing ranges for how long Search changes can take to move through crawling, indexing, serving and recovery. The figures came …
AI is starting to raise the price of everyday electronics
Artificial intelligence is moving into ordinary electronics, and the cost is no longer limited to cloud companies building massive data centres. PCs, phones, tablets, and other connected devices are being …
Shopify Canvas brings AI store design to Sidekick, with limits at launch
Shopify has introduced Canvas, a new AI-assisted storefront design surface that brings Sidekick into the theme-building workflow. In its Oct. 1, 2026, announcement, Shopify said Canvas was rolling out to …
AI’s infrastructure bill is catching up with the boom
As of early October 2026, the AI boom is confronting the cost of turning demand into buildings, chips, power contracts and cooling systems. A recent paper by Columbia Business School …
Shopify lets browser AI agents finish checkout with buyer approval
Shopify has moved browser-based AI shopping agents closer to completing purchases on behalf of buyers, adding checkout support to its WebMCP tools on September 28, 2026. According to Shopify’s developer …
ElevenLabs hits $22 billion as voice agents handle 15 million weekly conversations
ElevenLabs has doubled its valuation to $22 billion in a $300 million employee tender offer. The AI voice startup says its agents now handle more than 15 million conversations every …
WordPress.com’s WordPress Agent can now manage plugins from chat
WordPress.com has expanded the WordPress Agent from content and design assistance into plugin management, letting site owners ask the built-in AI agent to activate, update and install plugins directly from …