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Apple is offering a free case to tackle the iPhone 4's antenna problem, but will the fault damage the technology giant's reputation?Apple called a press conference at which the case offer was made in response to ongoing speculation about the phone's problems, and boss Steve Jobs also offered a full refund for the handset.

"If you were born around the turn of the 21st century, you've probably had to endure someone calling you a "digital native" at least once. At first, this kind of sounds like a good thing to be-raised without the taint of the offline world, and so imbued with a kind of mystic sixth sense about how the Internet should be."

"In Los Angeles, the theft of computers from a county contractor's office that contained personal data for over 342,000 patients has led to a call for tighter security."

"The agency has invested nearly $80 million to build a computer that could break "nearly every kind of encryption," according to a Washington Post report published online Thursday. Based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the Post reports the NSA is racing to build a "cryptologically useful quantum computer" research program called "Penetrating Hard Targets.""

"A newly released set of slides from the Snowden leaks reveals that the NSA is harvesting millions of facial images from the Web for use in facial recognition algorithms through a program called "Identity Intelligence." James Risen and Laura Poitras's NYT piece shows that the NSA is linking these facial images with other biometrics, identity data, and "behavioral" data including "travel, financial, behaviors, social network." "

"Microsoft showcased a line of new autonomous robots, called K5, as security guards for one of its campuses. And though the robots looked nothing like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the machine - developed by Knightscope - is impressive and intimidating. Standing 5 feet tall, weighing 300 pounds, and equipped with HD cameras, sensors, alarms, artificial intelligence, and WiFi, it's one incredible piece of technology."

"The two titans leading the pack are Google and Microsoft. The first battle? A new domain in artificial intelligence called "Deep Learning.""

"AI is already here. This isn't some future, theoretical technology we are working on. AI machines are already among us. Take for example Microsoft's recent security robot demonstration. Called the K5, these autonomous machines stand 5 feet tall, weigh 300 pounds, and are equipped with HD cameras, sensors, alarms, Wi-Fi and - you guessed it - artificial intelligence. These machines have been programmed to recognize if something is out of place, like an injured employee or a potential trespasser. And as technology improves, the K5 will become more capable of recognizing even smaller discrepancies than humans can."

""This project also came on the heels of a very public debate about structural sexism in Wikipedia. [This] began when writer Amanda Filipacchi wrote a New York Times op-ed on a problematic editorial practice being implemented by a number of Wikipedia editors: women were being removed from the 'American Novelists' category and moved into a subcategory for 'American Women Novelists.'" Filipacchi's piece set the internet on fire, sparking a mass call for reform."

"But the Turkish government has a plan to keep its youngsters from witnessing too much violence: it is calling to ban Minecraft. "

"The UK is opposing an international ban on so-called "killer robots" at a United Nations conference that is this week examining future developments of what are officially termed lethal autonomous weapons systems (Laws)."

"Durumeric leads a team of researchers at the University of Michigan that has developed scanning software called ZMap. This tool can probe the whole public Internet in under an hour, revealing information about the roughly four billion devices online. The scan results can show which sites are vulnerable to particular security flaws. In the case of FREAK, a scan was used to measure the scale of the threat before the bug was publicly announced."

"The US government is researching technology that it hopes will turn soldiers into cyborgs, allowing them to connect directly to computers. The US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has unveiled a research programme called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) which aims to develop an implantable neural interface, connecting humans directly to computers."

"The really significant thing about AlphaGo is that it (and its creators) cannot explain its moves. And yet it plays a very difficult game expertly. So it's displaying a capability eerily similar to what we call intuition - "knowledge obtained without conscious reasoning". Up to now, we have regarded that as an exclusively human prerogative. It's what Newton was on about when he wrote "Hypotheses non fingo" in the second edition of his Principia: "I don't make hypotheses," he's saying, "I just know.""

"Google said it "categorically" does not use what it calls "utterances" - the background sounds before a person says, "OK Google" to activate the voice recognition - for advertising or any other purpose. It also said it does not share audio acquired in that way with third parties."

Six convoys of semi-automated "smart" trucks arrived in Rotterdam's harbour on Wednesday after an experiment its organisers say will revolutionise future road transport on Europe's busy highways. More than a dozen self-driving trucks made by six of Europe's largest manufacturers arrived in the port in so-called "truck platoons" around midday, said Eric Jonnaert, president of the umbrella body representing DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo."

"But researchers at New York University's AI Now Institute have issued a strong warning against not only ubiquitous facial recognition, but its more sinister cousin: so-called affect recognition, technology that claims it can find hidden meaning in the shape of your nose, the contours of your mouth, and the way you smile. If that sounds like something dredged up from the 19th century, that's because it sort of is."