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Interesting how technology can be used to bring communities together for good :)~

Apparently all games (and who knows what else) for computers will only be available by downloads by the year 2011. If this is a good thing, we shall have to find out in a year's time.

The writer of a worm that can enter jailbroken iPhones has accepted a job to be a hacker full time. Although he will be doing his work for good, are iPhone owners so happy about the situation?

"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."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"This challenge inspired the Royal London Society for Blind People to team up with design firm Ustwo and create Wayfindr, a Bluetooth enabled beacon system to guide people who are blind or visually impaired through the London Underground."

"Major Wall Street institutions were cracked wide open by a phishing scam from FIN4, a hacker group that, unlike its competition, can write convincingly and employs some basic smarts about why people open attachments."

"Atlas is a semi-autonomous system. The operator tells the robot where to be and what position to take, such as where to put its hands on a vacuum cleaner, and then the robot comes up with a plan of how to do that. For some chores Atlas's actions are logical and human-like. Others require re-thinking of how to get the job done in a way that its quite different to the way a person would perform the action."

""The people who are on the list are not guilty until they've been prosecuted and taken to court, and the system makes that very clear", Simon says - and under the Data Protection Act "if anyone misuses that data there are very significant fines". Simon is also sanguine about the risk of misidentification. Images from the watch list will be sent with alerts so staff can check that there's a good match, he says. "

""The email has good spelling and grammar and my exact home address...when I say exact I mean, not the way my address is written by those autofill sections on web pages, but the way I write my address. "My tummy did a bit of a somersault when I read that, because I wondered who on earth I could owe £800 to and what was about to land on my doormat." She quickly realised it was a scam and did not click on the link."

"At the heart of the problem that troubles Ming is the training that computer engineers receive and their uncritical faith in AI. Too often, she says, their approach to a problem is to train a neural network on a mass of data and expect the result to work fine. She berates companies for failing to engage with the problem first - applying what is already known about good employees and successful students, for example - before applying the AI."