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"The baby automaton joins a growing list of companion robots, such as the upcoming Jibo - designed by robotics experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resembling a swivelling lamp - and Paro, a robot baby seal marketed by Japanese company Intelligent System as a therapeutic machine to soothe elderly dementia sufferers. Around a quarter of Japan's population is over 65 with a dearth of care workers putting a strain on social services."

"The school will teach cyber skills to some of the UK's most gifted 16- to 19-year-olds. It will select on talent alone, looking in particular for exceptional problem solvers and logic fiends, regardless of wealth or family background, according to Alastair MacWillson, a driving force behind the initiative. "The cyber threat is the real threat facing the UK, and the problem it's causing the UK government and companies is growing exponentially," said MacWillson, chair of Qufaro, a not-for-profit organisation created by a consortium of cybersecurity experts for the purposes of education."

"Experts now believe that criminals could 3D-print hands complete with fingers and fingerprints to defeat security precautions at banks, airports and police stations."

"There are now more than 120 separate families of ransomware, said experts studying the malicious software. Other researchers have seen a 3,500% increase in the criminal use of net infrastructure that helps run ransomware campaigns."

"Security experts who looked at the app, known as ByLock, at the request of Reuters said it appeared to be the work of amateur software developers and had left important information about its users unencrypted."

"Hacking into software and then demanding a ransom to release it - what's known as ransomware - is not new. Finnish security expert Mikko Hypponen fully expects it to become a reality as self-driving or "autonomous" cars start to become more commonplace."

"Ringing Bells also plans to sell other more expensive handsets - ranging in price up to about $100 (£75) - at a profit. But, with just over a week to go until Freedom 251's launch, critics remain unconvinced. "I find it difficult to believe that any sort of phone can be manufactured for 251 rupees, so it's difficult to see what kind of business model they have," says Pranav Dixit, a tech expert at the news site Factor Daily."

"An automated process is better-suited for a variety of other machine-readable forms of identification, said Vahid Motevalli, a professor at Tennessee Tech University and a flight security expert. For example, a person can't read bar codes, but even if they could, they wouldn't be as efficient as an automated process. A machine can almost always check in more people per hour than a security official, meaning security lines would move much faster."

"They aren't limited by human notions of attention; they can watch everyone at the same time. So while it may be true that using encryption is something the NSA takes special note of, not using it doesn't mean you'll be noticed less. The best defense is to use secure services, even if it might be a red flag. Think of it this way: you're providing cover for those who need encryption to stay alive."

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

""The fake page is actually hosted on Google's servers and is served over SSL, making the page even more convincing," Symantec security expert Nick Johnston explained in a blog post. "The scammers have simply created a folder inside a Google Drive account, marked it as public, uploaded a file there, and then used Google Drive's preview feature to get a publicly accessible URL to include in their messages.""

"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

"More than 150 artificial intelligence researchers have signed an open letter calling for future research in the field to focus on maximising the social benefit of AI, rather than simply making it more capable. The signatories, which include researchers from Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Harvard as well as staff at Google, Amazon and IBM, celebrate progress in the field, but warn that "potential pitfalls" must be avoided."

"Although we think we're doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are "not wired to multitask well… When people think they're multitasking, they're actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. "

"Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): "We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task. "I believe that society needs to confront this question before it is upon us: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?""

"Turkey on Wednesday launched an investigation after a hacker or hackers posted a database online containing the personal information of nearly 50 million Turkish citizens - more than half of the country's population - and a message taunting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The population of Turkey is around 78 million. Experts say the leak could be one of the largest public leaks of its kind."

"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."

"Cybersecurity experts have warned for years that malfeasance, technical breakdown or administrative incompetence could easily wreak havoc with electronic systems and could go largely or wholly undetected. This is a concern made much more urgent by Russia's cyber-attacks on political party servers and state voter registration databases in 2016 and by the risk of a repeat - or worse - in this November's midterms. "

"The groundbreaking artificial intelligence system, developed by the AI-outfit DeepMind with Moorfields eye hospital NHS foundation trust and University College London, was capable of correctly referring patients with more than 50 different eye diseases for further treatment with 94% accuracy, matching or beating world-leading eye specialists."

"But, for a growing number of users - and mental health experts - the very positivity of Instagram is precisely the problem. The site encourages its users to present an upbeat, attractive image that others may find at best misleading and at worse harmful. If Facebook demonstrates that everyone is boring and Twitter proves that everyone is awful, Instagram makes you worry that everyone is perfect - except you."