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"No arguments there, but the term, which stands for "artificial intelligence", has a more storied history than Spielberg and Kubrick's 2001 film. The concept of artificial intelligence goes back to the birth of computing: in 1950, just 14 years after defining the concept of a general-purpose computer, Alan Turing asked "Can machines think?""

"A story on the site of the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows how this is playing out in the world of social networks. Online criticism of the behavior of the President of South Korea following the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol prompted the government to set up a team to monitor online activity. That, in its turn, has led people to seek what the NHK article calls "cyber-asylum" -- online safety through the use of foreign mobile messaging services, which aren't spied on so easily by the South Korean authorities. According to the NHK article: Many users have switched [from the hugely-popular home-grown product KakaoTalk] to a German chat app called Telegram. It had 50,000 users in early September. Now 2 million people have signed up."

"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."

"While 77% of shoppers in a recent study by Opinion Lab said in-store tracking is unacceptable, 61% also responded that they expect to be compensated with cost-saving discounts if they're tracked. How stores sell in-store tracking to shoppers and highlight its benefits is where one of the next major battles of retail will be fought, Kilcourse says. "

"It's highly unlikely investigative or intelligence agencies have much of an interest in protecting the privacy of non-targeted citizens, even in non-terrorist-related surveillance -- not if it means using alternate (read: "less effective") investigative methods or techniques. It has been demonstrated time and time again that law enforcement is more interested in the most direct route to what it seeks, no matter how much collateral damage is generated. "

"Twitter has deleted more than 125,000 accounts linked to terrorists since mid-2015, the company announced, offering some of the most detailed insight yet of how Silicon Valley is collaborating with western governments in its fight against Islamic State."

"What if technology provided the ultimate resolution of this existential crisis by allowing you to plug your brain into a boundless, cognitive melting pot with other humans?"

Much of current science deals with even more complicated systems, and similarly lacks exact solutions. Such models have to be "computational" - describing how a system changes from one instant to the next. But there is no way to determine the exact state at some time in the future other than by "simulating" its evolution in this way. Weather forecasting is a familiar example; until the advent of computers in the 1950s, it was impossible to predict future weather faster than it actually happened.

""Privacy Not Included" is Mozilla's Christmas shopping (anti)-guide to toys and gadgets that spy on you and/or make stupid security blunders, rated by relative "creepiness," from the Nintendo Switch (a little creepy) to the Fredi Baby monitor (very creepy!). Mozilla's reviews include a detailed rationale for each ranking, including whether the product includes encryption, whether it forces a default password change, how easy to understand the documentation is, whether it shares your data for "unexpected reasons," whether it has known security vulnerabilities, whether it has parental controls and more."

"Eck said machine learning, a powerful form of AI, will be integrated into how humans communicate with each other. He raised the idea of "assistive writing" in the future with Google Docs, the company's online word processing software. This may be based on Google's upcoming Smart Compose technology that suggests words and phrases based on what's being typed. Teachers used to worry about whether students used Wikipedia for their homework. Now they may wonder what part of the work the students wrote themselves, Eck said."

"This affects all of us every single day. When the algorithms that govern increasingly large parts of our lives have been designed almost exclusively by young bro-grammers with homogeneous experiences and worldviews, those algorithms are going to fail significant sections of society. A heartbreaking example of this is Gillian Brockell's experience of continuing to get targeted by pregnancy-related ads on Facebook after the stillbirth of her son. Brockell, a Washington Post journalist, recently made headlines when she tweeted an open letter to big tech companies, imploring them to think more carefully about how they target parenting ads."

"The Facebook data, which captured the engagement metrics on thousands of posts by the six major party leaders in the two months leading up to the election, was collected by academics at the University of Pisa's MediaLab. It reveals all of the 25 most shared Facebook posts in the two months leading up to the election were videos, live broadcasts or photos from either Salvini, who runs the far-right League, or Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S)."

"The researchers, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, came up with a new way of constructing a generative adversarial network, or GAN. GANs employ two dueling neural networks to train a computer to learn the nature of a data set well enough to generate convincing fakes. When applied to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic fakery. The same Nvidia researchers have previously used the technique to create artificial celebrities (read our profile of the inventor of GANs, Ian Goodfellow)."

"Can you guess how long AlphaZero spent learning chess from scratch, preparing for the match against Stockfish 8, and developing its genius instincts? Four hours. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide."

"There is little evidence to show algorithms by online firms are based on politics, and many conservatives - including Trump himself - have large a social media following. Analysts say it would be dangerous to try to regulate how search engines work to please a government or political faction."

"In the meantime, I actually like how most of these islands represent an attempt by education institutions to embrace the weirdness of the web. The current crop of education startups seem bland and antiseptic in comparison to these virtual worlds. I can't take a Coursera class on a pirate ship, or attend office hours in front of an edX campfire. And honestly, that's probably a good thing. But it makes the web slightly less interesting."

"They've moved "authoritative sources" to the top search results. The question we need to ask is: "How does this play out in the Real World?" In the real world it means that the worldview, the political bias, the social preferences, the positions taken in various ideological and scientific controversies - as decided by top Google Executives - have been virtually hard-coded into Google's search algorithms. No longer is Google returning "unbiased and objective results"."

""Weapons of math destruction" is how the writer Cathy O'Neil describes the nasty and pernicious kinds of algorithms that are not subject to the same challenges that human decision-makers are. Parole algorithms (not Jure's) can bias decisions on the basis of income or (indirectly) ethnicity. Recruitment algorithms can reject candidates on the basis of mistaken identity. In some circumstances, such as policing, they might create feedback loops, sending police into areas with more crime, which causes more crime to be detected."

"Critics of the government's flagship internet regulation policy are warning it could lead to a North Korean-style censorship regime, where regulators decide which websites Britons are allowed to visit, because of how broad the proposals are."

"Depending on how legal decisions shake out, AI systems could become a valuable tool to assist creativity, a nuisance ripping off hard-working human musicians, or both."