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"The Turing Test was passed for the first time by a chatbot called "Eugene Goostman" on Saturday by convincing 33% of the human judges that it was human, according to Professor Kevin Warwick, a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Coventry University, in a statement."

"Nearly 150 million people have been affected by a loss of customer data by Adobe, over 20 times more than the company admitted in its initial statement last week."

"In theory, when the conventional financial system is experiencing turbulence, alternative currencies such as bitcoin should have their time to shine. The decentralised nature of the currency means that it's impossible for any central bank to impose controls on it, while the pseudonymity at its core could make it the perfect vehicle to get money into and out of the country while avoiding legal reprisals."

"Human beings have been replaced with robot arms, which have been busily crafting parts for mobile phones, with production per employee increased from 8,000 to 21,000 pieces at the same time. This amounts to a 162.5 per cent productivity improvement, and there is further bad news for the outdated meatsacks clutching their Chinese equivalent of P45s - the previous defect rate average of 25 per cent has now been reduced to just five per cent."

"The Apple TV is not a full-blown television. Instead, it's a set-top box that connects to a TV and delivers content like movies and television shows from sources like iTunes and Netflix, similar to a Roku or Amazon Fire TV." The Apple TV will come out and it will be interesting to see how the public reacts to it.

"Upcoming cell phone chips from Qualcomm will use artificial intelligence to block malware before it infects your phone. The chip company said on Monday that the next-generation Snapdragon 820 processor used in a variety of Android smartphones will be the first chip that uses machine learning to detect threats and privacy issues thanks to an application called Snapdragon Smart Protect." Qualcomm is trying to use artificial intelligence in a chip for smart phones. The chip will learn to detect any privacy or security issues that would usually be hard to detect.

"Google's self-driving cars have driven over a million miles in autonomous mode. But when Google brought its testing program to Austin, Texas, one of the vehicles met its match: a cyclist doing a track stand - when a rider shifts very slightly forward and back to maintain balance while keeping feet on the pedals." This is very surprising that this self-driven car would detect a person not even moving and still keep stopped, it will be interesting to see if and how they fix this problem.

"One such camera, the Seek Thermal has just gone on sale in the UK for the first time. WIRED took a look at it at IFA in Berlin." This is a cool new camera for your smartphone which could make your life a lot easier if you have lost a pet and many other uses.

"That's right, two thirds of the digital image is interpolated by the processor in the conversion from RAW to JPG or TIF. It's reality but not as we know it. For obvious commercial reasons camera manufacturers are careful to reconstruct the digital image in a form that mimics the familiar old photograph and consumers barely noticed a difference in the resulting image, but there are very few limitations on how the RAW data could be handled and reality could be reconstructed in any number of ways."

" Space telescopes such as the Hubble and the Spitzer have spent a lot of time photographing it, and we've seen it in many forms: infrared, false-colour composite, even enormously high-resolution at 1.5 billion pixels."

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.

My main concern isn't about what it does (even though it is quite odd), but how successful it will be.

Woweee - look at these and you realise the economics and problems with security of data...

Interesting debate including input from Schneier regarding the use of CCTV

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?

"EFF has released its mobile app to help people join in important, timely struggles, but you can't get it for your Iphone or Ipad, because Apple insists that EFF use DRM, and this is contrary to everything it stands for. In a petition, EFF calls out Apple's incredibly abusive, one-sided developer "agreement" and calls on developers and Apple users to join a campaign to get Apple to give developers the freedom to release their creations on more liberal terms."

"The hackers who stole 4.5 million patient records from an American hospital network might have exploited the infamous Heartbleed bug to carry out the hack - the first time the bug has been reported to be at the center of a high-profile breach."

GREAT ARTICLE ON AI "There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence-the median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we'd be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 204012-that's only 25 years from now, which doesn't sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it's likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like-this could happen: It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human."

""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."