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""I have no reason to doubt it - he was just in the right place at the right time, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime photo." But others questioned its veracity, including American evolutionary biologist Dan Graur. He said: "This is a fake photo if I ever saw one. The uniform blurred background is pure Photoshop."

""Many predicted at the outset that Google would simply agree to most requests for removal to save time and money," said Barron. "That hasn't happened - 60% of removal requests have been rejected. Every single request is considered by our teams and there is no automation. If their judgment is challenged by the publisher we will reconsider and, if a mistake has been made, we will reinstate." "

"The files were then downloaded through the Bitglass proxy service, in which a unique watermark was applied to each copy, so that the company could track when the data was viewed and/or downloaded from that point forward. The firm used a basic "phishing" technique to entice criminals on the Dark Web. The data had been viewed over 200 times in just a few days, and in 12 days it had received more than 1,000 clicks, and had spread across the globe in 22 different countries, in five different continents."

"Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things, scanning the public Internet for devices communicating on ports and over protocols that are commonly used by IoT devices. By feeding it the right parameters -- Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) -- you can find innumerable publicly shared webcams, ranging from CCTVs that oversee marijuana grow-ops and many, many baby-monitors. "

"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?""

""The Supreme Court's decision shows that we have a copyright law that is behind the times and insufficient faced with the digital reality we all live in," it said in a statement. It noted that tourists who take selfies of themselves at famous landmarks and spread them on the Internet could be deemed in violation of copyright laws."

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.

"The algorithmic manager seems to watch everything you do. Ride-hailing platforms track a variety of personalized statistics, including ride acceptance rates, cancellation rates, hours spent logged in to the app and trips completed. And they display selected statistics to individual drivers as motivating tools, like "You're in the top 10 percent of partners!" Uber uses the accelerometer in drivers' phones along with GPS and gyroscope to give them safe driving reports, tracking their performance in granular detail. One driver posted to a forum that a grade of 210 out of 247 "smooth accelerations" earned a "Great work!" from the boss."

"In the fawning media coverage of the Obama campaign's technological prowess, it did not occur to observers at the time to call this a startling invasion of privacy. And it wasn't, or at a very minimum, the privacy risks were arguably outweighed by the benefits. A tool like this could be the future of politics: door-to-door canvassing for the digital age, and a welcome antidote to impersonal broadcast TV ads or a welcome upgrade from getting a phone call from a stranger telling you to vote."

"Kim Zetter asked them, on behalf of the New York Times, if their products shipped with backdoors allowing remote parties to access and alter them over the internet, they told her unequivocally that they did not engage in this practice. But now, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR], they admit that they lied, and that they "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006.""

"The algorithm behind what3words took six months to write. Sheldrick worked on it with two friends he had grown up with. Mohan Ganesalingham, a maths fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Jack Waley-Cohen, a full-time quiz obsessive and question-setter for Only Connect. After the initial mapping was complete, they incorporated an error-correction algorithm, which places similar-sounding combinations a very long way apart."

"The facial recognition system is currently being rolled out across six of Prof Shen's classes. "The new system saves time and reduces the workload of students," Prof Shen told the Beijing News. "Out of one hundred students, it usually only fails to recognise one student." But obviously, not everyone is a fan."

"There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called "continuous partial attention", severely limiting people's ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity - even when the device is turned off. "Everyone is distracted," Rosenstein says. "All of the time.""

"At their core, GANs consist of two networks: the generator and discriminator. These computer programs compete against each other millions-upon-millions of times to refine their image generating skills until they're good enough to create the full-fledged pictures."

"Now a study published in Royal Society Open Science has failed to find any association between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behaviour, adding to a growing body of literature that suggests that such a link has been overstated - or may not exist at all."

"As Zuckerberg surely knows, providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won't make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more. This, of course, will produce more data for Facebook to mine to its own financial advantage."

"Proponents say that it's more than just a matter of probability. The laws of physics don't seem that different from code in a program, according to some, and it's likely that with enough time, a sufficiently advanced civilization could crunch the numbers and produce a simulation that mimics the existence and behavior of every particle in our universe."

"The Wheelie 7 kit equips a wheelchair with artificial intelligence to detect the user's expressions and process the data in real-time to direct the movement of the chair. Smiling, raising the eyebrows, wrinkling the nose or puckering the lips as if for a kiss are among the repertoire of 10 gestures recognised by the prototype Wheelie 7."

"This month, in an open-access study published in PLOS One, a team reported the first brain implant system that lets patients use their thoughts to navigate an off-the-shelf Android tablet. Compared to previous generations, this system doesn't require training-for example, learning to type on a different, non-QWERTY keyboard-or specialized interface equipment. With just her thoughts, T6 was able to send emails, chat with other paralyzed patients in the trial, Google random questions, and even shop on Amazon. For the first time since she became paralyzed, T6 regained access to the entire commercially-available Google Play ecosystem and the digital world."

"A time is coming in which you may see more memorial accounts on Facebook than active users, with academics estimating that accounts belonging to the deceased will outnumber the living within 50 years."