"The FBI can issue national security letters to conduct online surveillance in the US without court approval, but requests often come with a gagging order, which prevents websites from publicly disclosing them. To get around this, many websites state that they have not received any classified requests."

"But with the Snowden revelations and the widespread understanding of ubiquitous Internet surveillance (something that a minority was always aware of, of course), sociologists have observed a marked chilling effect on political and social discourse, as people who disagree with the majority fear that their searches and discussions will be observed, correlated, logged and use to ascribe guilt to them. "

"In just a few short years, ransomware -- malware that encrypts all the files on the computer and then charges you for a key to restore them -- has gone from a clever literary device for technothrillers to a cottage industry to an epidemic to a public menace. "

"Google announced on its blog that it is expanding upon Safe Browsing to alert Gmail users about the possibility of suspicious government activity. Since 2012, Google has put a banner on top of users' Gmail pages that had a warning about state-sponsored attackers if Google believed they were in danger, but starting today people will get a full-page warning about it - very hard to miss."

"A new method to crack open locked iPhones is so promising that US government officials have classified it, the Guardian has learned."

"A month after a hospital in Hollywood was shut down by a ransomware infection that encrypted all the files on its computers and computer-controlled instruments and systems, another hospital, this one in Kentucky, has suffered a similar fate. "

" In other words: get ready for an era when even the most plausible videos aren't safe from a little computer trickery."

"More specifically: delivery robots. What you see here is DRU (Domino's Robotic Unit), an autonomous delivery vehicle built in collaboration with Australian technology startup Marathon Targets that Domino's says is the first of its kind. It's filled with thousands of dollars worth of military robotics tech, but its covert mission has been to deliver fresh pizza to the residents of Queensland."

"TeslaCrypt ransomware with new features that are impossible to crack, according to Cisco's Talos security arm. That means user infected with the latest version (3.01) of the malware can no longer use white hat-engineered software to get their files back. Until someone finds a new solution -- and that seems unlikely -- victims will have to pay."

"The malware was delivered through multiple ad networks, and used a number of vulnerabilities, including a recently-patched flaw in Microsoft's former Flash competitor Silverlight, which was discontinued in 2013. When the infected adverts hit users, they redirect the page to servers hosting the malware, which includes the widely-used (amongst cybercriminals) Angler exploit kit. That kit then attempts to find any back door it can into the target's computer, where it will install cryptolocker-style software, which encrypts the user's hard drive and demands payment in bitcoin for the keys to unlock it."

"But the blockchain looks set to change that. Right now, there are a number of startups that are working on tools to record ownership of a property (intellectual or physical) onto the blockchain, like Tieron, Monegraph, Colu, and Ascribe."

"A 24-year-old university student, Kong Raya, was sentenced to 18 months in jail on Tuesday, after being found guilty of inciting crimes with an anti-government post he made on Facebook, a Phnom Penh court said."

"in the post-Snowden era, we can no longer address the "digital divide" just by providing access -- we also have to teach people how their online usage is spied on, how that will harm them, and what to do about it. "

"The proto-currency known as RSCoin has vastly greater scope than Bitcoin, used for peer-to-peer transactions by libertarians across the world, and beyond the control of any political authority. The purpose would be turned upside down. RSCoin would be a tool of state control, allowing the central bank to keep a tight grip on the money supply and respond to crises. It would erode the exorbitant privilege of commercial banks of creating money out of thin air under a fractional reserve financial system."

"According to tweets from DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, however, this time AlphaGo really did make mistakes. The AI "thought it was doing well, but got confused on move 87," Hassabis said, later clarifying that it made a mistake on move 79 but only realized its error by 87. AlphaGo adjusts its playing style based on its evaluation of how the game is progressing."

""Could teaching be trumped by a learning machine? Are we beginning to glimpse the possibility of machines that teach themselves to teach? They learn what works, what doesn't and deliver ever better performance. We see the embryonic evidence for this in adaptive learning systems, that are truly algorithmic, and do use machine learning, to improve as they deliver. The more students they teach, the better they get. They even tech themselves. This is not science fiction. This is real AI, in real software, delivering real courses, in real institutions." - Donald Clark"

"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."

"Google stunned the world by defeating Go legend Lee Se-dol yesterday, and it wasn't a fluke - AlphaGo, the AI program developed by Google's DeepMind unit, has just won the second game of a five-game Go match being held in Seoul, South Korea. AlphaGo prevailed in a gripping battle that saw Lee resign after hanging on in the final period of byo-yomi ("second-reading" in Japanese) overtime, which gave him fewer than 60 seconds to carry out each move."

"The US computer programmer came up with the idea of electronic messages that could be sent from one network to another in 1971. His invention included the ground-breaking use of the @ symbol in email addresses, which is now standard."

"On the other side of the table will be his opponent: Alphago, a programme built by Google subsidiary DeepMind which became, in October, the first machine to beat a professional human Go player, the European champion Fan Hui. That match proved that Alphago could hold its own against the best; this one will demonstrate whether "the best" have to relinquish that title entirely."