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"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."

""I'd like to ask you," NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asked Russian leader Vladimir Putin on a televised call-in show, "does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals?" Putin, a former KGB agent and head of Russia's intelligence service, spoke about what they had in common: spycraft. "

"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."

"As Americans continue to grapple with media distrust, conspiracy theories, bots, trolls, and general panic amid multiple unprecedented crises, Twitter is once again trying a new method of identifying misinformation. A new feature in development at the social media platform, called "Birdwatch," was first reported by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong (h/t Tech Crunch) in early August. "

"Deepfakes have arrived to US elections, with a faked audio call purporting to be Joe Biden reaching voters in New Hampshire earlier this year. Artificial intelligence tools allow people to create spoofed audio easily and cheaply - so easily and cheaply that a journalist can do it! We created some fake audio clips of both Biden and Donald Trump using Parrot AI, an app with audio renditions of public figures that users can input words into. You can make audio of what sounds like Biden, Trump or a host of other high-profile speaking, and it sounds real-ish."

"Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was asked to act to take down terrorist-sympathising websites from his search engines during a question and answer session at the literary festival on Saturday. This weekend MPs, including the Labour politician Paul Flynn, called on the company to prevent searches listing sites for groups such as the Islamist organisation Al Shabaab. Schmidt said: "We cannot prima facie identify evil and take it down. We have taken the decision that information if it's legal, even if it's despicable, will be indexed.""

"The NSA has a tool that records and analyzes all the flow of data that the spy agency collects around the world. Think of it as a global data-mining software that details exactly how much intelligence, and of what type, has been collected from every country in the world. It's aptly called "Boundless Informant." "

"Google released a beta test version of its Chrome browser that attempts to keep your data secure even if today's uncrackable encryption becomes tomorrow's code-breaking cakewalk. The Chrome 54 beta gets the ability to encipher data sent to and from websites with a technology called CECPQ1. It "protects against future attacks using large quantum computers," Google said in a blog post Thursday."

"To thwart such hackers, Elon Musk's OpenAI and Pennsylvania State University released a new tool this week called "cleverhans," that lets artificial intelligence researchers test how vulnerable their AI is to adversarial examples, or purposefully malicious data meant to confuse the algorithms. Once the vulnerability has been found, a defense to the attack can automatically be applied."

""Let's decide what it means to be a programmer,"Martin says in the video. "Civilization depends on us. Civilization doesn't understand this yet." His point is that in today's world, everything we do like buying things, making a phone call, driving cars, flying in planes, involves software. And dozens of people have already been killed by faulty software in cars, while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel.  "We are killing people," Martin says. "We did not get into this business to kill people. And this is only getting worse.""

"Concerns have been growing about AI's so-called "white guy problem" and now scientists have devised a way to test whether an algorithm is introducing gender or racial biases into decision-making."

"IDFC Bank has launched an app called Aadhaar Pay that aims to help millions of its citizens without a smartphone to pay for their purchases digitally with just their fingerprint.  Merchants will be able to download the app on their Android smartphones and attach a fingerprint scanner device. To make payments, buyers will only have to choose their bank name, input their unique Aadhaar number and scan their fingerprint, which acts as a password to make the payment directly from their bank account linked to their Aadhaar card."

"Now, researchers from Incapsula have delved into the world of cut-rate DDoS providers, who market their services for $5 a pop on the website Fiverr. The DDoSers figleaf their offerings by calling them "stress testers" that website owners can use to determine whether their sites are configured to handle lots of traffic, but as the Incapsula team found, most will cheerfully attack sites other than your own (though one vendor said he wouldn't attack "government state websites, hospitals"). "

"Bruce Schneier makes the point that if the Russian state is behind the DNC hacks, there's no reason to expect that its attacks on the US political system will end there. Voting machines are so notoriously terrible that they'd be a very tempting target for Russia or other states that want to influence the outcome in 2016 (or merely destabilize the US by calling into question the outcome in an election). "

"Researchers have demonstrated how garbled speech commands hidden in radio or video broadcasts could be used to control a smartphone. The clips, which sound like the Daleks from Doctor Who, can be difficult for humans to understand but still trigger a phone's voice control functionality. The commands could make a smartphone share its location data, make calls and access compromised websites."

"A cryptocurrency is only as reliable as the technology that keeps it running, and Ethereum is learning this the hard way. An attacker has taken an estimated $60 million in Ethereum's digital money (Ether) by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, an investment collective. The raider took advantage of a "recursive call" flaw in the DAO's code-based smart contracts, which administer the funds, to scoop up Ether many times in a single pass."

"DeepCoder uses a technique called program synthesis: creating new programs by piecing together lines of code taken from existing software - just like a programmer might. Given a list of inputs and outputs for each code fragment, DeepCoder learned which pieces of code were needed to achieve the desired result overall. "It could allow non-coders to simply describe an idea for a program and let the system build it""