Sunday, May 6, 2018

Chinese spies linked to decade-long hacking campaign

China's long-running hacking efforts may be more extensive than first thought. Security researchers at ProtectWise's 401TRG team have determined that a long series of previously unconnected attacks are actually part of a concerted campaign by Chinese...

Daniel Jones is said to have left Global Founders Capital to ‘raise his own fund’

Global Founders Capital, the venture capital arm of Rocket Internet, has seen a number of its London investment team leave over the last couple of years, but the most significant departure may have only just happened. According to multiple sources, Daniel Jones, General Partner at GFC, has left the VC firm and is thought to […]

Enterprise wasn’t ready for blockchain, so Manifold brought its ledger to consumers instead

While the cryptocurrency craze last year brought more consumer attention to blockchain technology, the future of this movement will be in the enterprise. Blockchain’s true potential is its ability to replace the archaic and centralized infrastructure that powers everything from payments to land registries with digital-first, decentralized, and trusted networks of data. Skepticism, though, abounds. […]

In Canada’s cloud services market, venture investment opportunities abound

Canada will be home to a new venture capital fund that will invest in enterprise cloud startups. Its backer? Salesforce Ventures, the global investment arm of Salesforce, a leading cloud-hosted business software provider.

Police face recognition misidentified 2,300 as potential criminals

Ask critics of police face recognition why they're so skeptical and they'll likely cite unreliability as one factor. What if the technology flags an innocent person? Unfortunately, that caution appears to have been warranted to some degree. South...

Kia unveils production Niro EV crossover with 280-mile range

When Kia unveiled the Niro EV at CES, it prompted one main question: how much would the electric crossover change between its flashy concept and the on-the-road car? We now have a better idea. Kia has unveiled the first details of the production Niro...

Our “modern” Congress doesn’t understand 21st century technology

Lorelei Kelly Contributor Lorelei Kelly leads the Resilient Democracy Coalition, a group working to make sure Congress succeeds in the Information Age. More posts by this contributor Slowly but surely, Congress will join us in the 21st century Is civic technology the killer app for democracy? Robert Bjarnason Contributor Share on Twitter Robert Bjarnason was […]

Chess can teach us how to implement AI in healthcare


It’s been more than 20 years since Garry Kasparov lost his famous chess match against IBM’s Deep Blue, which heralded much anxious commentary about how humanity was soon to be subjugated by the superior processing power of supercomputers. Two decades later and our cultural understanding of AI can feel like it’s still stuck in the nineties. Videos of increasingly agile robots from Boston Dynamics steal headlines about the AI-apocalypse, while AI’s application in other industries can be all but ignored by the mainstream. However, amid all the worry about AI taking jobs, there’s little informed debate and nowhere is this…

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Subscription hell

Another week, another paywall. This time, it’s Bloomberg, which announced that it would be adding a comprehensive paywall to its news service and television channel (except TicToc, its media partnership with Twitter). A paywall was hardly a surprise, but what was surprising was the price: the standard subscription is $35 a month (up from $0 […]

California to require solar panels on most new homes

There's no question that solar power is entering the mainstream, but California is about to give it a giant boost. The state's Energy Commission is expected to approve new energy standards that would require solar panels on the roofs of nearly all n...

'Eve Online' turns 15 today, and its history is epic

Today is the 15th anniversary of the legendarily fascinating virtual world EVE Online, a massively multiplayer spaceship game that has become famous for the incredible stories that sometimes emerge from the community about heists and wars between tho...

Kubernetes stands at an important inflection point

Last week at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen, we saw an open source community coming together, full of vim and vigor and radiating positive energy as it recognized its growing clout in the enterprise world. This project, which came out of Google just a few years ago, has gained acceptance and popularity astonishingly rapidly — […]

How automation will make dangerous oil rigs safer for workers


Offshore oil rigs can be extremely dangerous places to work. Over the last few decades, several offshore explosions have led to environmental disasters and the death of workers. Regulations have so far failed to stop fatal accidents from occurring. But with developments in technology, particularly the rise of automation, we’re hoping that future accidents can be reduced. Small offshore rigs are the subject of research for automated monitoring systems, which use a variety of wireless sensors. And, in a world first, an autonomous robot will soon be deployed to monitor equipment and inspect gas leaks on a North Sea rig.…

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Original Content podcast: No hiding from Netflix’s show about killer rain

We were skeptical about The Rain, a new Danish series from Netflix. Not that the trailer was bad, exactly. It’s just hard to take a show with the tagline “Stay Dry. Stay Alive.” very seriously. But here at the Original Content podcast, we don’t just judge shows by their trailers. No, we actually watched the […]

Aura is the app that helps you find your calm, happy place — and it’s almost 80% off


Sure, it might help you be more productive, but technology and relaxation don’t always work hand-in-hand. However, Aura Premium is staking out that very corner with an app-based meditation and stress relief regimen that’s won plenty of converts. Right now, you can secure a lifetime of Aura’s anxiety-draining services for just $79.99, an almost 80 percent saving off its regular price.

Personal privacy vs. public security: fight!

Personal privacy is a fairly new concept. Most people used to live in tight-knit communities, constantly enmeshed in each other’s lives. The notion that privacy is an important part of personal security is even newer, and often contested, while the need for public security — walls which must be guarded, doors which must be kept […]

After Math: Robot revolutionaries

The whole "fear of SkyNet" trope is a bit moot at this point, seeing as how robots have already infiltrated our roads, skies and cafeteria-style eateries. You can already see it happening with Lyft adding 30 self-driving vehicles to its Las Vegas fle...

YouTube pulls hundreds of videos over essay cheating ads

YouTube doesn't have it easy managing the ads it automatically inserts itself, but it's another challenge entirely to manage the ads baked into the videos themselves. The online video giant has pulled over 1,400 videos after a BBC investigation foun...

Facebook vs. Google: Clash of the privacy infringers


We all love free products and hey, if we have to give up some information about ourselves in exchange for those products, that’s just the price of free, right? But then, once our information was compromised in the most recent Facebook data leaks, we were all up in arms. “How could you do this to us? How could you let our information be compromised like this for the first time ever? We trusted you!” Don’t mind the fact that we couldn’t be bothered to read the Privacy Policy or actually protect our own information by refusing to give it to…

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How to stop people using your face for porn (or other scarier things)


If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video’s worth a thousand pictures. For as long as videos have existed, we’ve trusted them as a reliable form of evidence. Nothing is as impactful as seeing something happen on video (e.g. the Kennedy assassination) or seeing someone say something on video, especially if it’s recorded in an inconspicuous manner (e.g. Mitt Romney’s damning “47 percent” video). However, that foundation of trust is slowly fading as a new generation of AI-doctored videos finds their way into the mainstream. Famously known as “deepfakes,” the synthetic videos are created using an application called FakeApp,…

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