The vast data breach that might be the biggest ever posted on the internet is just the beginning, cyber security experts have warned. The trove of sensitive information known as Collection #1 was published to the internet this week, allowing anyone to download a collection of hundreds of millions of email addresses and passwords. They are likely to be used for years, as hackers attempt to break into people's personal acounts. But there are a host of similar collections being passed around the web, many of which are far bigger than the collection that arrived this week, researchers say. Cyber security journalist Brian Krebs reported that he had spoken to someone selling the collection, and that it is just one part of a numbered series that taken together dwarfs the initial data breach that has been posted publicly.

As he writes The Wall Street Journal the first to be turned off was the room voice assistant Churi who could not answer the simplest questions or was activated in the middle of the night whenever he heard snoring. However, the wearers switched off in snow or rain and were criticized by the customers as too slow. While the receptionists, the famous velociraptor check-in staff, did not know how to give information about the places to visit or the schedules of the planes. The robots are already obsolete after a few years or new and advanced by further models. But the hotel manager decided not to update his robots and flip the page, relying on human resources this time. It warns, however: The time of the robots is not over anyway.

Japan successfully launched on Friday morning a low-cost Epsilon rocket carrying seven satellites built by 10 organizations, including a space venture aiming to create artificial shooting stars. The launch by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) of the Epsilon-4 rocket, from Uchinoura Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, is the first since new rules were set in November to promote private-sector space development activities. Among the satellites sent into space was one developed by Tokyo-based ALE Co. that plans to replicate a meteor shower by releasing metal pieces into the atmosphere. It was accompanied by a land and weather observer named MicroDragon, developed by engineers from the Vietnam National Satellite Center with the support of professors from Japanese universities. ALE founder and CEO Lena Okajima, 39, and some 20 employees of the space venture took part in a tour to observe the launch along with more than 700 other people at a site about 3 kilometers from the space center. "It was a beautiful launch.

"You can use either aerial imagery or satellite imagery to do basically the same task, but a lot faster," says Aidan Swope, a Caltech undergrad who created the algorithm as an intern at the tech startup Descartes Labs. Because taking a census by hand takes months or years, some trees are inevitably cut down before it's complete, so the final map won't be completely accurate. And these censuses typically also only include street trees, not trees in parks or on private property, while the algorithm includes everything. The tool uses a convolutional neural network, similar to those used for facial recognition. While it's not hard for a machine to find green areas in an aerial image, Swope also trained the model with lidar data, a type of remote sensing data that shows height, making it possible to distinguish trees from grass or other plants.

Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd. (NSE: LTI, BSE: 540005), a global technology consulting and digital solutions company has acquired Ruletronics, a pure-play Pega consulting and implementation company with offices in the UK, USA, and India. "Pega is a leader in Intelligent Business Process Management segment with more than 3,000 customers globally. Ruletronics brings significant Pega and BPM expertise along with unique client relationships that will help us grow our digital business further. Ruletronics enables businesses to transform and evolve digitally by providing innovative BPM and CRM solutions leveraging Pega Platform. Their current industry strength lies across Insurance, Banking, Healthcare and Retail segments. The company offers unique product based offerings for Disability Claims management, KYC Bulk Remediation, and Insurance Sales & Service applications. The acquisition will strengthen LTI's rapidly growing digital business with a suite of capabilities in Pega implementation space around establishing BPM Roadmap & Strategy, Customer Services, RPA and Decisioning. Nachiket Deshpande, COO, LTI, said: "Pega is a leader in Intelligent Business Process Management segment with more than 3,000 customers globally.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - The world's largest maker of consumer drones, China's SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd, expects losses of more than 1 billion yuan ($150 million) for 2018 due to internal corruption, the state-run China Securities Journal said on Friday.

As fintech disruptors change how everything works, banks and financial institutions are either partnering with them or developing and deploying their own solutions. With the world becoming one enormous marketplace, we have seen a constant change in how businesses take place. This has been further fueled by new technologies and rapidly evolving customer expectations. Even the highly regulated banking and finance sector has in recent times witnessed the constant metamorphosis of its business models to stay ahead in disruptive times. When it comes to the financial services ecosystem, the fintech industry plays a significant role in determining how the sector moves forward.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) can bring additional economic output of around US$13 trillion by 2030, boosting global GDP by about 1.2 per cent a year, according to a recent McKinsey report. This net growth comes after taking in the costs of automation on the labour force, even as the consultancy flagged that workers must be ready for jobs to be transformed by technology. The potential behind AI comes as an estimated 70 per cent of global companies is due to adopt at least one form of such technology by 2030, said the McKinsey Global Institute report that was released in September. As a rough guide, this compares against the introduction of steam engines during the 1800s that lifted labour productivity by an estimated 0.3 per cent a year; the productivity gains from the use of robots during the 1990s at about 0.4 per cent, and the impact from the use of IT during the 2000s that raised productivity by an annual 0.6 per cent. The economic impact from using AI may emerge gradually and be visible only over time, with McKinsey expecting a S-curve adoption of AI - a pattern that suggests a slow start given the investment associated with learning and deploying the technology, and then an acceleration driven in part by competition.

Despite its struggles in some countries, virtual reality has steadily grown in popularity throughout China over the last few years, so Microsoft -- better known for its augmented reality headset HoloLens than its VR initiatives -- is getting in on the action. As reported by China's Xinhua news agency, the company today launched the Nanchang City AI VR Innovation Center, a cloud and mobile technology incubator geared towards startups and established manufacturing companies. Though the center's name suggests that Microsoft will focus equally on artificial intelligence and virtual reality initiatives, the incubator was apparently designed to cater to the VR industry in the Jiangxi province, which created a first-of-kind industrial base within China for VR technologies. The local government expects that Microsoft's incubator will "lure dozens of AI, VR and other tech companies" into Nanchang City's Honggutan New District, and expects it to be used to train and support local companies. Microsoft's interest in AI has been strong and clear over the past year, most recently spanning everything from AI-powered suggestions in Microsoft 365 to AI-focused ecological research grants and general availability of Azure Machine Learning.

In our latest collaboration, Jordan Erica Webber teams up with Ian Sample of the Guardian's Science Weekly podcast to look at why artwork produced using AI is forcing us to confront how we define creativity