Nintendo fans will soon have to start paying for the privilege of playing video games online with their friends. The video game company has finally revealed when online functionality, which has been free to access for all players since the launch of the Nintendo Switch last year, will become a paid-for extra for owners of the console. Switch Online will launch on September 18 2018 and cost £18 ($20) for an annual subscription, or £3.49 This marks the first time Nintendo has charged players to access online multiplayer features, which were available for free on the Wii and the Wii U. A free seven-day trial will be available to all Switch owners at launch. Nintendo fans will soon have to pay for the privilege of playing the online elements of their favourite games.

Facebook is expanding its fake news spotting systems to include photos and videos as part of its ongoing battle to halt the spread of misinformation on its service. Following successful trials in France, India, and Mexico, the company said it will now roll-out the system in 17 countries worldwide in a bid to staunch what it has branded'misinformation in these new visual formats.' The Artificial Intelligence (AI) system feeds potentially fake content to human fact-checkers, who use visual verification techniques such as reverse image searching and analysing image metadata to check the veracity of photos and videos. Previously, the company's efforts to tackle misinformation had been focused on rooting out false articles and webpage links. Russian agents and other malicious groups seeking to influence democratic elections in the US and elsewhere have repeatedly used images and video.

Google's secretive plans in China are attracting renewed scrutiny from privacy advocates. The tech giant is said to be building a prototype version of a censored Chinese search engine that links users' activity to their personal phone number, according to the Intercept. In doing so, it would be able to comply with the Chinese government's censorship requirements, increasing the chances that such a product would launch there in the future. A bipartisan group of 16 US lawmakers asked Google if it would comply with China's internet censorship and surveillance policies should it re-enter the search engine market there While China is home to the world's largest number of internet users, a 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that the country had the most restrictive online use policies of 65 nations it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria. But China has maintained that its various forms of web censorship are necessary for protecting its national security.

It's called'Aibo,' and is promoted as using artificial intelligence to respond to people looking at it, talking to it and touching it. Japanese customers have already bought over 20,000 units, and it is expected to come to the U.S. before the holiday gift-buying season – at a price nearing US$3,000. Why would anyone pay so much for a robotic dog? My ongoing research suggests part of the attraction might be explained through humanity's longstanding connection with various forms of puppets, religious icons, and other figurines, that I collectively call'dolls.' These dolls, I argue, are embedded deep in our social and religious lives.

What will happen as we enter the era of human augmentation, artificial intelligence and government-by-algorithm? James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention, said: "Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is the central challenge of the twenty-first century." A lot of folks are earnestly exploring the topic. "Will scientists soon be able to create supercomputers that can read a newspaper with understanding, or write a news story, or create novels, or even formulate laws?" asks J. Storrs Hall in Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2007). "And if machine intelligence advances beyond human intelligence, will we need to start talking about a computer's intentions?" Sharing this concern, SpaceX/Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk has joined with Y Combinator founder Sam Altman to establish OpenAI, an endeavor that aims to keep artificial intelligence research -- and its products -- accountable by maximizing transparency and openness. Among the most-worried is Swiss author Gerd Leonhard, whose new book Technology Vs. Humanity: The Coming Clash Between Man and Machine, coins an interesting term, "androrithm," to contrast with the algorithms that are implemented in every digital calculating engine or computer. Some foresee algorithms ruling the world with the inexorable automaticity of reflex, and Leonhard asks: "Will we live in a world where data and algorithms triumph over androrithms…i.e., all that stuff that makes us human?"

Online sci-fi shooter Destiny, released in 2014, had a strange effect on some of its players. Unlike World of Warcraft, or most other games that people play every day, it didn't have hundreds of hours' worth of different planets to visit, enemies to defeat or characters to get to know. You could play through the entirety of Destiny's story in 10 hours; beyond that, it offered only a small selection of daily "strike" missions and an arena to challenge other players in shootouts. Yet people played for hours every day. A significant portion of players spent a thousand hours or more with the game over two or three years, as recorded by the ironically titled WastedOnDestiny.com.

FOR the time being, Cape Town has dodged a bullet. After months of unrelenting drought, the recent winter rains have begun to refill its parched dams. That doesn't mean things are easy. City residents are still limited to using 50 litres of water a day, scarcely enough to half-fill a bath. But at least so-called day zero, when the taps run dry and residents have to wait in line to collect survival rations of water, has been averted.

Three US Representatives have sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence asking for a report on deepfake technology, how it could be used to harm the US and any countermeasures that can be taken to detect and deter nefarious use of the technology. While deepfakes gained notoriety when Reddit users began swapping celebrity faces onto porn stars, the potential for the technology's use in misinformation campaigns has generated a fair amount of concern. "Forged videos, images or audio could be used to target individuals for blackmail or for other nefarious purposes," the lawmakers said in their letter. The added, "Of greater concern for national security, they could also be used by foreign or domestic actors to spread misinformation. As deep fake technology becomes more advanced and more accessible, it could pose a threat to United States public discourse and national security, with broad and concerning implications for offensive active measures campaigns targeting the United States."

Forest loss is being driven by various factors, including commodity production, forestry, agriculture, wildfire, and urbanization. Curtis et al. used high-resolution Google Earth imagery to map and classify global forest loss since 2001. Just over a quarter of global forest loss is due to deforestation through permanent land use change for the production of commodities, including beef, soy, palm oil, and wood fiber. Despite regional differences and efforts by governments, conservationists, and corporations to stem the losses, the overall rate of commodity-driven deforestation has not declined since 2001. Global maps of forest loss depict the scale and magnitude of forest disturbance, yet companies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations need to distinguish permanent conversion (i.e., deforestation) from temporary loss from forestry or wildfire.

We consider the problem of learning a binary classifier only from positive data and unlabeled data (PU learning). This problem arises in various practical situations, such as information retrieval and outlier detection (Elkan and Noto, 2008; Ward et al., 2009; Scott and Blanchard, 2009; Blanchard et al., 2010; Li et al., 2009; Nguyen et al., 2011). One of the theoretical milestones of PU learning is Elkan and Noto (2008) and there are subsequent researches called unbiased PU learning (du Plessis and Sugiyama, 2014; du Plessis et al., 2015), where the classification risk is estimated in an unbiased manner only from PU data. We consider the case-control scenario (Ward et al., 2009; Elkan and Noto, 2008), where positive data are obtained separately from unlabeled data and unlabeled data is sampled from the whole population. Under this setting, the true class-prior π p(y 1) in unlabeled data is needed for the formulation of unbiased PU learning.