When the cybersecurity industry warns of digital threats to the "internet of things," the targets that come to mind are ill-conceived, insecure consumer products like hackable lightbulbs and refrigerators. But one group of researchers has shown how hackers can perform far more serious physical sabotage: tweaking an industrial robotic arm to cost millions of dollars worth of product defects, and possibly to damage the machinery itself or its human operator. Researchers at the security firm Trend Micro and Italy's Politecnico Milano have spent the last year and a half exploring that risk of a networked and internet-connected industrial robot. At the IEEE Security & Privacy conference later this month, they plan to present a case study of attack techniques they developed to subtly sabotage and even fully hijack a 220-pound industrial robotic arm capable of wielding gripping claws, welding tools, or even lasers. The ABB IRB140 they compromised has applications in everything from automotive manufacturing to food processing and packaging to pharmaceuticals.

This article originally appeared on the Motley Fool. IHS estimates that there will by 76 million autonomous vehicles on the road by 2035, and Boston Consulting Group expects the driverless car market to be worth $77 billion by that year. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to upend the transportation and technology industries, something that isn't lost on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). Both companies have been in the spotlight recently for their self-driving vehicle plans, so let's take a look at what each is doing with driverless car technology and why. A recent Wall Street Journal article (paywall) said Amazon created a driverless car technology group about a year ago with the intention of figuring out how to use autonomous vehicles to improve its delivery process.

Many consumers will be disappointed to discover that Windows 10 S won't play nice with two of Google's key products. The new operating system, which is intended as a streamlined and more secure version of Windows 10, was unveiled this week. It only runs apps that can be downloaded from the Windows Store, which unfortunately doesn't have the most generous selection at the moment. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Today we present the Mapillary Vistas Dataset--the world's largest and most diverse publicly available, pixel-accurately and instance-specifically annotated street-level imagery dataset for empowering autonomous mobility and transport at the global scale. Since we started our expedition to collaboratively visualize the world with street-level images, we have collected more than 130 million images from places all around the globe. While this number keeps growing at a frantic pace, we are putting serious efforts into researching, implementing, publishing, and releasing smarter computer vision models that can help us understand the semantics within this data. As stated in an earlier blog post, we keep advancing supervised deep learning models as our primary workhorses to extract information that is valuable to our community and improve our products. However, such models are inherently hungry for data--and in particular for a lot of precisely annotated data.

Software robots can perform human tasks, such as reading screens, saving email attachments, and importing info into a company's database. The $30m raised last week by UiPath, which builds apps to automate repetitive office work, is the largest investment a Romanian startup has ever received. Its tools are used by leading companies working in financial services, insurance, and healthcare, and each software robot license can replace up to five low-skilled full-time human employees, UiPath says. New robotic process automation tools can take over mundane data entry and other process tasks for your IT team. The firm's software robots mimic human users.

Here's what some big western companies are called in China China's Tencent has joined the exclusive $300 billion club. Tencent shares closed at a record high of 248.40 Hong Kong dollars (just under $32) on Tuesday, valuing the company at more than $302 billion. Tencent (TCEHY) joins Apple (AAPL, Tech30) and Google-parent Alphabet (GOOGL, Tech30) in the ranks of the world's biggest firms by market capitalization. It's the only firm outside the U.S. among the world's top 10 most valuable companies, and is now nipping at the heels of JPMorgan (JPM), which is currently worth $309 billion. Tencent isn't the first Chinese company to achieve the eye-popping number.

Twitter's (TWTR) investment in computers that function like a human brain is paying off, in more ways than one. Aside from helping to draw people back to the social media website, the company's growing status in artificial intelligence (AI) is also attracting attention from high profile investors. In an interview with CNBC's Squawk Alley, billionaire businessman Mark Cuban confirmed that he has recently been buying Twitter stock, as well as shares in other big names that work in AI, deep learning and machine learning, such as Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix (NFLX). In the interview, which sent the company's embattled shares up 4 per cent, Cuban claimed that firms specializing in AI are likely to experience better productivity and higher revenues off a smaller workforce, which should subsequently boost earnings. Cuban's encouraging comments came after the social media giant credited better than expected quarterly earnings to machine learning techniques.

Like nearly all of the other major car makers, Peugeot believes the next generation of cars will be autonomous. We've already seen the Instinct Concept -- which imagines a future where vehicles blend self-driving tech, home automation and cloud connectivity to deliver the best riding experience -- but to get there, the company needs to do the hard miles. Thanks to a partnership with MIT spin-off nuTonomy, the French carmaker has begun doing just that with the launch of a new self-driving pilot in Singapore. Under the agreement, nuTonomy's self-driving software and "specialized sensors" will be installed in customized Peugeot 3008s over the course of this summer and then unleashed on Singapore's streets in September. Should it be a success, both companies will consider expanding the pilot to more cities, allowing them to better understand how the vehicles behave in urban environments and assess how drivers interact with the automated systems.

According to AgFunder's 2016 AgTech Investing Report (supported by The Robot Report's own research), 2016 drone funding fell 64% from 2015 levels. Also, the type of companies getting funded were sensor, payload and analytics-based add-ons or service-providing companies rather than drone makers. In 2015, according to AgFunder, the largest drone deal was DJI's $75 million followed by 3D Robotics' $64 million. In 2016, the largest deal was 3D Robotics' $27 million and the majority of drone tech deals closed during the year were seed stage (15 out of 25), whereas there was an even split between late and seed stage deals in 2015. The Robot Report's year-end article: 2016 best year ever for funding robotics startup companies included 27 UAS deals. The largest was for $43.8 million to a meds drone delivery service, Zipline International.

Hundreds of Google Play apps are potentially exposing Android users to hackers, according to a new study. University of Michigan researchers used a custom-built tool called OPAnalyzer to scan 24,000 apps, and found 410 that could allow cyber criminals to steal users' data and remotely install malware onto smartphones. Several of those apps are extremely popular, having been downloaded by millions of users. One even comes pre-installed on some phones. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.