The war rages on over the connected home--an idea that home appliances and accessories will all be connected to the Internet. Soon, your fridge will send a text message when the milk is running low. For most people, that prospect is still far from being today's reality. But this Black Friday will spark the first battle between Amazon Echo and Google Home. Both products bill themselves as a Wi-Fi speaker and a sort of Siri-in-a-tube that answers users' spoken questions.

Tens of thousands of people are calling on Parliament to recall the "most extreme spying powers ever seen". The Investigatory Powers Bill was just passed through the House of Lords and so is now just weeks away from becoming law. But signatories to a new petition hope that process can be stopped, forcing lawmakers to keep the new powers from being published. The new law forces internet companies to keep a full browsing history of all of their users and give it up to a huge range of government agencies if they are asked. It also gives spies unprecedented powers to read people's messages, as well as forcing technology companies like Apple to hack into their own phones if they are asked.

With advances like 4K and HDR, it's been a big year for TVs. But like any new technology, separating the good from the bad is a tough task. We've spent hundreds of hours testing all the top TVs on the market in our state-of-the-art test labs with the goal of providing you with the very best recommendations. So whether you want a big-screen TV for the big game or a budget TV for catching up on your favorite Netflix shows, we've got you covered. These are the absolute best TVs we've tested all year, and the ones that we think you'll be happiest about putting in your living room. LG's 4K, HDR OLEDs dominated our top spots again this year, but as good as the G6, E6, and C6 OLEDs are, our favorite is by far the "mid-range" B6.

Japan plans to build a super-efficient computer that could vault it to the top of the world's supercomputer rankings by the end of next year. With a processing capacity of 130 petaflops, the planned computer would outperform the current world leader, China's Sunway TaihuLight, which delivers 93 petaflops. One petaflop is one million billion floating-point operations per second. Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) isn't just aiming to build the world's fastest supercomputers, it also wants to make one of the most efficient. It is aiming for a power consumption of under 3 megawatts -- a staggering figure, given that Japan's current highest entry in the Top500 supercomputer list, Oakforest-PACS, delivers one-tenth the performance (13.6 petaflops) for the same power.

It may take several years or even decades, but hackers won't necessarily always be human. Artificial intelligence -- a technology that also promises to revolutionize cybersecurity -- could one day become the go-to hacking tool. Organizers of the Cyber Grand Challenge, a contest sponsored by the U.S. defense agency DARPA, gave a glimpse of the power of AI during their August event. Seven supercomputers battled each other to show that machines can indeed find and patch software vulnerabilities. Theoretically, the technology can be used to perfect any coding, ridding it of exploitable flaws.

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At the inaugural O'Reilly AI conference, 66 artificial intelligence practitioners and researchers from 39 organizations presented the current state-of-AI: From chatbots and deep learning to self-driving cars and emotion recognition to automating jobs and obstacles to AI progress to saving lives and new business opportunities. There is no better place to imbibe the most up-to-date tech zeitgeist than at an O'Reilly Media event as has been proven again and again ever since the company put together the first Web-related meeting (WWW Wizards Workshop in July 1993). The conference was organized by Ben Lorica and Roger Chen, with Peter Norvig and Tim O'Reilly acting as honorary program chairs. Here's a summary of what I heard there, embellished with a few references to recent AI news and commentary: In contrast to traditional software, explained Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, "what is produced [by machine learning] is not code but more or less a black box--you can peak in a little bit, we have some idea of what's going on, but not a complete idea." Tim O'Reilly recently wrote in "The great question of the 21st century: Whose black box do you trust?": Because many of the algorithms that shape our society are black boxes… because they are, in the world of deep learning, inscrutable even to their creators – [the] question of trust is key.

With the advent of photography, a tiny fraction of 19th-century scientists believed they could develop methods of accurately identifying criminals by their facial features. While their hypotheses were eventually discredited, new artificial intelligence technology suggests their claims might've been valid after all. Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have resurrected this facial recognition tradition and built a neural network that can supposedly pick out criminals by simply looking at their faces. To accomplish this, the researchers used an array of machine-vision algorithms to examine a series of facial juxtapositions between photos of criminals and non-criminals with the goal of finding out whether a neural network can reliably tell them apart. In the process, the scientists fed the neural network a total of 1856 ID photos of men with no facial hair between the ages of 18 and 56, only half of whom had a criminal past.

TOKYO Japan plans to build the world's fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country's manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world's current best-performing machine. In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second - or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance - as early as next year, sources involved in the project told Reuters. At that speed, Japan's computer would be ahead of China's Sunway Taihulight that is capable of 93 petaflops.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan plans to build the world's fastest-known supercomputer in a bid to arm the country's manufacturers with a platform for research that could help them develop and improve driverless cars, robotics and medical diagnostics. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on the previously unreported project, a budget breakdown shows, as part of a government policy to get back Japan's mojo in the world of technology. The country has lost its edge in many electronic fields amid intensifying competition from South Korea and China, home to the world's current best-performing machine. In a move that is expected to vault Japan to the top of the supercomputing heap, its engineers will be tasked with building a machine that can make 130 quadrillion calculations per second - or 130 petaflops in scientific parlance - as early as next year, sources involved in the project told Reuters. At that speed, Japan's computer would be ahead of China's Sunway Taihulight that is capable of 93 petaflops.