The rise in consumer usage of ad blockers is leading to a few creative alternatives to try to achieve a'better relationship' between ad tech and web browsers. To wit Russia's Yandex, which has just announced it's adding a complaint button to its Android browser to lets users report ads they find annoying. Filing an ad complaint will send a report to Yandex which will initiate custom ad filtering for that user, using machine learning technology to hone the individual model over time. It will also be feeding intel back to advertisers so they can "create more targeted and effective campaigns that are relevant to users, reducing the need to install ad blocking software". So in theory users making use of the ad complaint button should see ads more pleasing/relevant to them over time, as well as eyeballing fewer ads they find annoying.

Indian artificial intelligence startups are disrupting the fashion industry by helping brands identify trends on how consumers buy clothes. Brands are crunching time to bring new designs to market using the underlying technology that help predict consumer trends, while increasing sales of their new selections. Typically, brands freeze new designs nine months to one year in advance of the respective seasons. "More than half of the branded clothes by big retailers are sold in discounts. Brands think they know their customers, yet they have not been able to clearly identify what their choice is," says Ganesh Subramanian, founder and chief executive officer of Stylumia, an artificial intelligence and computer vision startup.

On Sunday, the Japanese prime minister turned up at the Olympics closing ceremonies to promote the 2020 Tokyo games dressed up as Mario, the eponymous hero of the popular video game series created in 1985. Who is Mario and how did he come by his global appeal? Japanese animation and game characters from Hello Kitty to Pac Man also made appearances in the closing ceremonies. But none of them may have the global reach of Super Mario, the game franchise that was a hit when Nintendo's video game system and Game Boy burst onto the scene in the 1980s. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's appearance as Super Mario was a crowd-pleasing reminder of how much the game helped spur on the videogame revolution in the U.S. and globally.

Lyft is disputing reports from The New York Times and other sites (including Engadget) that the company is actively seeking a buyer. "Getting approached and then having it characterized as us wanting to sell the business and failing to do so is a large mischaracterization," President John Zimmer told Business Insider. The NYT reported that Lyft tried to sell itself to Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber and Didi Chuxing, Uber's new partner in China. However, it added that the company has 1.4 billion cash in the bank and is not exactly desperate. Lyft recently cemented a partnership with GM on self-driving vehicles to keep up with Uber, which is developing its own fleet. We need to let people know that we're not looking for a buyer, so that's not a legitimate part of the story.

Microsoft Corp.'s acquisition of the smart scheduling app Genee reflects a drive to add artificial intelligence to all of its digital experiences. The deal, announced Monday, could let Microsoft enhance its virtual assistant Cortana, to better compete with Alphabet Inc.'s Google Now and Apple Inc.'s Siri, as CIO Journal's Angus Loten reports. With Genee, Cortana could automatically set up business meetings by interpreting keywords in email. Though AI gets much attention these days, many CIOs don't have a clear idea about how to use the technology or maximize its value. Microsoft is expanding its AI expertise partly through acquisition, recently buying Wand Labs, a smart messaging app, and SwiftKey, a tool that predicts what users want to type next.

Hot Chips Samsung has revealed the blueprints to its mystery M1 processor cores at the heart of its S7 and S7 Edge smartphones. International versions of the top-end Android mobiles, which went on sale in March, sport a 14nm FinFET Exynos 8890 system-on-chip that has four standard 1.6GHz ARM Cortex-A53 cores and four M1 cores running at 2.3 to 2.6GHz. Only two M1 cores are allowed to kick it up to the maximum frequency at any one time to avoid draining batteries and overheating pockets. The M1, codenamed Mongoose, was designed from scratch in three years by a team in the US, and it runs 32-bit and 64-bit ARMv8-A code. In benchmarks, the Exynos 8890 SoC is behind Apple's iPhone 6S A9 chip in terms of single-core performance, but pushes ahead in multi-core tests.

You might think of drones as friendly things, like the DJI Phantom you fly yourself or those Amazon drones that could soon be delivering your groceries. Think again when it comes to military drones. An MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle with a 66-foot wingspan can loiter 50,000 feet above the Earth for a day at a time, poised to hit a target with a devastating 3,800 pounds of Hellfire missile payload. But as with all weapons, the awesome firepower of a drone needs to be aimed accurately. "It's less about technology than about strategy, about the way it's deployed," said Gavin Hood, director of drone drama "Eye in the Sky," out now on DVD and Blu-ray.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

A U.N. working party will adopt guidelines as soon as November for preventing cyberattacks on network systems used in self-driving vehicles, a source involved in the negotiations said. The guidelines will call on automakers to introduce specific measures for alerting drivers when attacks are detected and preventing the loss of control over the vehicles, according to the source. Discussions on the topic at the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations in Geneva has been led by Japan and Germany, while the United States is planning to establish its own safety regulations separate from the U.N. measures. Autonomous driving, which frees drivers from controlling a vehicle, involves artificial intelligence technology and requires use of a network of electronic devices that collect and exchange data known as the internet of things. But such networks have proven vulnerable to hackers trying to take over self-driving vehicles.

The idea for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's surprising "Super Mario" appearance at the closing ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics came originally from former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, now president of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics organizing committee. The behind-the-scenes story was disclosed by Toshiro Muto, director-general of the committee. "I hear he (Abe) willingly accepted our request when we told him he was the most suitable person to go on stage to raise publicity for the 2020 Games," Muto said Monday. At the Rio closing ceremony Sunday, Abe popped up from a huge green pipe, dressed as Mario from Nintendo Co.'s popular "Super Mario Bros." video game franchise. Tokyo 2020 organizers said in a statement that the idea came up during a brainstorming session.