Drones are experiencing something of an arms race for aerial domination. As fast as the technology develops to make the unmanned vehicles better in the air, new ways are being developed to take them down. Video footage has emerged of a soldier in the US using a'cyber rifle' to take down a drone, causing it to lose power instantly in flight before falling out of the air. Video footage has emerged of a US soldier using a'cyber rifle' to take down a drone, causing it to lose power instantly in flight and fall out of the air (still pictured). The cyber-rifle is built by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point in the US, and was tested in front of the US Secretary for Defense, Ash Carter.

From the World Economic Forum – Davos 2016, we have the probing panel discussion below that examines the state of AI in 2016. How close are technologies to simulating or overtaking human intelligence and what are the implications for industry and society?

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews." Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic.

Bitcoin is a purely online virtual currency, unbacked by either physical commodities or sovereign obligation; instead, it relies on a combination of cryptographic protection and a peer-to-peer protocol for witnessing settlements. Consequently, Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique characteristic further, using heuristic clustering to group Bitcoin wallets based on evidence of shared authority, and then using re-identification attacks (i.e., empirical purchasing of goods and services) to classify the operators of those clusters. From this analysis, we consider the challenges for those seeking to use Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale. Demand for low friction e-commerce of various kinds has driven a proliferation in online payment systems over the last decade. Thus, in addition to established payment card networks (e.g., Visa and Mastercard), a broad range of the so-called "alternative payments" has emerged including eWallets (e.g., Paypal, Google Checkout, and WebMoney), direct debit systems (typically via ACH, such as eBillMe), money transfer systems (e.g., Moneygram), and so on. However, virtually all of these systems have the property that they are denominated in existing fiat currencies (e.g., dollars), explicitly identify the payer in transactions, and are centrally or quasi-centrally administered. By far the most intriguing exception to this rule is Bitcoin. First deployed in 2009, Bitcoin is an independent online monetary system that combines some of the features of cash and existing online payment methods. Like cash, Bitcoin transactions do not explicitly identify the payer or the payee: a transaction is a cryptographically signed transfer of funds from one public key to another.

I appreciated Phillip G. Armour's use of coupled pendulums as an analogy for software project management in his The Business of Software column "The Chaos Machine" (Jan. Chaos is already being exhibited when Armour's machine performs smoothly, in the sense future behavior is inherently unpredictable. What happened when the machine made a hop was not that it "hit a chaos point" but apparently some "resonance disaster" that caused it to exceed the range of operation for which it was built. Moreover, "turbulence" is not an appropriate description in this context, as it describes irregular movement in fluid dynamics. Chaotic behavior does not require three variables.

When William Legrand finally decrypted the string, it did not seem to make much more sense than it did before. But at least it did sound more like natural language, and eventually guided the main character of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug"36 to discover the treasure he had been after. Legrand solved a substitution cipher using symbol frequencies. He first looked for the most frequent symbol and changed it into the most frequent letter of English, then similarly inferred the most frequent word, then punctuation marks, and so on. Both before and after 1843, the natural impulse when faced with some mysterious message has been to count frequencies of individual tokens or subassemblies in search of a clue. Perhaps one of the most intense and fascinating subjects for this kind of scrutiny have been biosequences. As soon as some such sequences became available, statistical analysts tried to link characters or blocks of characters to relevant biological functions.

Marvin Minsky, an American scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) who co-founded vthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI laboratory, wrote several books on AI and philosophy, and was honored with the ACM A.M. Turing Award, passed away on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016 at the age of 88. Born in New York City, Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Phillips Academy, before entering the U.S. Navy in 1944. After leaving the service, he attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950. He then went to Princeton University, where he built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, the Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator (SNARC), before earning his Ph.D in mathematics there in 1954. Doctorate in hand, Minsky was admitted to the group of Junior Fellows at Harvard, where he invented the confocal scanning microscope for thick, light-scattering specimens, decades in advance of the lasers and computer power needed to make it useful; today, it is in wide use in the biological sciences.

Zittrain, J. Engineering an election – digital gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy.

It is widely regarded as one of the greatest human achievements ever made, but putting a man on the moon was no cheap undertaking. The Apollo missions to send just 12 men onto the dusty lunar surface cost 25 billion ( 17 billion) – estimated to be worth around 170 billion ( 120 billion) in modern monetary value. But it appears we may be able to send humans back to our rocky satellite and set up a permanent base where they could live for just a fraction of the cost. The cost of building a base on the moon could be a fraction of what has been previously expected. Scientists say it may be possible to build a permanent base (illustrated) housing 10 people within the next five to seven years for around 10 billion.

The Yomiuri ShimbunA short-form novel "coauthored" by humans and an artificial intelligence (AI) program passed the first screening process for a domestic literary prize, it was announced on Monday. However, the book did not win the final prize. Two teams submitted novels that were produced using AI. They held a press conference in Tokyo and made the announcement, which follows the recent victory of an AI program over a top Go player from South Korea. These achievements strongly suggest a dramatic improvement in AI capabilities. The following sentences come from the end of one of the the novels, "Konpyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi" (The day a computer writes a novel): "I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement.