The three college-age defendants behind the creation of the Mirai botnet--an online tool that wreaked destruction across the internet in the fall of 2016 with unprecedentedly powerful distributed denial of service attacks--will stand in an Alaska courtroom Tuesday and ask for a novel ruling from a federal judge: They hope to be sentenced to work for the FBI. Josiah White, Paras Jha, and Dalton Norman, who were all between 18 and 20 years old when they built and launched Mirai, pleaded guilty last December to creating the malware that hijacked hundreds of thousands of Internet of Things devices, uniting them as a digital army that began as a way to attack rival Minecraft video game hosts, and evolved into an online tsunami of nefarious traffic that knocked entire web hosting companies offline. At the time, the attacks raised fears amid the presidential election targeted online by Russia that an unknown adversary was preparing to lay waste to the internet. The original creators, panicking as they realized their invention was more powerful than they had imagined, released the code--a common tactic by hackers to ensure that if and when authorities catch them, they don't possess any code that isn't already publicly known that can help finger them as the inventors. That release in turn lead to attacks by others throughout the fall, including one that made much of the internet unusable for the East Coast of the United States on an October Friday.

It's hard to believe how quickly the future is approaching. Waymo, formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project, plans to launch its first commercial service for self-driving cars later this year, essentially a fully automated ride-hailing service covering about 100 square miles in Phoenix, Arizona. The company is called Navya, and its two self-driving cars currently on sale include the Autonom Shuttle and the smaller Autonom Cab. Both run on fully electric power, and while the top speed is 55 mph the vehicles are intended for urban environments only where maximum speeds reached are only around 30 mph. Navya says its vehicles have been designed for "last mile" travel, i.e. the final leg of a trip.

Researchers in Germany have developed a new standardized workflow for sustainable marine image analysis. Researchers at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany have developed a new standardized workflow for sustainable marine image analysis. The workflow is divided into three steps: data acquisition, data curation, and data management. The researchers created CoMoNoD, an artificial intelligence algorithm that automatically records whether manganese modules are present in a photo, in what size, and at what position. The researchers plan to use the workflow and the newly developed programs during their next expedition in the spring.

Artificial intelligence has a bias problem and the way to fix it is by making the tech industry in the West "much more diverse", according to the head of AI and machine learning at the World Economic Forum. Just two to three years ago, there were very few people raising ethical questions around the use of AI, Kay Firth-Butterfield told CNBC at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China. But ethical questions have now "come to the fore," she said. "That's partly because we have (the General Data Protection Regulation), obviously, in Europe, thinking about privacy, and also because there have been some obvious problems with some of the AI algorithms." Theoretically, machines are supposed to be unbiased.

Imagine landing at a major airport and the only human official you meet on your way through the terminal is a customs officer. Singapore's Changi International Airport, voted the world's best for the past six years by Skytrax, is pursuing that goal of extensive automation with such vigor that it built an entire terminal to help test the airport bots of the future. Here's an idea of what Asia's second-busiest international airport is implementing. As a plane joins the long line to land, it's detected, identified and monitored by an array of cameras and technology that bypass the traditional control tower. Once at the gate, a laser-guided aerobridge positions itself to let passengers disembark, while automated vehicles below unload baggage, dodging others that are delivering robot-packed meals or processing cargo.

A futuristic, solar-powered yacht which can cruise the globe without stopping to refuel has been unveiled by its Swiss designers. The electric SolarImpact yacht is longer than a blue whale and topped with enough solar panels to cover a regulation-size tennis court. The boat sleeps ten people, on top of accommodation for the small crew, and is loaded with artificial intelligence that allows it to be driven by a single person. Pictured is an artist's impression of the all-electric SolarImpact yacht. The yacht is the result of five years of research by Zurich firm SolarImpact Yacht AG, which has not revealed an expected price or release date for its design.

Nintendo Switch Online is finally arriving. It's only taken a year-and-a-half: the Switch was first released in March 2017. But Nintendo hopes that it will be worth the wait, with a host of new features that could improve the Switch immeasurably. Chief among them is the ability to properly play games online against each other. 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.

Economists of all stripes would agree that investment and the application of technology drive economic activity. For decades governments around the world have made strenuous efforts to encourage investment and new technologies. Last year this orthodoxy came under fire from an unexpected source. In an interview with Quartz Bill Gates made the case for taxing robots at the same rate as human workers: "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think that we'd tax the robot at a similar level."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a key tool in the cyber security expert's arsenal to fight new threats inside IT infrastructure, according to a global study produced by analysts at the Ponemon Institute and funded by Aruba, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's (HPE's) networking unit. This 12 page buyer's guide gives you the tools you need to get up to scratch with GDPR compliance and to understand the mythology surrounding the new rules. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid. This email address is already registered.

These are perhaps the most powerful and important four words a woman can hear after a breast-screening visit. X-ray based mammography is an effective screening tool for detecting cancer, but what many women may not know is that breast screening programs produce a high level of false positive results, particularly after multiple years of screening. In other words, women are informed they may have cancer when in fact they don't. This is particularly true in the US, where each study is generally read by a single, expert radiologist. In Europe, two independent radiologists read each study.