One of the world's biggest networks of hijacked computers has been dismantled after a four-year investigation, the EU law enforcement agency Europol says. The Avalanche network was used to target online bank customers with phishing and spam emails, it adds. More than a million emails were sent per week with malicious files or links. When users opened them, their infected computers became part of the network. Five people have been arrested, but Europol has not said where.

This has not been shown in public. And no, it does not make coffee. Deep in the heart of the 17,000 attendees at Slush – the insanely busy, loud and dark conference in Helsinki – I found Karsa.fi a small stand with a big claim; they keep bombs off planes. Plane travel – while safer than it has ever been is still a concern for those in the planes as those on the ground. Terrorism – or rather fear of it – is at record levels (despite figures that suggest a decline in major incidents) so Karsa.fi's

It certainly has been another long week in cybersecurity. First, news that a third party hacked a group allegedly connected to the NSA and made off with secret "hacking tools" rocked the industry. It was shortly followed by news of cyber attacks in the form of smart email "bombs" raining down upon the mailboxes of .gov News of new ransomware-as-a-service platforms added to the headache, as did news of two big PoS hacks where credit card information may have been stolen from retailers, hotels and restaurants. As summer wanes and stretches towards Labor Day, it will also be hard to forget the hack of the servers at the Democratic National Committee.

Question: can AI vision systems from Microsoft and Google, which are available for free to anybody, identify NSFW (not safe for work, nudity) images? Can this identification be used to automatically censor images by blacking out or blurring NSFW areas of the image? Method: I spent a few hours creating in some rough code in Microsoft office to find files on my computer and send them to Google Vision and Microsoft Vision so they could be analysed. I spent a few hours over the weekend just knocking some very rough code. Yes, they did reasonably well at (a) identifying images that could need censoring and (b) identifying where on the image things should be blocked out. Follow on question: Why aren't sites like Facebook and Instagram automatically deploying this technology to identify images and allowing users to choose whether they wish to see such images? How do we know how much of our internet is already censored invisibly?

It used to be thought certain memories were forgotten forever But a study has identified a region of the brain these can be'tucked away' Researchers brought them back by prompting subjects and using magnets This technique could help those with disorders of thought, like depression But a study has identified a region of the brain these can be'tucked away' Understanding what kind of information the brain stores, and what it keeps handy for easy access is not fully understood, but a new study shines light on the concept. Can't hear yourself think in the office? Overhearing other... Hackers could someday wirelessly take over your BRAIN:... The Danish city powered by POO: Aarhus burns sewage waste to... Facebook's artificial intelligence to monitor live videos... Can't hear yourself think in the office? Overhearing other... Hackers could someday wirelessly take over your BRAIN:...

Artificial intelligence (AI) will emerge as a key marketing point in the smartphone industry next year, with the world's leading handset manufacturers scrambling to add more AI functions to their upcoming flagship devices. The move comes as big data technology, allowing devices to make human-like predictions, has been identified as a core feature for a paradigm shift in the global handset market which has stagnated in recent years. The weak growth has been attributed to toughened rivalry among existing players and a slowdown in terms of technological innovations from industry-leading handset makers ― such as Samsung Electronics and Apple ― according to observers. According to market researcher Gartner, the smartphone market has reached 90 per cent penetration in key global markets this year - including the United States, Europe and Japan ― where lifecycles for premium handsets are extended to 2.5 years on average. The trend will prolong over the next five years, added the firm.

Programming is one of todays most in demand skills but as we continue to train, not code our latest computer systems, the trend won't last Before the invention of the computer, most experimental psychologists thought the brain was an unknowable black box that they'd never be able to unravel – let alone understand. You could analyze a subject's behaviour but thoughts, memories, emotions? That stuff was obscure and inscrutable, beyond the reach of science. So these behaviorists, as they called themselves, confined their work to the study of stimulus and response, feedback and reinforcement. They gave up trying to understand the inner workings of the mind and this doctrine ruled the field for four decades. MIT breakthrough lets virtual reality gamers cut the chord Then, in the mid 1950s, a group of rebellious psychologists, linguists, information theorists, and early artificial intelligence (AI) researchers came up with a different conception of the mind. People, they argued, were not just collections of responses that had been conditioned over millions of years, they absorbed information, processed it, and then acted upon it. They had systems for writing, storing, and recalling memories. They operated via a logical, formal syntax. It was more like a computer. The so called cognitive revolution started small, but as computers became standard equipment in psychology labs across the country, it gained broader acceptance. By the late 1970s, cognitive psychology had overthrown behaviorism, and with the new regime came a whole new language for talking about the brain. Psychologists began describing thoughts as programs, ordinary people talked about storing facts away in their memory banks, and business gurus fretted about the limits of mental bandwidth and processing power in the modern workplace.

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Facebook is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning. The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material.

One of Silicon Valley's most idiosyncratic players -- the Mozilla Foundation -- just reported a 28% leap in revenue for 2015, to $421 million, with cash flow more than tripling, to about $80 million. Further increases appear likely this year. In a section of its newly released annual report, called The State of Mozilla, the foundation said that in 2017, Mozilla will invest in more mobile-product development and will build a recommender system for the web, known as Context Graph. Mozilla also said that in 2017 it will launch its first Internet Health Report. This will examine "the state of the open internet . . .