Deepfakes are video manipulations that can make people say seemingly strange things. Barack Obama and Nicolas Cage have been featured in these videos. You probably feel pretty comfortable navigating the internet. You might even be among the 1 in 5 people who created a website. Or maybe you're part of the 48% with "make a website" on their to-do list.

Not all voice assistants can handle the same requests. We put Siri, Alexa and Google to the test. Personal digital assistants – the voice-based interfaces that started with Apple's Siri – were supposed to enable entirely new and significantly more intuitive ways of interacting with our devices, but they ended up being so frustrating that many people gave up on them. Thankfully, we're starting to see some significant advances in phone-based digital assistants, and recent developments from both Microsoft's Build and Google's I/O (and likely from Apple's upcoming WWDC) developer conferences all highlight the important progress that has been made. These conferences, primarily intended for software developers to learn about new advances in the host company's technology platforms, also serve as a great guidepost for consumers to understand how technology is evolving.

San Francisco supervisors approved a ban on police using facial recognition technology, making it the first city in the U.S. with such a restriction. SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco supervisors voted Tuesday to ban the use of facial recognition software by police and other city departments, becoming the first U.S. city to outlaw a rapidly developing technology that has alarmed privacy and civil liberties advocates. The ban is part of broader legislation that requires city departments to establish use policies and obtain board approval for surveillance technology they want to purchase or are using at present. Several other local governments require departments to disclose and seek approval for surveillance technology. "This is really about saying: 'We can have security without being a security state. We can have good policing without being a police state.' And part of that is building trust with the community based on good community information, not on Big Brother technology," said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who championed the legislation.

People care about their privacy, but not enough to quit buying gadgets that expose their personal data, says a new study on consumer habits. Consumers International and the Internet Society surveyed thousands of people across North America, Europe and Asia to better understand the relationship between consumers and'smart' devices -- a term they defined as'everyday device and products that can connect to the internet.' The study did not include phones and mobile apps, which present a vast and more complex array of privacy issues. What they found was that many respondents using products like Google Home or Amazon Echo, fitness wearables, gaming consoles and internet-connected home appliances shared concern over how those devices harvest and share their personal data. Consumers think that data collection of their smart devices is'creepy' according to a new study of consumers across the world.

In this Oct. 31 photo, a man has his face painted to represent efforts to defeat facial recognition. It was during a protest at Amazon headquarters over the company's facial recognition system. In this Oct. 31 photo, a man has his face painted to represent efforts to defeat facial recognition. It was during a protest at Amazon headquarters over the company's facial recognition system. San Francisco has become the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and city agencies.

In a gallery in downtown Manhattan, people are huddling around four laptops, taking turns to control the apartments of 14 complete strangers. They watch via live video feeds, and respond whenever the residents ask "Someone" to help them. They switch the lights on and off, boil the kettle, put some music on – whatever they can do to oblige. The project, called Someone, is the latest in a series exploring our ever more complicated relationship with technology. It's by the American artist Lauren McCarthy and is a sort of outsourcing of Lauren, an earlier work in which she acted as a real-life Alexa, remotely watching over a home 24 hours a day, responding to its occupants' questions and needs like a flesh and blood version of Amazon's voice-operated virtual assistant. Lauren, a video work, features in AI: More Than Human, which opens this week at the Barbican in London as part of its Life Rewired season, an investigation into what it means to be human in the digital era.

Colibri Digital is a technology consultancy company founded in 2015 by James Cross and Ingrid Funie. The company works to help its clients navigate the rapidly changing and complex world of emerging technologies, with deep expertise in areas such as big data, data science, machine learning, and cloud computing. Over the past few years, they have worked with some of the world's largest and most prestigious companies, including a tier 1 investment bank, a leading management consultancy group, and one of the World's most popular soft drinks companies, helping each of them to make better sense of its data and process it in more intelligent ways. Tom Joy is studying for a PhD at the University of Oxford in the field of Semantic SLAM, which is the process of simultaneously localizing a robot in space; producing a map/understanding of the surrounding area whilst also detecting and delineating objects in 3D space. Achieving this requires a high level of competency in computer vision, machine learning, and optimization.

A couple of years ago, there was a joke doing the rounds at technology conferences that AI in business is like teenagers and sex: everyone talks about it, but few actually get it. Is the ribald witticism outdated in 2019? Or has the increased hype enveloping AI that it will magically solve most business problems only further confused executives? So much so they are not engaging with AI's myriad technologies or are left clumsily fumbling with algorithms that fail to perform, while cannier rivals score big. Moreover, has the crucial point that AI in business is best utilised as a means of achieving very specific, narrow-focused objectives, and is not an end point in itself, been obscured by the sheer volume of misleading buzz?

The FAA plans to release its remote identification ruling for UAS in July, UAS Integration Office Executive Director Jay Merkle said in front of Congress last week. The remote ID rules -- often compared to license plates for drones -- would allow the FAA, police officers and other public officials to look up a UAS by a broadcast unique identifier and find out information about the operator. This would go hand-in-hand with registration rules to prevent uncooperative flights around airports or other illegal uses from going unpunished. "We are working currently to ensure that we keep the policy component along with standards and remote id infrastructure all developed and harmonized," Merkle said during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about integrating new entrants into the National Airspace System. Remote ID has its detractors, who say it exposes too much private information of operators, but the FAA determined that it is necessary since, unlike with a car, the operator is not present, and there needs to be some accountability attached to that anonymity.

Google Dataset Search: Similar to how Google Scholar works, Dataset Search lets you find datasets wherever they're hosted, whether it's a publisher's site, a digital library, or an author's personal web page. Kaggle: A data science site that contains a variety of externally contributed to interesting datasets. You can find all kinds of niche datasets in its master list, from ramen ratings to basketball data to and even Seattle pet licenses. Although the data sets are user-contributed and thus have varying levels of cleanliness, the vast majority are clean. VisualData: Discover computer vision datasets by category, it allows searchable queries.