Macy's customers in stores across the country were in for a surprise while waiting in line to take their Black Friday hauls home. The credit card system at Macy's was reportedly down. Customers waiting in long lines in stores were tweeting that all non-Macy's cards were being declined by the system. The store had been advertising massive sales in the days leading up to Black Friday. The outage comes on one of the biggest shopping days of the year during which thousands of customers visit locations all across the country expecting great deals.

Uber rival Lyft is raising an additional $500 million in funding ion its ongoinjg battle with Uber, according to a U.S. share authorization document filed in Delaware. The additional funding round, led by Alphabet's CapitalG, is an extension of the $1 billion round announced in October. Lyft spokesman Adrian Durbin, confirming the funding round, in an e-mailed statement said, 'Increasing the potential for this round will allow us to further accelerate our commitment to serving passengers and drivers.' The additional funding round, led by Alphabet's CapitalG, is an extension of a $1 billion round announced in October, and raises the firm's valuation to $11.5 billion Axios was first to report the news. In October Lyft had said that the previous round of funding boosted its valuation to $11 billion from $7.5 billion.

U.S. ride-hailing firm Lyft has secured a permit to test autonomous vehicles in California, taking it one step further in the race with several other companies to bring self-driving cars to the masses. Lyft's permit, reflected on the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) website, comes two months after it announced plans to offer a self-driving car as a ride option in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lyft already has partnerships in place with autonomous car companies to advance its self-driving strategy. Ride-hailing firm Lyft Inc said on Monday it would launch its service in Toronto, marking the first international expansion for the U.S.-based rival of Uber Technologies Inc. Ford self-driving test vehicles will be connected to Lyft's network, but at first, customers will not be able to use them, according to Sherif Marakby, Ford's vice president for autonomous vehicles and electrification.

Your personal information might be at risk! In a public statement, Uber's CEO confirmed that information belonging to about 57 million customers and drivers was stolen by hackers. Transport for London (TFL), the governing body responsible for transport in London, announced on 22 September 2017 that they will not renew Uber's license as a private hire operator in the city. Transport for London has informed Uber London Limited that it will not be issued with a private hire operator licence after expiry of its current licence on 30 September 2017. SAN FRANCISCO -- Personal information belonging to about 57 million Uber customers and drivers was stolen by hackers last October, a breach the company kept hidden for a year and for which its chief security officer was fired this week.

In a press release, the telco said these "rapidly maturing" technologies, such as machine learning and adaptive security, will propel investment in data centres. Interestingly, though, data centres themselves may end up using this new tech as heavily as the customers. San Jose, California-based Litbit said in a recent blog post that it has developed the first AI-powered data center operator. Dac, as the AI tool is called, promises to find loose electrical hook-ups and leaking water, among other potential data centre disasters. Infrared vision is among Dac's skills, according to CEO Scott Noteboom.

Graphcore has today announced a $50 million Series C funding round by Sequoia Capital as the machine intelligence company prepares to ship its first Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) products to early access customers at the start of 2018. The Series C round enables Graphcore to significantly accelerate growth to meet the expected global demand for its machine intelligence processor. The funding will be dedicated to scaling up production, building a community of developers around the Poplar software platform, driving Graphcore's extended product roadmap, and investing in its Palo Alto-based US team to help support customers. Nigel Toon, CEO at Graphcore said: "Efficient AI processing power is rapidly becoming the most sought-after resource in the technological world. We believe our IPU technology will become the worldwide standard for machine intelligence compute. The performance of Graphcore's processor, compared to other accelerators, is going to be transformative, whether you are a medical researcher, roboticist, online marketplace, social network or building autonomous vehicles. "At Graphcore, we are focused on building a successful, enduring company that can serve the needs of all of those communities, over the long term.

Learn how to use Apache Hive to process Twitter data. The result is a list of Twitter users who sent the most tweets that contain a certain word. The steps in this document were tested on HDInsight 3.6. Linux is the only operating system used on HDInsight version 3.4 or greater. For more information, see HDInsight retirement on Windows.

RE•WORK are pleased to announce the launch of'Expo Only Passes' for the upcoming San Francisco events, on January 25 from 14:00 - 18:00. Plus, save 20% on passes to all RE•WORK summits with the code KDNUGGETS.

Mindfire, a new foundation with the goal of "decoding the mind" to help develop true artificial intelligence (AI) is launching November 17th in Zurich, Switzerland. Futurism spoke with the founder of Starmind and president of the foundation, Pascal Kaufmann to learn more about its goals and the path to reach them. "We cannot achieve True AI until we understand actual intelligence. Intelligence has evolved as a means of nature to successfully guide us through an ever-changing environment. This gave rise to behavior, emotions, and consciousness. These critical factors must be taken into account in how we develop AI. This is the purpose of the Mindfire Foundation," he explains.

Microsoft announced today that its Visual Studio integrated development environment is getting a new set of tools aimed at easing the process of building AI systems. Visual Studio Tools for AI is a package that's designed to provide developers with built-in support for creating applications with a wide variety of machine learning frameworks, like Caffe2, TensorFlow, CNTK, and MXNet. Once users have coded up models inside Visual Studio, the AI tools make it easier for them to send that code off to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform for training and deployment. Launching these tools brings a host of advanced capabilities to developers in a point-and-click format that would have previously required the use of a command line interface. It should make building AI systems more accessible for a class of developers that haven't been able to use Visual Studio's rich development environment to its full potential for that purpose.