A recently presented European Union plan to update long-standing product liability rules for the digital age -- including addressing rising use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation -- took some instant flak from European consumer organization, BEUC, which framed the update as something of a downgrade by arguing EU consumers will be left less well protected from harms caused by AI services than other types of products. For a flavor of the sorts of AI-driven harms and risks that may be fuelling demands for robust liability protections, only last month the UK's data protection watchdog issued a blanket warning over pseudoscientific AI systems that claim to perform'emotional analysis' -- urging such tech should not be used for anything other than pure entertainment. While on the public sector side, back in 2020, a Dutch court found an algorithmic welfare risk assessment for social security claimants breached human rights law. And, in recent years, the UN has also warned over the human rights risks of automating public service delivery. Additionally, US courts' use of blackbox AI systems to make sentencing decisions -- opaquely baking in bias and discrimination -- has been a tech-enabled crime against humanity for years. BEUC, an umbrella consumer group which represents 46 independent consumer organisations from 32 countries, had been calling for years for an update to EU liability laws to take account of growing applications of AI and ensure consumer protections laws are not being outpaced.

What we usually think of as Artificial Intelligence (AI) today, when we see human-like robots and holograms in our fiction, talking and acting like …

After turning heads with her paintings of icons like Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Paul McCartney, artificial intelligence robot Ai-Da made a historic appearance in the UK's House of Lords on October 11, where the sophisticated automaton answered questions as part of a wider inquiry into the relationship between technology and creativity in the modern world. Ai-Da's parliamentary cameo is a reminder that emerging AI technologies have a more diverse range of positive applications than many people might think. As well as its extensive use in the creative sector (which is often heralded as the defining distinction between human and robot), AI also has much to offer in terms of improving safety, efficiency, and the overall user experience in a variety of different industries and areas. Ai-Da might be commanding much of the headlines surrounding AI art at the moment, but she represents the merest tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI's contribution to the creative sector. Indeed, the gaming industry has been one of the driving forces and guinea pigs behind the development of the technology, with the first chess algorithms coming out in the 1950s and IBM's Deep Blue creating quite the storm in 1997 when it beat then-Grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

A new report from UN Climate Change says that the world might be on track for 2.5 C of warming by the end of the century, a potentially catastrophic level of warming that's far above the 1.5 C target of the 2015 Paris Agreement. I think it is time to seriously consider a specific solution in which AI can play a meaningful role: Climate geoengineering via stratospheric aerosol injection. Stratospheric aerosol injection involves spraying fine particles that reflect sunlight high in the atmosphere. By increasing the reflectivity (or albedo) of the planet, we can slow down the rate at which sunlight warms it, and thereby buy more time to reduce carbon emissions and develop mitigations. Harvard Professor David Keith explains the science behind this idea is in his book, A Case for Climate Engineering. At the current 1.1 C of warming, the world is already experiencing increased climate-related crises.

The Cyberguy, Kurt Knutsson, discussed how Microsoft is set to have ten thousand employees in China and warns about rogue fraudulent apps on phone app stores, on'Fox & Friends Weekend.' Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard – the video game company behind titles like "Guitar Hero," "Candy Crush," "World of Warcraft" and "Call of Duty" – in the largest tech acquisitions in history. Antitrust regulators are assessing whether the deal could hurt competition in the booming global video game industry, for numerous reasons including the fact that Microsoft already produces the widely used Xbox gaming console. Further consolidation in the tech industry elicits well deserved skepticism from regulators, but they should also consider how this deal could help America's greatest geopolitical adversary: China. To understand how, it's first important to understand Microsoft's long and close relationship with the People's Republic of China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Microsoft has operated in China for three decades, boasting on its website that its "most complete subsidiary and largest R&D center outside the United States is in China."

Tehran, Iran – Iran for the first time confirmed it sold drones to Russia, but said this happened "months" before the start of the war in Ukraine. Speaking to reporters after an event in Tehran on Saturday, Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian addressed claims by Western officials that Iranian drones were supplied to Moscow for its invasion, and that surface-to-surface missiles may also be on the way. "Their comments on the missiles part are completely wrong, and the drones part is correct. We gave a limited number of drones to Russia months and before the war in Ukraine," Amirabdollahian said. Iranian officials had previously said on numerous occasions that Tehran had "defence" cooperation with Russia, but had not supplied the Kremlin with arms "for the purpose of being used in the war in Ukraine".

Australian surf lifesavers are increasingly using drones to spot sharks at the beach before they get too close to swimmers. But just how reliable are they? Discerning whether that dark splodge in the water is a shark or just, say, seaweed isn't always straightforward and, in reasonable conditions, drone pilots generally make the right call only 60% of the time. While this has implications for public safety, it can also lead to unnecessary beach closures and public alarm. Engineers are trying to boost the accuracy of these shark-spotting drones with artificial intelligence (AI).

In 2015, General Qassem Suleimani, the architect of Iran's foreign military strategy, travelled to Moscow to see President Vladimir Putin. He had a pitch--and a plea. During their two-hour meeting, Suleimani rolled out large maps of the battlefield in Syria, which was in the fifth year of a civil war with disparate rebel groups and had lost control of a third of its territory to ISIS jihadis. The stakes for Russia were high. For decades, Syria had been its only steadfast ally among the twenty-two Arab countries.

Conspiracy theorists have posted official White House videos of Mr. Biden on TikTok and offered debunked theories that he is a deepfake. The political consultant Roger Stone claimed on Telegram in September that footage showing him calling for violence ahead of the 2020 election, which CNN aired, was "fraudulent deepfake videos." Lawyers for at least one person charged in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021 have tried to cast doubt on video evidence from the day by citing "widely available and insidious" deepfake-making technology. "When we enter this kind of world, where things are being manipulated or can be manipulated, then we can simply dismiss inconvenient facts," said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who sits on TikTok's content advisory council. Tech companies have spent years trying new tools to spot manipulations such as deepfakes.

The use of supervised Machine Learning (ML) to enhance Intrusion Detection Systems has been the subject of significant research. Supervised ML is based upon learning by example, demanding significant volumes of representative instances for effective training and the need to re-train the model for every unseen cyber-attack class. However, retraining the models in-situ renders the network susceptible to attacks owing to the time-window required to acquire a sufficient volume of data. Although anomaly detection systems provide a coarse-grained defence against unseen attacks, these approaches are significantly less accurate and suffer from high false-positive rates. Here, a complementary approach referred to as 'One-Shot Learning', whereby a limited number of examples of a new attack-class is used to identify a new attack-class (out of many) is detailed. The model grants a new cyber-attack classification without retraining. A Siamese Network is trained to differentiate between classes based on pairs similarities, rather than features, allowing to identify new and previously unseen attacks. The performance of a pre-trained model to classify attack-classes based only on one example is evaluated using three datasets. Results confirm the adaptability of the model in classifying unseen attacks and the trade-off between performance and the need for distinctive class representation.