Artificial intelligence research group OpenAI last month made the unusual announcement: It had built an AI-powered content creation engine so sophisticated that it wouldn't release the full model to developers. Anyone who works in cybersecurity immediately knew why. Phishing emails, which try to trick recipients into clicking malicious links, originated 91 percent of all cyberattacks in 2016, according to a study by Cofense Inc. Combining software bots to scrape personal information from social networks and public databases with such a powerful content generation engine could produce much more persuasive phishing emails that might even mimic a certain person's writing style, said Nicolas Kseib, lead data scientist at TruSTAR Technology LLC. The potential result: Cybercriminals could launch phishing attacks much faster and on an unprecedented scale. That danger neatly sums up the never-ending war that is the state of cybersecurity today, one in which no one can yet answer a central question: Will artificial intelligence provide more help to criminals or to the people trying to stop them?

Studying complexity of various bribery problems has been one of the main research focus in computational social choice. In all the models of bribery studied so far, the briber has to pay every voter some amount of money depending on what the briber wants the voter to report and the briber has some budget at her disposal. Although these models successfully capture many real world applications, in many other scenarios, the voters may be unwilling to deviate too much from their true preferences. In this paper, we study the computational complexity of the problem of finding a preference profile which is as close to the true preference profile as possible and still achieves the briber's goal subject to budget constraints. We call this problem Optimal Bribery. We consider three important measures of distances, namely, swap distance, footrule distance, and maximum displacement distance, and resolve the complexity of the optimal bribery problem for many common voting rules. We show that the problem is polynomial time solvable for the plurality and veto voting rules for all the three measures of distance. On the other hand, we prove that the problem is NP-complete for a class of scoring rules which includes the Borda voting rule, maximin, Copeland$^\alpha$ for any $\alpha\in[0,1]$, and Bucklin voting rules for all the three measures of distance even when the distance allowed per voter is $1$ for the swap and maximum displacement distances and $2$ for the footrule distance even without the budget constraints (which corresponds to having an infinite budget). For the $k$-approval voting rule for any constant $k>1$ and the simplified Bucklin voting rule, we show that the problem is NP-complete for the swap distance even when the distance allowed is $2$ and for the footrule distance even when the distance allowed is $4$ even without the budget constraints.

On August 13, 2018, President Trump signed the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018 (FIRRMA). The law's intent is to stop China's acquisition of critical technologies -- the'crown jewels' of U.S. global power. FIRRMA expands the powers of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to review the national security implications of foreign investments. The CFIUS reform bill subjects more transactions to review and mandates that foreign investments in critical technologies are reported to the committee. Championed initially as a strong response to China's technology transfer strategy, FIRRMA's passage, coupled with ongoing trade and IP tensions, caused Chinese investments into U.S. technology firms to decline by 79% in 2018.

Before the New Work Summit last week, The New York Times asked leaders who were participating in the conference to answer their choice of questions about technology. Their responses have been edited and condensed. In 2013, when I was the D.O.D.'s No. 2 official, I issued a policy directive on autonomous weapons that is still in force. The U.S. takes its values to the battlefield, and the directive says that a human must be involved in and responsible for decisions aided by A.I. to employ lethal weapons. The same moral compass should govern commercial applications of A.I., such as credit ratings, prison sentencing and privacy.

Arms manufacturers are rushing to develop missile systems to take down drones. Arms makers are targeting the growing menace of drones at airports and on battlefields with a rush to develop new missile systems, radar jammers and laser cannons. U.S. forces, along with Middle East allies and Russian troops, have been forced to confront hostile drone operations. Commercial flights at some of the world's busiest hubs--in New York, London and Dubai--have been grounded in recent months amid concerns that nearby drones could endanger airliners. The rising number of incidents has put the threat in the public eye and propelled interest in anti-drone technology.

In what might be the biggest Google search of the decade, CNET reports that NASA has used Google's machine learning technology to discover a new exoplanet. Orbiting Kepler-90, a sun-like star 2,545 light years away from Earth, Kepler-90i is an extremely hot, rocky, and barren planet that orbits its star in 14.4 days. Aside from its extreme temperatures, the planet is notable for the fact that it is the eighth planet discovered in the Kepler-90 system, making the system itself tied with ours in the number of planets which orbit a star. Kepler-90i is also notable for the way in which it was discovered. NASA made use of Google's machine learning to analyze data collected by the Kepler Space Telescope.

It's been a long time coming, but the Pentagon said it's ramping up a program designed to address a shortfall of cyber experts in its civilian workforce. Defense officials told Congress they're dedicating more staff to the implementation of the Cyber Excepted Service, and may want to expand it to include other positions like data scientists and artificial intelligence experts. Congress created the CES more than three years ago, letting DoD set up streamlined hiring processes and new pay scales for cyber experts. DoD officials acknowledge they've been slow to use those authorities. They've only placed about 500 jobs into the new system so far. It's been a long time coming, but the Pentagon said it's ramping up a program designed to address a shortfall of cyber experts in its civilian workforce.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule arrives at the International Space Station for the first time on March 3, 2019 after launching from Kennedy Space Center. A SpaceX capsule that could be astronauts' next ride to orbit from the United States safely reached the International Space Station early Sunday, completing a flawless daylong voyage from Kennedy Space Center on its first test flight. The Crew Dragon eased into a docking port at 5:51 a.m., becoming the first privately designed and operated spacecraft capable of flying to people to visit the outpost. The station had not hosted a U.S. crew ship for nearly eight years, since Atlantis on NASA's final space shuttle mission in July 2011. Since then, only Russia's Soyuz has flown astronauts up and down.

It is nearly impossible to traverse web news or popular media today without being assaulted by vast amounts of propaganda on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is perhaps the fad to end all fads as it supposedly encompasses almost every aspect of human existence, from economics and security to philosophy and art. According to mainstream claims, AI can do almost everything and do it better than any human being. And, the things AI can't do, it WILL be able to do eventually. Whenever the establishment attempts to saturate the media with a particular narrative, it is usually with the intent to manipulate public perception in a way that produces self fulfilling prophecy. In other words, they hope to shape reality by telling a particular lie so often it becomes accepted by the masses over time as fact.

Washington, DC (CNN Business)Tesla is selling its cars with the option of "full self-driving capability," a feature that's drawing criticism from experts on self-driving technology. They say CEO Elon Musk is playing fast and loose with definitions, overselling the technology and potentially creating safety issues. When Tesla announced the $35,000 Model 3 Thursday, it said it would come with an optional $5,000 feature: full self-driving capability. The system will offer "automatic driving on city streets" as an update later this year, according to Tesla's website. A Tesla spokeswoman declined to comment on details around the automatic driving option, and pointed CNN Business to fine print on Tesla's order page that tells buyers the currently enabled features require "active" driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.