Amazon, Apple and Google voice assistants and smart TVs could find out if a person is cheating on their partner, a data expert has claimed. Smart gadgets, which are used by one in ten people around the UK, can harvest enough data to work out the dynamics of a relationship, they say. They have the potential to record saucy conversations and analyse location data to discover secret affairs. The virtual assistants can show when occupants are in a building, or for example, share a bedroom, by using sensor logs and smart meters. There is already ambiguity when it comes to these companies privacy policies and how they collect and use people's data.

On the heels of President Trump's State of the Union address making a case for increased border security and other initiatives, federal agencies have been moving quickly on artificial intelligence, Internet of Things and robocall spoofing. Meanwhile, the EU and Japan have entered into an agreement on cross-border data flows, and India is taking action on investment in e-commerce. Want our Strategic Policy Advisory team to take a look at other topics? Let us know in the comments! Earlier this week, President Trump signed the American AI Initiative, an Executive Order directing federal agencies to develop new AI R&D budgets, share resources with academia and industry, create educational programs to improve the AI talent pipeline, and develop regulatory guidances for AI implementation that balance innovation with civil liberties.

China steps up plans for using artificial intelligence to strengthen its military; Bill Hemmer reports. China wants to become the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030, and President Donald Trump is taking the necessary steps to ensure that won't happen. Last week, the president signed an executive order, the American AI Initiative, that will accelerate America's pursuit of the sophisticated AI capabilities necessary to maintain our military and economic dominance. The Chinese government exercises significant control over its domestic technology firms and frequently steals intellectual property from foreign companies that operate in the country. In addition, it has poured sizable resources into its AI programs in a deliberate effort to eclipse America in the race to perfect this world-changing technology.

Much more rapidly than anyone originally thought possible, facial recognition technology has become part of the cultural mainstream. Facebook, for example, now uses AI-powered facial recognition software as part of its core social networking platform to identify people, while law enforcement agencies around the world have experimented with facial recognition surveillance cameras to reduce crime and improve public safety. But now it looks like society is finally starting to wake up to the immense privacy implications of real-time facial recognition surveillance. For example, San Francisco is now considering an outright ban on facial recognition surveillance. If pending legislation known as "Stop Secret Surveillance" passes, this would make San Francisco the first city ever to ban (and not just regulate) facial recognition technology.

Yet the healthcare industry has been slow to commit to its potential. As recently as 2016, a Forrester Consulting survey found that just 34% of healthcare organizations had adopted predictive analytics, compared with 51% in all other industries. Healthcare was similarly behind in cognitive computing, at 23% versus 40% elsewhere. Among the pioneers, some organizations are already using AI to reduce physical trips to the doctor's office, improve patient care and rethink care delivery models that date to the 19th century. "I believe we can get to a world where we aren't just identifying your likelihood of utilizing the emergency room or being hospitalized, but getting in front of those situations and delivering proactive care," says Dr. Arta Bakshandeh, senior medical officer at Alignment Healthcare.

Online disinformation is only going to get more sophisticated, the chair of the committee investigating disinformation and fake news, Damian Collins, has warned. In a report released on Monday, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee said Facebook had in effect put democracy at risk by allowing voters to be targeted with disinformation and personalised "dark adverts" from anonymous actors. It called for the company to be regulated. "Where we can see lies being spread, particularly in election periods, we should have the ability to say to the tech companies: we want you to act against that content," Collins told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme. It's being spread maliciously and you should stop it." After an 18-month investigation, the DCMS found that British election laws were not fit for purpose and were vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors. Although he stopped short of saying that companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were breaking the law, Collins said the legislation was not robust enough and needed to be made clearer. Citing evidence of agencies working from Russia, as well as an unidentifiable organisation called the Mainstream Network that urged voters to lobby their MP to support a no-deal Brexit, Collins criticised the fact that the law did not require such actors to identify themselves. "No one knows who this organisation is, and I think in a democracy, citizens need to be informed … and the law doesn't require that." He predicted false information would become more convincing, saying that "deepfake films" featuring politicians giving inflammatory speeches they never gave could circulate social media in the near future. The interviewer, John Humphrys, interjected: "So it looks like you're saying, 'sack Theresa May', but in fact it's somebody else with your face superimposed?" Collins said: "In a situation like that we are going to want to be able to go to companies like Facebook and say this is clearly fake, its being released maliciously to try to influence people's opinion to spread anger and hate and it should be taken down because its not true.

In this Help Net Security podcast, Chris Morales, Head of Security Analytics at Vectra, talks about machine learning fundamentals, and illustrates what cybersecurity professionals should know. Hi, this is Chris Morales and I'm Head of Security Analytics at Vectra, and in this Help Net Security podcast I want to talk about machine learning fundamentals that I think we all need to know as cybersecurity professionals. AI has become very used within our industry more and more, and here at Vectra we are an AI company as well. As you start to hear more about AI, you have to start asking yourself what is it really, what makes a machine intelligent and in the next ten minutes I just want to give a quick overview so that you can understand some of the principle operations and applications of how machine learnings apply to build AI, and just kind of a quick understanding of the different algorithms or understanding when you need to use certain algorithms for specific jobs. There has always been a very muddled use of the terms artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning.

Nasa engineers said goodbye to the Opportunity rover with a touching final message. The little robot spent 15 years exploring the surface of Mars, sending back unprecedented amounts of information to engineers back on Earth. But months ago the signals it was sending back started to look worrying. It told Nasa its batteries were running low and it was getting dark – before it was swallowed by a dust storm that took over the entire planet. Since then, Nasa has been sending messages to the rover in the hope of waking it up and bringing it back to life.

Humans pricked by info-hunger pangs used to hunt and peck for scraps of trivia on the savanna of the internet. Now we sit in screen-glow-flooded caves and grunt, "Alexa!" Virtual assistants do the dirty work for us. Problem is, computers can't really speak the language. Many of our densest, most reliable troves of knowledge, from Wikipedia to (ahem) the pages of WIRED, are encoded in an ancient technology largely opaque to machines--prose.

Mars One Ventures, the company behind an improbable plan to colonize the red planet via global reality show, confirmed last week that it is now in bankruptcy. News reports of this demise brought on a whipping storm of schadenfreude: The "Fyre Festival of Space"--as several outlets called it--had been canceled before liftoff. "It was terribly mismanaged, shortsighted and possibly even fraudulent," said the New York Post. "The false promise is over," added Forbes. Forget the fact that Mars One failed; I mean, we all knew that it would fail.