For decades, the police and drivers with lead feet have engaged in a war of radars and radar detectors. Every time police radar technology improves, so do radar detectors to outsmart it. The same is true with cybersecurity. In turn, the technology that hackers use is also improved. It makes little sense to continue this way.

A Bill Gates-funded startup is seeking permission to test a new kind of drone detector at Sunday's Super Bowl game between the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots in Atlanta, Georgia. Echodyne, a Seattle-based company, filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Sunday to operate two experimental radars "in the immediate vicinity" of Mercedes-Benz Stadium to "alert security personnel, including Federal officers, of any unidentified drone activity during Super Bowl LIII". The drone tests would be conducted under the guidance and direction of the FBI. Atlanta police have said there will be a zero tolerance policy for drones near the Super Bowl stadium, with hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement officers watching for illegal flights. Reports of rogue drones grounded flights at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey last week, and forced the closure of Gatwick, Britain's second-busiest airport, for several days in December.

Nasa is trying to save its Opportunity rover, a robot that is feared dead on Mars. Engineers have been trying for months to revive the struggling rover, which hasn't been heard from since June. Nasa thinks it was knocked offline by a huge dust storm that engulfed the entire planet and covered Opportunity. Now the agency is sending it a host of new commands in an attempt to force the 15-year rover to get back in touch with Earth. "We have and will continue to use multiple techniques in our attempts to contact the rover," said John Callas, project manager for Opportunity at JPL. "These new command strategies are in addition to the'sweep and beep' commands we have been transmitting up to the rover since September."

If you see a video of a politician speaking words he never would utter, or a Hollywood star improbably appearing in a cheap adult movie, don't adjust your television set -- you may just be witnessing the future of'fake news.' 'Deepfake' videos that manipulate reality are becoming more sophisticated due to advances in artificial intelligence, creating the potential for new kinds of misinformation with devastating consequences. As the technology advances, worries are growing about how deepfakes can be used for nefarious purposes by hackers or state actors. Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security looks at a'deepfake' video of former US President Barack Obama manipulated to show him speaking words from actor Jordan Peele on January 24, 2019, in Washington'We're not quite to the stage where we are seeing deepfakes weaponized, but that moment is coming,' Robert Chesney, a University of Texas law professor who has researched the topic, told AFP. Chesney argues that deepfakes could add to the current turmoil over disinformation and influence operations. 'A well-timed and thoughtfully scripted deepfake or series of deepfakes could tip an election, spark violence in a city primed for civil unrest, bolster insurgent narratives about an enemy's supposed atrocities, or exacerbate political divisions in a society,' Chesney and University of Maryland professor Danielle Citron said in a blog post for the Council on Foreign Relations.

It's been seven months since NASA last made contact with the Opportunity rover – but, the team isn't ready to give up hope just yet. The rover celebrated a bittersweet 15th anniversary on Mars last week as it remains silent after a dust storm that blanketed the red planet back in June. Engineers on the Opportunity team say they're now trying out a new set of commands in attempt to wake up the robotic explorer over the next few weeks. Opportunity landed on Jan. 24, 2004, and logged more than 28 miles (45 kilometers) before falling silent during a global dust storm June 2018. There was so much dust in the Martian atmosphere that sunlight could not reach Opportunity's solar panels for power generation The new commands are an effort to coax the rover back into operation and address the low-likelihood events that may have happened in the wake of the storm, preventing it from sending messages back to Earth, NASA says.

Elon Musk has sounded off on AI various times, and how it can pose a massive threat to the world. At a meeting of the nation's governors, Elon Musk warned that artificial intelligence was "the greatest risk we face as a civilization". As a result of his deep involvement in the tech industry, Elon Musk said he "[has] access to the very most cutting edge AI," and that "people should be really concerned about it." In a tweet, Elon Musk stated that AI was "potentially more dangerous than nukes". Elon Musk is also concerned that AI can be used in a warfare scenario, by being able to create massive amounts of fake news (i.e. in a propaganda scheme to push a certain ideology), fake press releases, and manipulating information in general.

Google will not seek another contract for Project Maven, a controversial military program that uses artificial intelligence to improve drone targeting. A decorated Marine Corps infantry officer is pleading with Google to not turn its back on the Department of Defense months after the tech giant decided to end its involvement in Project Maven, a U.S. military artificial intelligence program. In an op-ed for Defense News, First Lt. Walker D. Mills writes that he attended a symposium on innovation sponsored by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory last summer, but was disappointed that a representative from Google did not attend the event, which did feature leaders from Amazon and IBM. Mills also calls out Google's proposal for a censored Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly: "The company that Americans and people all over the world associate with innovation and information technology had spurned the U.S. military, yet continues to work with one of our chief competitors." FACEBOOK SLAMS REPORT FROM ZUCKERBERG'S OLD HARVARD CLASSMATE CLAIMING HALF ITS USERS ARE FAKE Although Google said Project Dragonfly has been "effectively ended," the company is still being slammed by human rights groups and critics for considering a censored Chinese search engine.

Last Thursday, a shiny new SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sat perched atop NASA's historic Pad 39A, at Florida's Kennedy Space Center, waiting to briefly fire its engines. The exercise was part of a routine pre-launch test. What wasn't routine was the presence of a Crew Dragon capsule atop the slick black-and-white Falcon. The domed capsule, which can accommodate up to seven passengers, represents the next big step in SpaceX's evolution and in NASA's dependency on a commercial space industry. The test simulated all of the events of an actual launch, though with the rocket secured to the pad.

File photo: Youtube logo is seen on an android mobile phone. YouTube is again claiming it'll tweak its recommendation system to promote fewer conspiracy videos. The Google-owned service announced the change after BuzzFeed published a report detailing how YouTube's recommendation systems can lead you down a "rabbit hole" of misinformation and politically charged content. "We'll begin reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways--such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the Earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11," the company said in a Friday blog post. What will be different this time isn't clear.

AI, the impact of which is simultaneously over-hyped and under-rated in most sectors, is catalyzing revolutionary use cases in healthcare. Deep learning has come a long way from identifying cats and dogs and can now perform independent image-based diagnosis with comparable or better accuracy than (human) doctors. X-Ray or scan-based diagnosis of tumours, fractures, strokes, electrodiagnosis can be entirely done by algorithms. While several of these options have received FDA approval and starting a clinical trial or beginning to be used in production, researchers are attempting selfie diagnosis to detect 50 diseases from abnormalities in eye colour (Nature,2018) and diagnosis from (molecules emitted from) body odour. Using data from wearables or behavioural observations such as changes in gait, driving patterns, mouse usage etc., machine learning algorithms can predict the onset of physiological (particularly neurological or cardiovascular) or psychiatric disorders, assist management of chronic conditions such as diabetes or epilepsy, and even raise real-time warnings.