Slack has banned accounts with alleged links to countries under US sanctions, despite some users of the workplace chat app claiming they only visited them on holiday. In a message to affected users, Slack said accounts would be closed "effective immediately," in order to comply with laws and regulations imposed by the US government. Sanctioned countries and regions include Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and the Crimea region of Ukraine. "In order to comply with export control and economic sanctions laws and regulations promulgated by the US Department of Commerce and the US Department of Treasury, Slack prohibits unauthorised use of its products and services in certain sanctioned countries," the message to affected users stated. "We've identified your team/ account as originating from one of those countries and are closing the account effective immediately."

If Matt Chasen gets his way, there will be a time -- in the not-so-distant future -- when commuters are able to order an air taxi that whisks them across town in minutes, bypassing traffic-clogged streets below. For now, however, the chief executive of LIFT Aircraft will have to use his start-up's electric-powered vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, the Hexa, for something else: 15-minute flights across a lake outside Austin, for $249 a pop. Though the flights will target a recreational crowd, Chasen sees them as a steppingstone to a new form of convenient urban transportation. "Today's regulatory environment does not allow for a transportation use of these aircraft -- yet," said Chasen, a former Boeing engineer with a background in mechanical and aerospace engineering. "We'll build public trust in the technology. Once that happens, it's inevitable that people will want to use it for certain types of commuting flights."

When T-Mobile's chief executive went before Senate lawmakers this year to make the case for his company's merger with Sprint, he argued that the deal could help preserve U.S. dominance in high-tech wireless networks for smartphones and other devices. "We'll make sure America wins the global 5G race," John Legere vowed. "5G will unlock capabilities that will fuel job creation and innovation well beyond what we have seen so far." The entire industry has spent much of the year marketing a dazzling future to consumers, one in which the successor to 4G LTE enables entirely new technologies, such as self-driving cars and remote medicine. But despite the hype, 5G is still a long way from becoming a reality for the majority of everyday Americans.

Digital technology is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare, and in the pharma industry as it searches for ways to find new drugs, while cutting costs and reducing expensive trial failures. The UK government's life sciences tsar, Sir John Bell, set the tone for 2018, when he went on record to say that artificial intelligence (AI) could save billions of pounds for the NHS. Bell told the BBC that researchers at an Oxford hospital have AI technology for diagnosing heart disease that could shave £2.2 billion from the NHS' pathology spend. Another AI system developed by a company called Optellum could allow more than 4,000 cancer patients a year to be diagnosed earlier. This could save £10 billion if adopted in the US and EU, according to the company's science and technology officer, Dr Timor Kadir.

Artificial intelligence has been applied to everything from digital assistants that power smart speakers to helping drivers park to predicting weather. And during the next year, the technology is expected to become even cheaper, more efficient, and more broadly used. "We are going to see increasing democratization of the ability to create AI and, more importantly, deploy AI," said Dario Gil, chief operating officer of IBM's AI and quantum computing. As a result, he added, in the next year people should expect "not just accurate AI, but trusted AI." The greater use of AI over the next year depends on improving how computers learn based on experience and reasoning, both of which help lower the cost and increase the speed at which the complex systems behind AI crunch massive amounts of data. As AI gains adoption, new uses could open up for that haven't yet been considered.

The American military is desperately trying to get a leg up in the field of artificial intelligence, which top officials are convinced will deliver victory in future warfare. But internal Pentagon documents and interviews with senior officials make clear that the Defense Department is reeling from being spurned by a tech giant and struggling to develop a plan that might work in a new sort of battle--for hearts and minds in Silicon Valley. The battle began with an unexpected loss. In June, Google announced it was pulling out of a Pentagon program--the much-discussed Project Maven--that used the tech giant's artificial intelligence software. Thousands of the company's employees had signed a petition two months earlier calling for an end to its work on the project, an effort to create algorithms that could help intelligence analysts pick out military targets from video footage.

Over the past century, and particularly since the outset of the Cold War, wargames (interactive simulations used to evaluate aspects of tactics, operations, and strategy) have become an integral means for militaries and policy-makers to evaluate how strategic decisions are made related to nuclear weapons strategy and international security (1). These methods have also been applied beyond the military realm, to examine phenomena as varied as elections, government policy, international trade, and supply-chain mechanics. Today, a renewed focus on wargaming combined with access to sophisticated and inexpensive drag-and-drop digital game development frameworks and new cloud computing architectures have democratized the ability to enable massive multiplayer gaming experiences. With the integration of simulation tools and experimental methods from a variety of social science disciplines, a science-based experimental gaming approach has the potential to transform the insights generated from gaming by creating human-derived, large-n datasets for replicable, quantitative analysis. In the following, we outline challenges associated with contemporary simulation and wargaming tools, investigate where scholars have searched for game data, and explore the utility of new experimental gaming and data analysis methods in both policy-making and academic settings.

The person - or people - responsible for flying drones near Gatwick Airport has caused chaos for thousands of passengers. But how serious an offence is being committed? And what punishment could be handed down? Endangering the safety of an aircraft is a criminal offence which can carry a prison sentence of up to five years. The government passed legislation earlier this year making it illegal to fly a drone within 1km of an airport or airfield boundary in the UK.

Earlier this month, an intergovernmental conference in Marrakesh, Morocco brought together leaders from around the world to address global migration. After two days of deliberations, some 150 nations signed the Global Compact for Migration (GCM) agreement, which called for the implementation of more humane policies to ensure "safe, orderly and regular migration". But the conference and the agreement were very much a platform for Western doublespeak and hypocrisy. European countries and the United States are by far not concerned with the "safety" of migrants and refugees heading for their borders. In fact, the border security industry in Europe and the US is thriving and in both places, Israel with its infamous militarised security policies is serving as a role model and a major technology supplier.

Climbing teams spent over two weeks laser scanning Mount Rushmore in May 2010. High atop the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is a layer of biofilm covering the dome, darkening and discoloring it. Biofilm is "a colony of microscopic organisms that adheres to stone surfaces," according to the U.S. National Park Service, which needed to get a handle on its magnitude to get an accurate cost estimate for the work to remove it. Enter CyArk, a non-profit organization that uses three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning and photogrammetry to digitally record and archive some of the world's most significant cultural artifacts and structures. CyArk spent a week covering "every inch" of the dome, processed the data, and returned a set of engineering drawings to the Park Service "to quantify down to the square inch how much biofilm is on the monument," says CEO John Ristevski.