Cyberwar may not feel like "real" war -- the kind we've known and loathed for eons and the very same we perversely reenact in video games. But some military and legal experts say cyberwar is as real as it gets. David Petraeus, a retired US General and (some say disgraced) former intelligence chief says the internet has created an entirely distinct domain of warfare, one which he calls "netwar." And that's the kind being waged by terrorists. Then there's another kind, and technically any hacker with enough computer skills can do it -- whatever the motivation.

Computers are getting ever better at recognising different faces - but on this week's Tech Tent we ask whether facial recognition technology is just too big a threat to privacy. That is certainly the view of the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. This week the rights group urged Amazon to stop providing its Rekognition facial recognition technology to American police forces, saying a guide for the software "reads like a user manual for authoritarian surveillance". Amazon responded robustly, saying the quality of life would be much worse if new technologies were blocked because of how they might be used. But Matt Cagle, technology and civil liberties lawyer for the ACLU in California, says the tech firm has unlocked something really dangerous: "This technology can be turned against protesters - it can be targeted at immigrants, and it can be used to spy on entire neighbourhoods."

The UK's Ministry of Defense envisions the future as a world where artificial intelligence (AI) is critical to national defense. A new Joint Concept Note entitled Human and Machine Teaming suggests that the government should build a registry of security-cleared artificial intelligence and robotics experts, who can be called-up should Queen and country ever require their services. The proposed register is much the same as the cybersecurity experts that GCHQ can call upon. The document focuses on the challenges and opportunities of robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and how to achieve military advantage through human-machine teams. It also laments the UK's technical skills shortages.

Recent work has shown that state-of-the-art models are highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations of the input. We propose cowboy, an approach to detecting and defending against adversarial attacks by using both the discriminator and generator of a GAN trained on the same dataset. We show that the discriminator consistently scores the adversarial samples lower than the real samples across multiple attacks and datasets. We provide empirical evidence that adversarial samples lie outside of the data manifold learned by the GAN. Based on this, we propose a cleaning method which uses both the discriminator and generator of the GAN to project the samples back onto the data manifold. This cleaning procedure is independent of the classifier and type of attack and thus can be deployed in existing systems.

Masayoshi Son, with a net worth of $21.5bn, is reputed to be Japan's wealthiest person. He is also one of the world's slickest and smartest salesmen. In September 2016, Son met then Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. By the end of the 45-minute meeting, bin Salman, MBS, as he is known, had committed $45bn from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) to Son's Vision Fund. That's nearly half the value of what has become the biggest investment fund the world has ever seen.

In an ongoing effort to get more AI into healthcare, the FDA just approved the marketing of an algorithm that detects wrist fractures. The news: The software, called OsteoDetect, identifies fractures in x-rays. Two different studies by Imagen Tech, the company that makes it, showed that it made orthopedic hand surgeons better at spotting fractures. Background: This isn't the first AI to get the green light from the FDA. This year the agency has given the go-ahead for an AI that diagnoses a certain kind of eye disease, and another that helps detect strokes.

In a continued focus on improving digital health technology, the United States Food and Drug Administration has permitted marketing of an artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithm for detection of wrist fractures. The software, known as OsteoDetect, effectively identifies distal radius fractures in two-dimensional X-ray images. The device is intended as an adjunct and not a replacement for clinician review of radiographs, the FDA noted. In retrospective studies submitted to the FDA for the approval, use of the device increased sensitivity and specificity as well as both positive and negative predictive values when compared with standard methods. "Artificial intelligence algorithms have tremendous potential to help health care providers diagnose and treat medical conditions," said Robert Ochs, PhD, the acting deputy director for radiological health in the Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a statement.

Do you have a right to know if you're talking to a bot? Does it have the right to keep that information from you? Those questions have been stirring in the minds of many since well before Google demoed Duplex, a human-like AI that makes phone calls on a user's behalf, earlier this month. Bots -- online accounts that appear to be controlled by a human, but are actually powered by AI -- are now prevalent all across the internet, specifically on social media sites. While some people think legally forcing these bots to "out" themselves as non-human would be beneficial, others think doing so violates the bot's right to free speech.

TIANJIN, May 18 (Xinhua) -- Machines that can impeccably synthesize the human voice, assist judges in sentencing, and tell customers whether a dress is a good fit, have been displayed at the second World Intelligence Congress in Tianjin. Riding the global waves of artificial intelligence (AI), China aims to improve the productivity and inject new momentum into its economy by encouraging more players to tap the fledging industry. By June 2017, about one-fourth of the world's 2,542 AI companies were in China, where around 15,700 AI patents were filed, ranking second after the United States, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. "China should seize opportunities to boost innovation in deep learning, smart algorithms and chips, and modernize industries with AI technologies," Lin Nianxiu, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), told a room of entrepreneurs, researchers and policy-makers at the congress, which was held from May 16 to 18. NDRC is China's top economic planning agency. In July last year, the State Council issued a plan for new generation AI, pledging to make the industry a major new growth engine and improve people's life by 2020 and make the country the world's center and leader for AI innovation by 2030.

The City watchdog has urged banks to track down criminals with artificial intelligence and machine learning rather than just throwing cash at the problem to "show willing" or appear virtuous. In a message that comes a day after the foreign affairs select committee said the Government "cannot afford to turn a blind eye" to criminals using London to launder ill-gotten funds, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said banks should not be afraid to try new technology. "Excessive risk aversion is not going to help us win an arms race that is so heavily rooted in automation. We need to turn technology against criminals," urged FCA executive Megan Butler. She said many banks still employ thousands of "checkers checking the checkers" to manually sift through high-risk transactions when intelligent technology could be used to spot suspicious transactions in real time instead.