Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona revealed on Wednesday that he intends to introduce a resolution to roll back privacy rules that restrict what internet service providers can do with customer data, according to a report from Politico. Flake said he intended to eliminate the Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules by using the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to undo rules set by federal agencies with a simple majority vote. The rules that Flake is taking aim at were first passed by the FCC in October 2016 and were aimed at giving consumers more control over their data by requiring internet service providers to ask for permission before using sensitive information. "We like to say it makes [consumers] the king or queen of their information," Dallas Harris, a policy fellow at open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge, told International Business Times. "The way the order does that is by saying, 'Okay internet service provider, if you would like to use sensitive information, you have to ask your consumers first.' The order defines sensitive information as information regarding a user's finances, health, information from children, precise geolocation data, web browsing history, and app usage history. It also includes any unencrypted message content that may be accessible to the service provider. Information deemed to be non-sensitive can be collected by default requires an option to opt-out. Internet service providers oppose the rules and lobbied for the FCC to undo them --a very real possibility under the leadership of Ajit Pai, who was appointed to the head of the FCC by President Donald Trump. Commissioner Pai opposed the rules when they were passed last year, arguing at the time, "if the FCC truly believes that these new rules are necessary to protect consumer privacy, then the government now must move forward to ensure uniform regulation of all companies in the Internet ecosystem at the new baseline the FCC has set." Pai's argument is essentially that if the FCC wants to make handing over consumer data require an opt-in for ISPs, it should for edge providers like Facebook and Google as well. It's unlikely Pai would extend the rules as he suggested, but he could modify them. "The agency is free to change its mind" on the ruling, Harris explained, "It just can't do so in an arbitrary and capricious manner...they can't just willy-nilly with no reason decide to rescind them." Doing so would require opening the rules up to public comment and would require the agency to change the rules based on new facts. Pai and the FCC also have the option to make changes by reviewing petitions for reconsideration, which allows the commission to change a rule without opening the process up to public comment. Both options are preferable to using the Congressional Review Act, which Harris calls "entirely too blunt of an instrument" to handle such a rule. "There really is no benefit to using the CRA here.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - European lawmakers called on Thursday for EU-wide legislation to regulate the rise of robots, including an ethical framework for their development and deployment and the establishment of liability for the actions of robots including self-driving cars.

On Jan. 20, the drone war entered its third Administration. Over the inaugural weekend, American drones fired missiles at suspected Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, killing five people. The drone war, that is, the popular, unmanned-vehicle term for America's strategy of targeted killing, is an outgrowth of President George W. Bush's war on terror, a vestigial organ that became the centerpiece for the Obama administration's eight years of low-intensity warfare. With much of American national security strategy poised to change under the new Trump administration, it's worth taking a step back to examine what, exactly, the United States hoped to do with its drones. The United States is, it's worth noting, at war.

Marine Le Pen is on course to be the next president of France, according to one fund manager's big-data analysis. Arun Kant, chief executive and chief investment officer at Singapore-based investing firm Leonie Hill Capital, told CNBC he expected the right-wing populist to prevail thanks to his firm's proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) system's analysis of troves of data. His analysis -- which he said incorporates inputs such as social and traditional media discussions, polling, economics and demographics -- predicts that Le Pen will "walk over" her opponents in the first electoral test and then prove most forecasters wrong and steal the lead in the second ballot, Kant said. The French vote is split into two phases, with the top two candidates from the April 23 round due to face each other in a second run-off on May 7. In the running alongside 48-year old Le Pen are former economy minister and independent candidate Emmanuel Macron, conservative ex-prime minister Francois Fillon and socialist Benoit Hamon. Kant's AI program predicts that Le Pen would take 28 percent of the vote in the first round, he said, which would best 16.4 percent for Fillon, and 19 to 20 percent for Macron.

With the robotics industry rapidly growing, MEPs have warned that rules are needed to'guarantee a standard level of safety and security.' In a resolution voted today, MEPs are asking the EU Commission to enforce regulatory standards for robotics, and have stressed that the key issue lies with self-driving cars. They have suggested that a European agency for robotics and artificial intelligence should be set up, to supply public authorities with technical, ethical and regulatory expertise. They also asked for specific legal status for robots as'electronic persons' in the long run, in order to establish who is liable if they cause damage. MEPs have warned that robots need to be fitted with'kill switches' to prevent a Terminator-style uprising against humans If a robot unlawfully kills someone in the heat of battle, who is liable for the death?

NASA needs help finding space objects, so the government agency teamed up with astronomy site Zooniverse for a new project that will recruit the public to help aid in the search for hidden planets and other solar system objects beyond Neptune. The NASA-funded project, named Backyard Worlds: Find Planet 9, launched on Zooniverse Wednesday. Participants in the project will search through data collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and separate actual celestial objects like brown dwarfs and low-mass stars from image artifacts that can sometimes appear to be real objects, referred to as false positive. WISE has pumped out hundreds of thousands of images but the computer system was unable to determine actual space object from image errors. "Spiky images of stars, especially variable stars, are everywhere. Worse, are the optical ghosts, blurry blobs of light that have been scattered around inside WISE's instruments. These can hop back and forth, or even change color. These artifacts can easily fool our image processing software," Zooniverse said in a statement.

Fingerspitzengefühl is a German word used to describe an ability to maintain attention to detail in an ever-changing operational and tactical environment by maintaining real-time situational awareness. The term is synonymous with the English expression of "keeping one's finger on the pulse." The problem with traditional fingerspitzengefühl, in addition to pronouncing it, is it is hard to scale. Today, however, in a world of sensors, GPS and mobile devices, having real-time situational awareness is far easier than ever before. In fact, today the challenge is not how to do it (answer: sensors), but what to do with all the information.

The European Parliament today called for EU-wide liability laws to cover robotics and artificial intelligence. MEPs also want researchers to adopt ethical standards that "respect human dignity". In a resolution today MEPs noted that several countries are planning robotics regulations and that "the EU needs to take the lead on setting these standards, so as not to be forced to follow those set by third countries". According to a European Parliamentary press release, MEPs said draft legislation was "urgently needed" to clarify liability in accidents involving self-driving cars. Although manufacturers including Volvo, Google, and Mercedes say they will accept full liability if their autonomous vehicles cause a collision, this is not currently a legal requirement.

Evoking thoughts of Gattaca, the 1997 film in which genetic engineering is used to make new and supposedly improved people, an eagerly anticipated report out Tuesday stopped short of recommending a ban on tweaking the genes of human eggs, sperm or embryos. The report, from the influential National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), concluded that clinical trials of genome "editing" of the human germline--cells that can be passed from one generation to the next--could one day be permitted, but only for serious inherited conditions and under stringent oversight. "Genome editing has great promise for preventing, ameliorating or eliminating many human diseases and conditions," the report concluded. "Along with this promise comes the need for ethically responsible research and clinical use." While germline genome editing to eliminate inherited diseases might seem like a worthy goal, critics say it could lead to attempts to make healthy babies even healthier, not to mention smarter, more athletic and more attractive.

What supercomputers will look like in the future, post-Moore's Law, is still a bit hazy. As exascale computing comes into focus over the next several years, system vendors, universities and government agencies are all trying to get a gauge on what will come after that. Moore's Law, which has driven the development of computing systems for more than five decades, is coming to an end as the challenge of making smaller chips loaded with more and more features is becoming increasingly difficult to do. While the rise of accelerators, like GPUs, FPGAs and customized ASICs, silicon photonics and faster interconnects will help drive performance to meet many of the demands of such emerging applications as artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analytics, autonomous vehicles and the Internet of Things, down the road new computing paradigms will have to be developed to address future workload challenges. Quantum computing is among the possibilities being developed as a possible solution as vendors look to map out their pathways into the future.