Facebook has developed a special tool to keep countries from seeing stories criticial of their government. The site has been secretly working on a feature that allows it to geographically censor specific posts from people in the country. It appears to have been done as a way of getting back into China, an important market for the company but one with an intense censorship regime. The apparent tool was revealed at a time when Facebook was facing increased scrutiny of how it picks what appears in news feed. It has received special criticism for the way that it allows fake news to flourish on the service, and many have claimed that it helped Donald Trump win the Presidential election.

The U.K. government has distributed a number of gifts to the country's technology sector. In his first Autumn Statement Wednesday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond confirmed the U.K. government would invest an additional 2 billion pounds ($2.48 billion) into technology research and development by the end of the current Parliament in 2020. Some of this money will be allocated to a new Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund that will direct it to priority technologies, including robotics and artificial intelligence. Hammond also flagged further investment into the development of autonomous vehicles, and announced plans to invest 400 million pounds into venture capital via the British Business Bank, in order to stem the sale of promising U.K. startups to foreign buyers. "I am taking a first step to tackle the longstanding problem of our fastest growing technology firms being snapped up by bigger companies, rather than growing to scale," said Hammond.

Following recent reports from the Government Office for Science and the House of Commons Select Committee, Digital Catapult comments on how access to data can open opportunities to the UK's AI entrepreneurs. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the centre of two recent government reports. Yesterday, the Government Office for Science published an overview of AI that focuses on several significant areas: the effect of AI on productivity and economic value, advantages to government, effects on the labour market, ethical challenges and public trust. Earlier in October the House of Commons Select Committee published their report on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence that recommends that the government is to invest in education and training infrastructures, ensure digital inclusion and governance mechanisms, and provide leadership for future growth in robotics and AI. When considering where the government can provide a significant boost to UK AI and machine learning entrepreneurs, Digital Catapult believes there is a major opportunity in access to data.

After the US election, many people feel we're on the verge of an apocalypse. What might not be obvious is that it's an artificial intelligence apocalypse, like the ones in The Terminator and The Matrix. The fact is the machines have taken over, enslaved us, and may now destroy us. Here's what an AI apocalypse looks like in broad brushstrokes: Unfortunately, the unintended consequence is the downfall of humanity. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard reports that nearly half of all Americans get their news from Facebook.

DeepMind Health's inaugural collaboration with the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS), initially focused on building an app for helping early detection of Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), was relaunched earlier today -- under a new information-sharing agreement with the Royal Free NHS Trust, and a broader scope for the collaboration. Under the arrangement, patient identifiable data (PID, aka people's medical records) continues to be shared across a wide range of data types for some 1.6 million individuals who are being treated or have been treated at the Royal Free's three London hospitals (five years of historical in-patient data is also made accessible under the arrangement). The types of data being shared under ISA 1 and 2 (aka the legal contracts that set out how the data can be used) are described as "similar" by DeepMind -- and a spokesman confirmed that patient data shared under the original arrangement has therefore not been deleted (given that they view it as a continuation of the same arrangement). The relevant section of ISA 2, detailing the data types being shared, can be found at the bottom of this post. There are some notable additions to the project at this point -- such as a plan to create a technical audit infrastructure to track and log individual access to patient data, and an explicit commitment in the ISA that Google will not use the PID for any other purpose, nor combine it with other data, nor sell data to third parties.

A new bill will ban huge swathes of sex acts from UK porn. The Digital Economy Bill looks to ban anything that wouldn't be allowed on a commercially-available DVD. That seems to limit adult content in a number of ways, banning things including female ejaculation and the sight of menstrual blood from all pornographic videos. While there are no strict guidelines as to what acts and images can't be shown on commercial DVDs, adult film producers have found that they have had to cut almost all kinds of non-conventional videos from their films. Such restrictions include the "four-finger rule", for instance, which limits the number of digits that can be placed into any orifice while on video. A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Russia has showed off its latest weapon in the arms race with NATO - a remotely controlled robot tank, which will be deployed on the border with Poland. A Russian Ministry of Defence video on Youtube shows troops from the Strategic Missile Forces using the new technology in the Kaliningrad enclave, where Vladimir Putin recently sited several nuclear-capable Iskander missiles. The Russian Ministry of Defence said it had the'ability to direct weapons, accompany and hit targets in automatic and semi-automatic modes as it is equipped with electro-optical and radar reconnaissance'. The Russian Defence Ministry have been showing off the robot tank on Youtube. The unmanned tank has four rocket launchers and a 7.62mm gun and can work 24/7 without the need to rest The weapon station can be guided, it can carry out supportive tasks and it can destroy targets in automatic or semiautomatic control systems. Platforma-M is equipped with optical-electronic and radio reconnaissance locators, which enable the Russian robot to perform combat tasks during the night without unmasking itself.

Slow economic growth is the mantra of political campaigns and economic angst. Growth in economic output per hour ("labor productivity") achieved an annual pace of 3 percent for a full half-century between 1920 and 1970. Since 1970 that rate has slowed to about 1.5 percent, and in the last six years productivity growth has slowed further to a lamentable 0.5 percent annual rate. Growth in the middle of the 20th century was propelled by the invention in the late 19th century of electricity, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, chemicals and plastics, and the diffusion to every urban household of clear running water and waste removal. America made a transition from 50 percent of the working population on farms to a largely urban nation, and the drudgery of household work – carrying water in and out, doing laundry on a scrub board – made a transition to modern bathrooms and kitchens by the 1950s.

Securing your digital assets is a clear need for any business and individual, whether you are looking to protect your personal photos, your company's intellectual property, your customers' sensitive data, or anything else that can harm your reputation or business continuity. Although billions of dollars are spent on cybersecurity, the number of reported cyberattacks and the magnitude of breaches keep rising. There are many frontiers where harnessing the predictive power of AI might give the upper hand to security vendors -- and to us all, including individuals and businesses. Cisco forecasts that the number of connected devices worldwide will rise from 15 billion today to 50 billion by 2020. A high percentage of these devices do not have basic security measures due to limited hardware and software resources.

I can't run a starship with twenty crew. WESLEY: You've got a great job, Jim. All you have to do is sit back and let the machine do the work. One clear message from the presidential election is that the dream of good factory jobs still resonates in America's rust belt. Despite the push for students to pursue STEM careers or move into the service sector, Americans still want to make stuff.