The U.S. Coast Guard has seen an uptick in the number of fake distress calls it has received in recent months and is looking to counter the problem with voice recognition technology, the Verge reported. Tasked with law enforcement and search and rescue missions in both domestic and international waters, fielding prank calls has become costly for the Coast Guard since it has to respond by deploying aircraft and clearing airspace for its mission. In response to the pranks, which have been happening nearly every day in recent months, the Coast Guard is planning to adopt voice recognition software to identify the phony callers. The fake calls come in through the Coast Guard's VHF radio channel, essentially the maritime version of 911. Unlike a typical phone call, the radio communications do not have any identifying information like a phone number -- and tracking the source of the transmission presents a number of challenges.

Summary: What are the real threats of job loss from real and AI enhanced virtual robots? How do we position ourselves and our children to succeed in this new environment? Data Scientists Automated and Unemployed by 2025! is the title of an article we wrote almost exactly a year ago. If you thought that job loss due to automation was going to be restricted to traditional industries you'll need to think again. It's clear this is going to encompass jobs we thought until recently were immune from automation.

British politicians who examined the details of a drone strike which killed a British man in Syria said they were disappointed by the government's lack of transparency during investigations. On August 21, 2015, the UK conducted a drone strike in Raqqa for the first time outside the traditional theatre of war, killing 21-year-old British national Reyaad Khan, a suspected fighter with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), and two other people. "We are in no doubt that Reyaad Khan posed a very serious threat to the UK," the Intelligence and Security Committee in the UK said in a report on Wednesday. "There is nevertheless a question as to how the threat is quantified and in this instance whether the actions of Khan and his associates amounted to an'armed attack' against the UK or Iraq - which is clearly a subjective assessment," the committee said. "The [government's] failure to provide what we consider to be relevant documents is profoundly disappointing," the report added.

If you're headed to the UEFA Champions League final in Cardiff on June 3rd, you might just be part of a massive experiment in security -- and a privacy uproar. South Wales Police are conducting a face recognition trial that could scan every one of the 170,000 visitors expected to show up in the city for the match, whether or not they're heading to the stadium. Cameras around both the stadium and Cardiff's main train station will compare faces against a police database of 500,000 people of interest. If there's a match, police will get a heads-up that could help them stop a terrorist or frequent hooligan. The UK's surveillance camera commissioner, Tony Porter, tells Motherboard that the South Wales Police will have to honor the country's usage guidelines.

There's one thing you're going to hear over and over in relation to Call of Duty: WWII's multiplayer experience: "Boots on the ground." The four-word catchphrase refers to the way WWII strips out the modern contrivances of more recent games -- such as booster packs and exoskeletons -- in favor of more traditional close combat. It amounts to a simplification: everyone will have an easier time getting a handle on Call of Duty multiplayer in WWII. SEE ALSO: The painstaking process behind making strategy guides, from the guy who's spent his life doing it Sledgehammer Games focused primarily on the game's story mode in its April 26 reveal, but we did pick up a few facts about how PvP action will factor in. Headquarters is one of the most intriguing ideas in the new multiplayer. It sounds like Sledgehammer will introduce a new online social space, something Call of Duty hasn't ever seen before.

Video games set during World War II tend to be Holocaust deniers. Video games weren't mature enough to tackle difficult topics when World War II shooters were in their heyday. Wolfenstein 3D established Nazis as uncontroversial villains, but there wasn't room to respectfully explore war atrocities in a game that ended with a boss fight against "mecha Hitler." For roughly the next decade -- until Call of Duty 4 popularized more modern war settings -- mainstream shooters set during WWII followed a similar pattern. Developers avoided touching on the Holocaust, and in doing so they also built up a body of work that denied its existence.

Facebook must obtain the permission of German users of WhatsApp before processing their personal data, a German court confirmed on Tuesday. Last August, Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp changed its privacy policy to allow the transfer of its users' personal information to Facebook for processing. That angered the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, which in September ordered the companies to stop the transfer until they had obtained users' consent, and to delete any data they had already transferred. Facebook challenged the order in Hamburg's administrative court, and on Tuesday the court handed down its ruling. The court upheld the Commissioner's requirement to obtain consent, but threw out the order to delete the data on procedural grounds.

Internet companies are readying for a showdown with telecoms and a Republican-controlled government over a policy near and dear to their hearts: net neutrality. Net neutrality basically prevents broadband providers from playing favourites or steering users toward (or away from) particular internet sites. Under rules enacted during the Obama administration, the likes of Comcast and Verizon -- which offer their own video services they'd very much like subscribers to use -- can't slow down Netflix, can't block YouTube, and can't charge Spotify extra to stream faster than Pandora. Broadband companies hate the net neutrality rules, and they have an ally in new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai, who has repeatedly called the regulations a mistake. Pai could launch the process of unwinding the rules as early as Wednesday, according to reports.

British lawmakers say a U.K. man killed by a Royal Air Force drone strike in Syria was an Islamic State group attack planner who posed a "very serious threat" to Britain. Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee scrutinized the August 2015 strike that killed Reyaad Khan and two others. It was the first such drone strike acknowledged by the British government. Committee chairman Dominic Grieve said Wednesday that intelligence assessments left "no doubt that Reyaad Khan posed a very serious threat to the U.K." But he said lawmakers still had questions about ministers' decision-making, because some documents were withheld from the committee. Grieve said that was "profoundly disappointing."

In February, Google's self-driving car spin-out Waymo accused Anthony Levandowski of stealing 14,000 confidential files about the laser-ranging lidars developed while he was working there and taking them to Uber. On Friday 14 April, the engineer sat down in the San Francisco office of Waymo's lawyers to face six hours of hard questioning. When asked what his current responsibilities were at Uber, Levandowski took the 5th, citing his right under the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment not to answer questions that might incriminate him. He plead it again to questions about whether he stole the files, and again when asked if he subsequently used the files to build lidars for Uber. In fact, he took the 5th over 400 times in the course of the day.