Georgia's voter-registration process violates the Voting Rights Act and has prevented tens of thousands of residents, mostly minorities, from registering to vote, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday. Under a policy implemented in 2010, people aren't added to the voter rolls if identifying information on their applications doesn't exactly match information in databases maintained by the Georgia Department of Driver Services or the Social Security Administration, the lawsuit says. "What Georgia is doing is denying people the ability to make it onto the registration rolls at the outset, which is what's so problematic about this matching program," said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The organization said it filed the lawsuit Wednesday in Gainesville, in north Georgia, along with other legal organizations on behalf of a coalition of civil rights groups. It's no secret that partisan state legislators, once in power, frequently try to alter voting laws to give their party an advantage.

AI and machine learning are all the rage across a range of technology and industrial sectors. Now, the U.S. military is gauging the prospects for leveraging machine learning and other tools in autonomous weapons via emerging human-machine interfaces. In describing the latest version of the Pentagon's "offset strategy," senior U.S. defense officials have in recent months highlighted the military's desire to leverage AI to develop autonomous weapons. That, Robert Work, deputy U.S. defense secretary, noted in a recent address, "is going to lead to a new era of human-machine collaboration and combat teaming. Added Work: "Collaboration is using the tactical acuity of a computer to help a human make better decisions and human-machine combat teaming is using manned and unmanned platforms." DoD's "offset strategy" refers to a blueprint designed to maintain technological superiority.

International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM) announced three new servers built for cognitive computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). These are three buzzwords for essentially the same thing: computer systems that learn how to solve more and more complex real-world problems and understand the world like humans. The automated machine learning technology of Watson, IBM's cognitive computing software platform, is at the forefront of AI research, but there are practical spin-offs that can already be used in advanced medical applications and commercial applications built on the Watson Developer Cloud. The new servers are part of IBM's Linux specialized server portfolio co-developed with members of the OpenPOWER Foundation. The OpenPOWER ecosystem includes a wide variety of computing solutions that use IBM's open POWER processor technology.

WASHINGTON U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning, serving a 35-year prison term for passing classified files to WikiLeaks, ended her hunger strike on Tuesday after the Army said she would be allowed to receive gender transition surgery, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said.

It is used to disguise a person's identity, cover explicit areas of an image or to render vehicle number plates unreadable. But deliberate pixilation of photographs could soon be rendered useless by artificial intelligence that can peer through the blurring to see what is hidden beneath. Software engineers have used machine learning to teach a piece of software to adapt image recognition techniques to recognise objects, faces and words in obscured images. Artificial intelligence could be used to defeat attempts to protect people's identity (stock image) or hide certain information in videos and photographs posted online. The software could mean that people who appear on Google Street View, for example, could be identified despite attempts by the search company to hide their identity with image blurring. It is a bizarre disappearing act that only the most affluent seem to be able to afford.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Tech investor Marc Andreessen took the stage Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. SAN FRANCISCO – For tech entrepreneurs, these are both the best of times and the gnarliest of times. But only standout ideas with either unique intellectual property or quantifiable traction are likely to benefit from this buoyant climate in the form of investments or acquisitions. "Only strong companies are getting acquired," Greylock Ventures' Josh Elman told attendees at TechCrunch Disrupt Tuesday, citing the 1 billion price tags paid for self-driving car startup Cruise Automation (General Motors) and Dollar Shave Club (Unilever). Elman might have added another recent purchase to the list, Microsoft's 26 billion spend for professional networking site LinkedIn, founded by Elman's fellow Greylock colleague and panelist, Reid Hoffman.

The reliance on drones--and the tendency to regard them as the default tool for taking out jihadi suspects on the battlefield--subsided in Obama's second term, in part because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were winding down, in part because the drones weren't having the dramatic effect that they seemed to promise. It turned out that killing a key terrorist or destroying a terrorist hangout--while sometimes fruitful and always tempting--has little impact on the course of the war. Al-Qaida had a seemingly endless line of No. 3–ranking officials to replace the ones just killed. And to the extent terrorist groups have been decimated on the battlefield, it's been due to a combination of conventional airstrikes and forces on the ground. And sometimes, in drone strikes, innocent people get killed, not because the Hellfire missile veers off course but because the intelligence was poor, the images were fuzzy, someone has made a mistake about who was (or wasn't) in the crosshairs. And when innocent people get killed, new terrorists--their husbands, cousins, fathers, sons, or neighbors--are often created.

Parked outside a warehouse by the Allegheny River was Uber's vision of the future: 14 Ford Fusions, each mounted with conspicuous cameras, antennae and sensors. A lumpy lidar unit, which uses light to map its surroundings, spun atop each car's roof like a high-tech propeller hat. But I was about to get into a car that drives itself. Style was the least of my worries. This fleet of geekmobiles, clearly marked with Uber's logo, will be deployed Wednesday as part of a test that will let Pittsburgh customers hail a self-driving car.