A hacker was sentenced on Monday to a year in federal prison for disrupting one of the most popular video games of all time, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in a press release. A 38-year-old Romanian national named Calin Mateias had been in custody since November for coordinating a series of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks in "World of Warcraft" seven years earlier. Mateis was extradited from Romania last year and pleaded guilty to a charge of intentional damage to a protected computer, according to the Justice Department. His crime was deliberately slowing down or even shutting down "World of Warcraft" servers earlier this decade out of spite for other players of the massive online game. A DDoS attack is when a hacker overloads a server with traffic to cause a logjam for anyone trying to access it, according to Scientific American.

Imagine a world where the boring part of your job is automated and you get to focus on and do more of the interesting things – the things that actually inspired you to study your subject in the first place. That's now a dream come true for lawyers at Walmart. The company has invested in a new artificial intelligence tool by LegalMation. Alan Bryan, Walmart's senior associate GC of legal operations and outside counsel management told the Corporate Counsel that the technology is automated to create first drafts of answers to litigation and to draft the initial round of discovery requests, each in about two minutes. This could equate to shaving off 10 hours of attorney time on each lawsuit, according to LegalMation's estimates.

Perhaps you'll see this one coming like an angry regulator pacing up to the door. But if you wonder what federal mandates, a motorcycle, a baby boomer hairdresser and a blown business opportunity might have in common, read on. Our story of regulatory woe on the go begins with 60-year-old Geri Michael of Vero Beach, Florida. The hairdresser decided it was high time to treat herself to a Honda motorcycle. Her checklist was looking pretty good, too.

A report from the House of Lords recommends that ethics be a key focus in the future of artificial intelligence, saying it should be developed "for the common good and benefit of humanity" and never given "autonomous power to hurt, destroy or deceive" people. AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able highlights the UK's opportunity to become a world-leading nation in the development of artificial intelligence but insists that clear-cut ethics must be established around the development and deployment of such technology. The report claims that, as a world leader, the UK can "help shape the ethical development of artificial intelligence" on a global scale; thus helping to set the fundamental guidelines for all future AI development. The report also addresses other key issues surrounding the development of AI – the potential effect on workers and data privacy rights. For some time now the issue of job losses due to the introduction of AI and robotics has been discussed, with conflicting claims of job losses and exaggeration of figures.

One World of Warcraft player is paying the price for taking a virtual rivalry too far. A US federal court has sentenced Romanian man Calin Mateias to spend a year in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to launching a distributed denial of service attack against WoW's servers in response to being "angered" by one player. The 2010 traffic flood knocked thousands of players offline and cost Blizzard $30,000 (which Mateias repaid in April) in recovery expenses. A defense sentencing memorandum claimed that Mateias had been spurred by a "juvenile desire to win the game." That's not really how the online role-playing title works (there's no definitive victory over fellow players, and they don't lose when they're offline), but you get the idea -- it was reportedly a hotheaded decision.

Tracing the origins of US patent law, Thomas Jefferson stated that an "inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time" to encourage "men to pursue ideas which may produce utility." Consistently, under US patent law, an invention requires conception, which is "the formation in the mind of the inventor, of a definite and permanent idea of the complete and operative invention," where the "inventor" refers to an "individual." The Federal Circuit explained that to "perform this mental act, inventors must be natural persons and cannot be corporations or sovereigns." The remainder of the Patent Act is also replete with references to human actions. When the Patent Act was put in place, there was likely no need to characterize the inventive process as being performed by anything other than people, because there were no such other "beings".

Gait recognition technology, a method to identify people by characteristics shown unconsciously in the ways they walk, is being utilized in criminal investigations in Japan. The technology enables the identification of individuals even from images taken from a distance and low-resolution footage. According to advocates, a video image of only two strides is sufficient to identify a person with a high rate of accuracy, based on arm swings, length of stride and other characteristics. Researchers are working to improve the accuracy of the technology with the use of artificial intelligence. In a brazen daytime attack in Tokyo's upscale Ginza district in April 2017, a man was robbed of some ¥40 million on a street after he had converted gold into cash.

We propose an approach for explaining Bayesian network classifiers, which is based on compiling such classifiers into decision functions that have a tractable and symbolic form. We introduce two types of explanations for why a classifier may have classified an instance positively or negatively and suggest algorithms for computing these explanations. The first type of explanation identifies a minimal set of the currently active features that is responsible for the current classification, while the second type of explanation identifies a minimal set of features whose current state (active or not) is sufficient for the classification. We consider in particular the compilation of Naive and Latent-Tree Bayesian network classifiers into Ordered Decision Diagrams (ODDs), providing a context for evaluating our proposal using case studies and experiments based on classifiers from the literature.

Accounting fraud is a global concern representing a significant threat to the financial system stability due to the resulting diminishing of the market confidence and trust of regulatory authorities. Several tricks can be used to commit accounting fraud, hence the need for non-static regulatory interventions that take into account different fraudulent patterns. Accordingly, this study aims to improve the detection of accounting fraud via the implementation of several machine learning methods to better differentiate between fraud and non-fraud companies, and to further assist the task of examination within the riskier firms by evaluating relevant financial indicators. Out-of-sample results suggest there is a great potential in detecting falsified financial statements through statistical modelling and analysis of publicly available accounting information. The proposed methodology can be of assistance to public auditors and regulatory agencies as it facilitates auditing processes, and supports more targeted and effective examinations of accounting reports.

Artificial intelligence's "black boxes" are about to be blown wide open, whether or not the data science world is ready for it. That's because AI's algorithmic models are in the bullseye of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which takes effect on May 25. The EU designed GDPR to protect the privacy of European citizens, recognizing that the personally identifiable information (PII) that companies hold and process on customers' behalf belongs to the individuals themselves. More to the point, those individuals have the right to control how their personal data is processed, whether that handling be done through algorithmic automation, manual methods, or some combination thereof. With that deadline approaching, any enterprise that operates in the EU must fast-track their efforts to bring greater accountability to their machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and other AI-based applications. Failure to comply with GDPR's strict requirements could result in companies that operate in the EU being subject to significant financial penalties, up to 4 percent of company revenues.