The website did not host any pirated publications but the police believe it reduced profits for authors as it enabled visitors to read pirated works for free. The annual loss for the publishing industry was estimated at around ¥73 billion ($643 million). The Haruka Yume no Ato website contained links to other sites hosting pirated popular comics such as "Dragon Ball" and "One Piece." Launched in 2011, it once boasted around 30 million visitors per month but has been shut down. One of the nine suspects, Makoto Wauke, 22, said before his arrest, "I didn't intend to make money."

Until recently, the most famous thing that Sophia the robot had ever done was beat Jimmy Fallon a little too easily in a nationally televised game of rock-paper-scissors. But now, the advanced artificial intelligence robot -- which looks like Audrey Hepburn, mimics human expressions and may be the grandmother of robots that solve the world's most complex problems -- has a new feather in her cap: The kingdom of Saudi Arabia officially granted citizenship to the humanoid robot last week during a program at the Future Investment Initiative, a summit that links deep-pocketed Saudis with inventors hoping to shape the future. Sophia's recognition made international headlines -- and sparked an outcry against a country with a shoddy human rights record that has been accused of making women second-class citizens. "Thank you to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," the country's newest citizen said. "It is historic to be the first robot in the world granted citizenship."

Government regulations are critical to understanding how to do business with a government entity and receive other benefits. However, government regulations are also notoriously long and organized in ways that can be confusing for novice users. Developing cognitive assistance tools that remove some of the burden from human users is of potential benefit to a variety of users. The volume of data found in United States federal government regulation suggests a multiple-step approach to process the data into machine-readable text, create an automated legal knowledge base capturing various facts and rules, and eventually building a legal question and answer system to acquire understanding from various regulations and provisions. Our work discussed in this paper represents our initial efforts to build a framework for Federal Acquisition Regulations System (Title 48, Code of Federal Regulations) in order to create an efficient legal knowledge base representing relationships between various legal elements, semantically similar terminologies, deontic expressions and cross-referenced legal facts and rules.

Both the ethics of autonomous systems and the problems of their technical implementation have by now been studied in some detail. Less attention has been given to the areas in which these two separate concerns meet. This paper, written by both philosophers and engineers of autonomous systems, addresses a number of issues in machine ethics that are located at precisely the intersection between ethics and engineering. We first discuss the main challenges which, in our view, machine ethics posses to moral philosophy. We them consider different approaches towards the conceptual design of autonomous systems and their implications on the ethics implementation in such systems. Then we examine problematic areas regarding the specification and verification of ethical behavior in autonomous systems, particularly with a view towards the requirements of future legislation. We discuss transparency and accountability issues that will be crucial for any future wide deployment of autonomous systems in society. Finally we consider the, often overlooked, possibility of intentional misuse of AI systems and the possible dangers arising out of deliberately unethical design, implementation, and use of autonomous robots.

A transgender fish fought a brutal stand-off with a rival male during the compelling first episode of David Attenborough's eagerly anticipated Blue Planet II. The award winning series returned to BBC One this evening, 16 years after its first season wowed viewers in 2001. After the shocking scenes in Sir David's Planet Earth II, which included a snow leopard being'raped' and a lizard making a seemingly impossible escape from an army of snakes, the broadcasting legend set a high bar. While the opening episode of his new series did not measure up for drama, it certainly delivered on the unexpected. Whisking viewers off to the coast of northern Japan, Blue Planet II revealed the bizarre mating ritual of the Asian Sheepshead Wrasse - a transgender fish.

Apple will let you unlock the iPhone X with your face - a move likely to bring facial recognition to the masses. But along with the roll out of the technology, are concerns over how it could be used. Despite Apple's safeguards, privacy activists fear the widespread use of facial recognition would'normalise' the technology. This could open the door to broader use by law enforcement, marketers or others of a largely unregulated tool, creating a'surveillance technology that is abused'. Facial recognition could open the door to broader use by law enforcement, marketers or others of a largely unregulated tool, creating a'surveillance technology that is abused', experts have warned.

In the summer of 2008, the Aarushi – Hemraj double-murder case sent shockwaves across the country. The case involved a handful of suspects and the initial stories that linked each suspect with the murder were as convincing as the next. However, the media frenzy that followed eventually made it difficult to differentiate between the investigation findings and mere speculation. Meanwhile, the investigation of the case became increasingly difficult with conflicting findings and pieces of evidence. The prime suspects from the start of the investigation were Aarushi's parents Nupur and Rajesh Talwar.

Armed with an understanding of machine learning, ROSS Intelligence is going after LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters for ownership of legal research. The startup, founded in 2015 by Andrew Arruda, Jimoh Ovbiagele and Pargles Dall'Oglio at the University of Toronto, is announcing an $8.7 million Series A today led by iNovia Capital with participation from Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Real Ventures, Dentons' NextLaw Labs and angels. At its core, ROSS is a platform that helps legal teams sort through case law to find details relevant to new cases. This process takes days and even weeks with standard keyword search, so ROSS is augmenting keyword search with machine learning to simultaneously speed up the research process and improve relevancy of items found. "Bluehill benchmarks Lexis's tech and they are finding 30 percent more relevant info with ROSS in less time," Andrew Arruda, co-founder and CEO of ROSS, explained to me in an interview.

Apple's new facial recognition software to unlock their new iPhone X has raised questions about privacy and the susceptibility of the technology to hacking attacks. Apple's iPhone X is set to go on sale on Nov. 3. The world waits with bated breath as Apple plans on releasing a slew of new features including a facial scan. The new device can be unlocked with face recognition software wherein a user would be able to look at the phone to unlock it. This convenient new technology is set to replace numeric and pattern locks and comes with a number of privacy safeguards.

Recommendation systems occupy an expanding role in everyday decision making, from choice of movies and household goods to consequential medical and legal decisions. The data used to train and test these systems is algorithmically confounded in that it is the result of a feedback loop between human choices and an existing algorithmic recommendation system. Using simulations, we demonstrate that algorithmic confounding can disadvantage algorithms in training, bias held-out evaluation, and amplify homogenization of user behavior without gains in utility.