Popular iPhone apps like Spotify, Angry Birds and Pokemon Go are being pirated using technology developed by Apple, an investigation has revealed. By circumventing Apple's tightly controlled App Store, software pirates have been able to install versions of these apps that allow them to stream music and play games ad free, without having to pay a fee. Illicit software distributors such as TutuApp, Panda Helper, AppValley and TweakBox have found ways to use digital certificates to get access to a program Apple introduced to let corporations distribute business apps to their employees without going through the official app store. Using so-called enterprise developer certificates, these pirate operations are providing modified versions of popular apps to consumers, enabling them to stream music without ads and to circumvent fees and rules in games, depriving Apple and legitimate app makers of revenue. By doing so, the pirate app distributors are violating the rules of Apple's developer programs, which only allow apps to be distributed to the general public through the App Store.

I can't wait to tell my future children about the day robots were about to take over--before one brave man held them at bay. It's an unlikely story, as all the best ones are. Harish Natarajan, just a guy in a vest, beat IBM's computer with wit and verve in a debate tournament this week, Bloomberg reports. Granted, he was the 2012 European debate-tournament winner, and is the record holder for most debate-competition wins overall. Champion of the robots was a human-size black box that IBM has lovingly nicknamed "Miss Debater," which can "[scan] more than 300 million newspaper articles and scientific journals to identify relevant arguments on any given topic." The arena was IBM's Think conference in San Francisco.

I mostly agree with runvnc in that I think this is a very substantial project, but I think if you're willing to make a few compromises and get some help, you could probably do it without it being detectable or intrusive. First, you'd need a VPN to spoof IPs from different countries, locations, etc. Next, you'd need some screen capture software like Nvidia shadowplay. Finally, you'd need a way to determine if an ad has already been added to your catalog, which I think would be pretty non-trivial (maybe save short 3 second sound clips so you can rapidly search those, making the assumption that they're distinct). If it had been, or once the ad was done, stop recording, move on to the next video and start recording (to keep them separate). Then you run multiple machines concurrently spoofing different locations.

The Washington Business Journal's inaugural FedBiz Forum offered a glimpse at how artificial intelligence is changing government contracting.

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon's new artificial intelligence strategy shows how the military is shifting from old-school heavy-metal hardware – tanks, …

To some degree, humans are quite predictable.

A new report for Seal Software sheds light on how companies' legal departments are preparing for or using the latest tools associated with artificial …

Apple is preparing for its next big launch event, according to a new report – but there might not be new products. The company is rumoured to be working on a whole host of new updates: an improved iPad Mini, a second version of the AirPods, as well as new Macs. That had many to hope that the company would hold one of its regular March events, and start selling many of those long-expected products. Apple will be holding one of those March events at its campus in California on 25 March, according to a new report from BuzzFeed. But those products won't be the central focus, according to the same report. Instead, the event will be headlined by Apple's news subscription service, which has been the subject of intense discussions between media organisations and the company.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is largely an experimental science—at least as much progress has been made by building and analyzing programs as by examining theoretical questions. MYCIN is one of several well-known programs that embody some intelligence and provide data on the extent to which intelligent behavior can be programmed. As with other AI programs, its development was slow and not always in a forward direction. But we feel we learned some useful lessons in the course of nearly a decade of work on MYCIN and related programs. In this book we share the results of many experiments performed in that time, and we try to paint a coherent picture of the work. The book is intended to be a critical analysis of several pieces of related research, performed by a large number of scientists. We believe that the whole field of AI will benefit from such attempts to take a detailed retrospective look at experiments, for in this way the scientific foundations of the field will gradually be defined. It is for all these reasons that we have prepared this analysis of the MYCIN experiments.