Aldi customers have been warned to stay away from hoax vouchers circulating on email and social media which trick shoppers into thinking that they can save money. The German retailer said the £65 vouchers, that circulated on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, are worthless and will not be accepted as legal tender at their stores. Aldi said it was investigating the scam and urged customers not to share their personal details, which could help scammers to commit identity fraud. "We advise customers to ignore these adverts and not to share any personal information," the supermarket said in a statement sent to the Independent. On Twitter, the supermarket said: "We are aware that there is a hoax £65 Aldi voucher being circulated. This voucher is fraudulent and cannot be redeemed in store."

However, some users may create multiple identities, or sockpuppets, and engage in undesired behavior by deceiving others or manipulating discussions. In this work, we study sockpuppetry across nine discussion communities, and show that sockpuppets differ from ordinary users in terms of their posting behavior, linguistic traits, as well as social network structure. Sockpuppets tend to start fewer discussions, write shorter posts, use more personal pronouns such as "I", and have more clustered ego-networks. Further, pairs of sockpuppets controlled by the same individual are more likely to interact on the same discussion at the same time than pairs of ordinary users. Our analysis suggests a taxonomy of deceptive behavior in discussion communities. Pairs of sockpuppets can vary in their deceptiveness, i.e., whether they pretend to be different users, or their supportiveness, i.e., if they support arguments of other sockpuppets controlled by the same user. We apply these findings to a series of prediction tasks, notably, to identify whether a pair of accounts belongs to the same underlying user or not. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of deception in online discussion communities and paves the way towards the automatic detection of sockpuppets.

Beijing authorities aren't messing around when it comes to stopping the theft of toilet paper. Facial recognition technology has been deployed at one of the city's busiest tourist spots to prevent what The South China Morning Post referred to as "toilet paper kleptomania." High-definition cameras installed at the city's Temple of Heaven restrooms capture facial images and then reportedly prevents any one person from taking more than 60 centimeters (or about 23 inches) of paper within a nine-minute period, according to the report and other news outlets. If the same person appears during that period, the toilet paper dispenser stops working. Presumably, this photo session takes place at the entrance to the restroom, so some degree of privacy is maintained while patrons go about their business.

On a bet from peers in his high school programming club, a teenager in West Virginia taught himself to build an artificial intelligence program that can rap like Kanye West, according to news reports. Seventeen-year-old Robbie Barrat thought that artificial intelligence (AI) could accomplish tasks better than humans, and his high school programming club told him to prove it, reported Quartz. Using open-source code and 6,000 Kanye West lines, Barrat built a neural network that could mimic the superstar rapper. Barrat completed the project in a week and showed the program to his peers at their next club meeting, according to Quartz. It took one afternoon to write most of the code, Barrat said, but a few more days to optimize the AI's results.

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless place. Nothing struggled, thought, or wanted. Seawater leached chemicals from rocks; near thermal vents, those chemicals jostled and combined. Some hit upon the trick of making copies of themselves that, in turn, made more copies. The replicating chains were caught in oily bubbles, which protected them and made replication easier; eventually, they began to venture out into the open sea. A new level of order had been achieved on Earth. The tree of life grew, its branches stretching toward complexity. Organisms developed systems, subsystems, and sub-subsystems, layered in ever-deepening regression. They used these systems to anticipate their future and to change it. When they looked within, some found that they had selves--constellations of memories, ideas, and purposes that emerged from the systems inside. They experienced being alive and had thoughts about that experience. They developed language and used it to know themselves; they began to ask how they had been made. This, to a first approximation, is the secular story of our creation. It has no single author; it's been written collaboratively by scientists over the past few centuries. If, however, it could be said to belong to any single person, that person might be Daniel Dennett, a seventy-four-year-old philosopher who teaches at Tufts. In the course of forty years, and more than a dozen books, Dennett has endeavored to explain how a soulless world could have given rise to a soulful one. His special focus is the creation of the human mind.

Artificial Intelligence has come to mean many things to different people. Some view A.I. as a command-and-response technology that offers one-dimensional, pre-programmed, responses. This command-driven interpretation of artificial intelligence falls short of describing truly dynamic artificial intelligences like Arghon. As a high-performance A.I., Arghon seeks to provide practical services and useful information quickly, based on its deep understanding and personalized interactions with our users. Having truly useful artificial intelligence lets users avoid downloading tons of apps while still getting customized service, information, and companionship via their A.I.s.

HBO's Westworld features a common plot device--synthetic hosts rising up against their callous human creators. But is it more than just a plot twist? After all, smart people like Bill Gates and Steven Hawking have warned that artificial intelligence may be on a dangerous path and could threaten the survival of the human race. They're not the only ones worried. The Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament recently issued a report calling on the EU to require intelligent robots to be registered, in part so their ethical character can be assessed.

Beyond the political underpinning, the fake news agenda and the plethora of VR experiences, the one technology to really know about while at SXSW in Austin this year, was artificial intelligence (AI). That sentence has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because it's almost impossible to think of AI as a single idea, or indeed even a "trend" these days, for the very fact it is so fundamentally beginning to underpin everything we do. Christian Ward, senior editor of media and marketing at trends service Stylus, referenced Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said: "We are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in computing that is like nothing we've seen in decades." We've been living in a world that has slowly become mobile-first, he explained, but we're moving to one that is ultimately AI-first. The view at SXSW was broken down into really what this means, both at a top line societal level and at the more applicable brand one.

Diamo Parvez was born with cerebral palsy and died from complications when he was nine years old. During his life his parents were constantly struggling to get him the braces and splints he needed to support his body - and have channelled the pain of their loss into the search for a new, fast way of making them. Diamo's arms and legs were paralysed and he had very little control of his head. He needed a back brace, hand splints and ankle splints - technically known as orthoses - to prevent him suffering pain. The main problem, says his mother, Samiya, is that when a muscle isn't used it shrinks and tightens.

Waymo, a self-driving car company that used to be part of Google, last month sued Uber in federal court, alleging betrayal and high-tech espionage. The complaint accuses Anthony Levandowski, a former top manager for Google's self-driving car project, of stealing technology now propelling Uber's effort to build an autonomous vehicle fleet.