The tech company introduced "Tay" this week -- a bot that responds to users' queries and emulates the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. The aim was to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," with Tay able to learn from "her" conversations and get progressively "smarter." But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for "upgrades," and it is deleting some of the worst tweets -- though many still remain. It's important to note that Tay's racism is not a product of Microsoft or of Tay itself.

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

A self-driving car is, in the words of the roboticist Missy Cummings, "one, big data-gathering machine." Which, on one hand, is great: For driverless cars to work, they have to slurp up huge streams of sensory data about the world around them. But these vehicles will also collect reams of personal information about their passengers--just the way Uber and Google Maps have detailed information about where you've gone, and can predict where you're going. This isn't necessarily bad--there are all kinds of neat services that might rely on personalized data--but it does raise the question of how, if at all, data collection ought to be regulated. This topic came up last week at a Congressional hearing on driverless cars, and the companies potentially doing the data-collecting were, and this is putting it gently, evasive.

Bitcoin is a purely online virtual currency, unbacked by either physical commodities or sovereign obligation; instead, it relies on a combination of cryptographic protection and a peer-to-peer protocol for witnessing settlements. Consequently, Bitcoin has the unintuitive property that while the ownership of money is implicitly anonymous, its flow is globally visible. In this paper we explore this unique characteristic further, using heuristic clustering to group Bitcoin wallets based on evidence of shared authority, and then using re-identification attacks (i.e., empirical purchasing of goods and services) to classify the operators of those clusters. From this analysis, we consider the challenges for those seeking to use Bitcoin for criminal or fraudulent purposes at scale. Demand for low friction e-commerce of various kinds has driven a proliferation in online payment systems over the last decade. Thus, in addition to established payment card networks (e.g., Visa and Mastercard), a broad range of the so-called "alternative payments" has emerged including eWallets (e.g., Paypal, Google Checkout, and WebMoney), direct debit systems (typically via ACH, such as eBillMe), money transfer systems (e.g., Moneygram), and so on. However, virtually all of these systems have the property that they are denominated in existing fiat currencies (e.g., dollars), explicitly identify the payer in transactions, and are centrally or quasi-centrally administered. By far the most intriguing exception to this rule is Bitcoin. First deployed in 2009, Bitcoin is an independent online monetary system that combines some of the features of cash and existing online payment methods. Like cash, Bitcoin transactions do not explicitly identify the payer or the payee: a transaction is a cryptographically signed transfer of funds from one public key to another.

I appreciated Phillip G. Armour's use of coupled pendulums as an analogy for software project management in his The Business of Software column "The Chaos Machine" (Jan. Chaos is already being exhibited when Armour's machine performs smoothly, in the sense future behavior is inherently unpredictable. What happened when the machine made a hop was not that it "hit a chaos point" but apparently some "resonance disaster" that caused it to exceed the range of operation for which it was built. Moreover, "turbulence" is not an appropriate description in this context, as it describes irregular movement in fluid dynamics. Chaotic behavior does not require three variables.

Marvin Minsky, an American scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) who co-founded vthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI laboratory, wrote several books on AI and philosophy, and was honored with the ACM A.M. Turing Award, passed away on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016 at the age of 88. Born in New York City, Minsky attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Phillips Academy, before entering the U.S. Navy in 1944. After leaving the service, he attended Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1950. He then went to Princeton University, where he built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, the Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator (SNARC), before earning his Ph.D in mathematics there in 1954. Doctorate in hand, Minsky was admitted to the group of Junior Fellows at Harvard, where he invented the confocal scanning microscope for thick, light-scattering specimens, decades in advance of the lasers and computer power needed to make it useful; today, it is in wide use in the biological sciences.

Zittrain, J. Engineering an election – digital gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy.

U.S. President Barack Obama discussing his Computer Science for All plan to give students across the country the chance to learn computer science in school. In late January, U.S. President Barack Obama asked Congress to approve 4.1 billion in spending in the coming fiscal year to support the Computer Science for All initiative, aimed at providing computer science education in U.S. public schools. Obama pointed out computer science is no longer "an optional skill" in the modern economy," yet "only about a quarter of our K–12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) schools offer computer science. Twenty-two states don't even allow it to count toward a diploma." While many organizations have contributed to the national effort to see real computer science exist and count toward graduation requirements in U.S. public schools, former ACM CEO John R. White said, "ACM has been there from the beginning." Indeed, White contends Obama's Computer Science for All initiative "in a way represents the ...

More than 20% of U.S. adults live with some form of disability, according to a September 2015 report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The latest generation of smartphones, tablets, and personal computers are equipped with accessibility features that make using these devices easier, or at least, less onerous, for those who have sight, speech, or hearing impairments. These enhancements include functions such as screen-reading technology (which reads aloud text when the user passes a finger over it); screen-flashing notification when a call or message comes in for the hearing impaired; and voice controls of basic functions for those who are unable to physically manipulate the phone or computing device's controls. Other technologies that can help the disabled have or are coming to market, and not all of them are focused simply on providing access to computers or smartphones. Irrespective of the accessibility provided, most market participants agree more needs to be done to help those with disabilities to fully experience our increasingly digital world.

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter is just out of frame on the right side of the screen. As soon as it was airborne, the drone flying inside West Point crashed to the ground at the feet of Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. The soldier responsible for the drone's demise gently lowered the weapon, no smoke wafting from its barrel, not even a sound made with the shot. Built by the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, the rifle was demonstrated last fall at the Association of the United States Army exposition in Washington, DC. Unlike pretty much every other variety of gun, this rifle doesn't shoot any projectiles.