Between Walking Dead and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, AMC currently has a cable ratings juggernaut on its hands. But before the network put all its eggs in the zombie basket, it was committed to developing critical darling successors to shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The would-be fill-in for the latter, Low Winter Sun, got cancelled after a single botched season. But Halt and Catch Fire, a darkly lit drama following Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), a tortured genius businessman in the fledgling world of personal computers in 1980s Texas, rebounded from anemic early ratings to earn increasingly improbable renewals for a second and then third season. And that's when the show did something pretty remarkable: It got even better.

This June, we published a big story--Shane Bauer's account of his four-month stint as a guard in a private prison. That's "big," as in XXL: 35,000 words long, or 5 to 10 times the length of a typical feature, plus charts, graphs, and companion pieces, not to mention six videos and a radio documentary. It was also big in impact. More than a million people read it, defying everything we're told about the attention span of online audiences; tens of thousands shared it on social media. The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR's Weekend Edition picked it up.

Among those who do enter the criminal justice system, a disproportionately high number are people of color. In 2010, the BJS found that for every 100,000 Americans, 380 inmates are white, while 2.5 times that many (966) are Latino. A whopping 2,207 are black -- nearly six times as many black Americans are incarcerated as their Caucasian counterparts. Is it any wonder, then, that America's minority communities express such little faith in the fairness of US legal institutions? In a nation that incorporated structural racism into its social system for nearly a century -- after hundreds of years of slavery -- are you really surprised that people of color have historically distrusted the legal system?

U.S. stocks are trading lower Wednesday morning as losses for phone and utility companies continue to drag the market from its recent record highs. Retailers including Target and Lowe's are skidding after disappointing earnings. The Federal Reserve will release minutes from its July meeting in the afternoon. KEEPING SCORE: The Dow Jones industrial average fell 58 points, or 0.3%, to 18,493 as of 10:25 a.m. The Standard & Poor's 500 index gave up 6 points, or 0.3%, to 2,171.

According to industry estimates, the US needs about 200,000 more workers to fill current cybersecurity roles. Globally, the gap is five times higher – an estimated 1 million workers. The issue has become such a priority that President Obama made increasing the number of cybersecurity workers a key component of his multibillion-dollar Cybersecurity National Action Plan, which was introduced earlier this year. The White House said earlier this month it plans on boosting the federal cybersecurity workforce by 3,500 new hires by year's end. But as businesses compete for scarce cybersecurity talent and policymakers weigh remedies for the digital security worker shortage, the ground underneath the profession is shifting.

I'm seated in a giant ballroom where vast rows of chairs face seven glowing supercomputers. Each liquid-cooled rack of servers is lit with a different color. Though they stand on a dais at the Paris Las Vegas resort as still as statues, the computers are locked in heated battle with each other. "The race for third is very tight," says Hakeem Oluseyi, an astrophysicist, in a rousing voice. ForAllSecure's team Mayhem stands as a silent sentinel in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, people typically envision a Sci-Fi world where robots take over humanity as we know it. But artificial intelligence is already here, improving everyday technologies such as ecommerce, surveillance systems and many others. To shed some light on how AI is used in this industry, we've asked Cristina Vatamanu, malware researcher at Bitdefender's Antimalware Labs, to answer a few questions. For the past 6 years, Cristina has demonstrated strong expertise in reverse engineering, exploit analysis, threat analysis and automated systems. She is now pursuing a PhD in Machine Learning theory in malware detection systems at "Gheorghe Asachi" Technical University in Iasi.

AI has impacted our day-to-day lives for years, whether that's automated voice calls or virtual personal assistants - like Siri - or even self-driving cars. The next step is to implement AI technology into personal and cyber security systems. Currently, one or two guards will monitor a bank of security screens, and it is a successful method of security, but it is not full proof. Eliminating human error is a key driver behind bringing Artificial Intelligence to security through intelligent video analytics. Humans can easily get distracted, generally have short attention spans, and often find it difficult to focus on multiple things at once - a bank of security screens.

Before the end of this year, Darktrace plans to release its Antigena technology. Antigena is designed to replicate the function of human antibodies, which identify and neutralise bacteria and viruses, by neutralising cyber threats automatically without human intervention. Darktrace is researching how information security teams respond to situations with a view to enabling the system not only to learn what they do, but also to predict what they will do and then use that information to offer better support information. "This is the kind of thing that really interests us, and is the kind of envelope-pushing, self-learning, machine-learning, AI-type stuff that we really want to get into," said Palmer. "An entirely AI security operations centre is not an unreasonable objective for us to have as researchers, and is certainly one of our goals, especially considering how quickly technology is moving in areas such as self-driving cars, which not long ago were considered to be pure fiction."