Roughly half of all Web traffic comes from bots and crawlers, and that's costing companies a boatload of money. That's one finding from a report released Thursday by DeviceAtlas, which makes software to help companies detect the devices being used by visitors to their websites. Non-human sources accounted for 48 percent of traffic to the sites analyzed for DeviceAtlas's Q1 Mobile Web Intelligence Report, including legitimate search-engine crawlers as well as automated scrapers and bots generated by hackers, click fraudsters and spammers, the company said. DeviceAtlas is owned by Afilias, which calls itself the world's second-largest Internet domain name registry. Bot technologies have long been known to account for a significant amount of traffic, but today they're becoming more malevolent--and more expensive, said Ronan Cremin, CTO of DotMobi, a mobile content delivery company also owned by Afilias.

When an unidentified object hit a British Airways A320 on the nose on its approach to Heathrow last month, the encounter was widely believed the fault of some dope who had flown his drone into busy airspace, endangering the lives of the 137 people aboard the jet. "It was bound to happen," the British Airline Pilots Association said. This time, the errant "drone" was actually a plastic bag, but the FAA isn't sitting around, waiting for a next time. This month, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it's expanding its Pathfinder Program, which it created to detect and identify drones flying too close to airports. To make that happen, the agency's conducting joint research with a number of companies to identify the technology that might be used to spot, block, and drop the unwanted unmanned aircraft systems.

A Kansas Tinder user was recently kidnapped, beaten and held against her will for six days by a man she met via the app. Shane Steven Allen faces one charge of kidnapping and four of aggravated battery. Should the convictions go through, Allen could serve a 32 year prison sentence. The woman, a 20 year-old student at the University of Kansas, was kidnapped on April 12th and was returned to her sorority on April 18th with multiple injuries including a pair of black eyes, broken blood vessels in her eyes and multiple bruises and abrasions, according to local news outlet Lawrence Journal World.

A file photo dated 06 January 2004 shows Apple Computer's CEO Steve Jobs sitting in front of a project Apple Computer logo during his keynote speech at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, California, USA. Apple's (AAPL) epic fall on the stock market took a symbolic turn Thursday after its market value again dropped below its top rival's. That makes it second fiddle behind Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) at 499.9 billion. Shares of Apple have been in freefall this year, dropping more than 14%, amid the company's disappointing first-quarter results. It's the second time this year Alphabet's market value has surpassed Apple's.

Roughly half of all Web traffic comes from bots and crawlers, and that's costing companies a boatload of money. That's one finding from a report released Thursday by DeviceAtlas, which makes software to help companies detect the devices being used by visitors to their websites. Non-human sources accounted for 48 percent of traffic to the sites analyzed for DeviceAtlas's Q1 Mobile Web Intelligence Report, including legitimate search-engine crawlers as well as automated scrapers and bots generated by hackers, click fraudsters and spammers, the company said. DeviceAtlas is owned by Afilias, which calls itself the world's second-largest Internet domain name registry. Bot technologies have long been known to account for a significant amount of traffic, but today they're becoming more malevolent -- and more expensive, said Ronan Cremin, CTO of DotMobi, a mobile content delivery company also owned by Afilias.

WASHINGTON – U.S. special operations forces working with African partners called in an airstrike against the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab group in Somalia on Thursday, killing five, the Pentagon said. Jeff Davis said U.S. troops were advising and assisting Ugandan troops from the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) in southern Somalia, west of Mogadishu. The AMISOM troops were raiding an illegal Shabaab roadblock where the jihadis were extorting payments from drivers. "They came under fire from the al-Shabaab militants, and we called in an airstrike in their defense," Davis said. A U.S. defense official said the strike was conducted by drone.

Will Machine Learning come to rescue for cybersecurity? Or is it just more empty promises. This is the third part of a short series on cybersecurity. Watch the video below and let's discuss. This article is published as part of the IDG Contributor Network.

IBM is teaming up with eight North American universities to further tune its cognitive system to tackle cybersecurity problems. Watson for Cyber Security, a platform already in pre-beta, will be further trained in "learning the nuances of security research findings and discovering patterns and evidence of hidden cyber attacks and threats that could otherwise be missed". IBM will work with eight US universities from autumn onwards for a year in order to push forward the project. The universities selected are California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; Pennsylvania State University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; New York University; the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); the University of New Brunswick; the University of Ottawa; and the University of Waterloo. The project is ultimately designed to bridge the cyber-security skills gap, a perennial issue in the industry.

A file photo dated 06 January 2004 shows Apple Computer's CEO Steve Jobs sitting in front of a project Apple Computer logo during his keynote speech at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, California, USA. Apple's (AAPL) epic fall on the markets took a symbolic turn Thursday after its market value again dropped below its top rival's. That makes it second fiddle behind Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) at 497.8 billion. Shares of Apple have been in freefall this year, dropping more than 14%, amid the company's disappointing first-quarter results. It's the second time this year that Alphabet's market value has surpassed Apple's.

But such is not the case in the domain of cybersecurity. Although security solutions based on unsupervised machine learning do exist, relying entirely on artificial intelligence to spot cyberattacks isn't totally practical because such systems yield a large number of false positives. You eventually need the help of human experts to find evidence of security breaches and make critical decisions. This means cybersecurity professionals get to keep their jobs--at least for the time being. But that's not necessarily a good thing, especially since analyst-based security solutions are fraught with problems, too, and can't keep up with the huge volume of data that needs to be analyzed at every moment, eventually leading to high rates of undetected attacks and delayed responses.