The US has charged two Russian spies with the biggest cyber attack ever carried out. The Department of Justice said that two "state-sponsored" Russian hackers were responsible for breaking into Yahoo and stealing 500 million accounts. The case would be the first ever brought against Russian officials. The charge comes amid increasing tensions between Russia and the US over the use cyber weapons and hacking. Multiple US intelligence agencies have accused Russian state-sponsored hackers of running a co-ordinated campaign to upset the result of the US election and increase the chances that Donald Trump would become president.

If you take humans out of the driving seat, could traffic jams, accidents and high fuel bills become a thing of the past? As cars become more automated and connected, attention is turning to how to best choreograph the interaction between the tens or hundreds of automated vehicles that will one day share the same segment of Europe's road network. It is one of the most keenly studied fields in transport – how to make sure that automated cars get to their destinations safely and efficiently. But the prospect of having a multitude of vehicles taking decisions while interacting on Europe's roads is leading researchers to design new traffic management systems suitable for an era of connected transport. The idea is to ensure that traffic flows as smoothly and efficiently as possible, potentially avoiding the jams and delays caused by human behaviour.

A rogue robot has been blamed for the death of a woman killed in an accident at an auto-parts factory in Michigan. Wanda Holbrook, who worked as a maintenance technician at the Ventra Ionia Mains plant for 12 years, was "trapped by robotic machinery and pronounced dead at the scene" in July 2015. The 57-year-old's widower, William Holbrook, has filed a wrongful death complaint seeking damages from five robotics companies responsible for manufacturing, installing and testing the robotics: Lincoln Electric, Flex-N-Gate, Prodomax, FANUC and Nachi. "Wanda was working in either section 140 or 150 within the '100' cell, when a robot from section 130 took Wanda by surprise, entering the section she was working," the lawsuit alleges. She "suffered tremendous fright, shock and conscious pain and suffering" when she was crushed to death, the suit claims.

Intelligence agents and military operatives may come to rely heavily on machine learning to parse huge quantities of data, and to control a growing arsenal of autonomous systems. But the U.S. military wants to make sure that this doesn't lead to blindly trusting in any algorithm. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the Defense Department that explores new technologies, is funding several projects that aim to make artificial intelligence explain itself. The approaches range from adding further machine-learning systems geared toward providing an explanation, to the development of new machine-learning approaches that incorporate an elucidation by design. "We now have this real explosion of AI," says David Gunning, the DARPA program manager who is funding an effort to develop AI techniques that include some explanation of their reasoning.

When I first heard of predictive analytics, machine learning, and cognitive security, I was skeptical. I am an engineer at heart and condition-based maintenance was the only way, I thought, to effectively look at predictive maintenance. You start with the physical asset, you deploy sensors to monitor critical components, and you analyze the data. The thing is, this approach is expensive and time-consuming. Sensors need to be deployed and installed on existing equipment, software to collect, store, and process the data needs to be integrated, O&M teams need to be trained on the technology, and the software needs to be constantly updated.

Bottom line, a typo crashed the AWS powered Internet! AWS outages already have a long history and the more AWS customers running their web infrastructure on the cloud giant, the more issues end customers will experience in the future. According to SimilarTech only Amazon S3 is already used by 152,123 websites and 124,577 unique domains. However, following the philosophy of "Everything fails all the time (Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon.com)"

The health sector is the most vulnerable, most targeted, and resoundingly least equipped to defend against hackers who are pummeling healthcare organizations with ransomware attacks. This ransomware epidemic will only become more severe and costly as the infection volume in 2017 will trump infections in 2016. In this post, entitled "How to Crush the Health Sector's Ransomware Pandemic: The Machine Learning Based Artificial Intelligence Revolution Starts Now!", the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology discusses the power of machine based artificial intelligence as a potent cybersecurity defense layer to defend against hyper-evolving APTs and malware. This paper was authored by James Scott, Sr. Fellow, ICIT

For a previous generation in the US, the only places where one might worry about the possibility of a mass casualty were "high-value targets," like airports and government offices, places that have body scanners and bag inspections, security guards and long lines to get in today. But attackers increasingly strike at public places like nightclubs, stadiums, clinics, malls, places of worship and schools. A startup called Evolv Technology Inc., has raised $18 million to help venues with even a limited budget use advanced technology rather than pat downs to detect and prevent mass casualties. Investors in Evolv's new round of funding included General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Gates Ventures, and Data Collective. The Waltham, Mass.-based startup has created both hardware and software for physical security.

The Premier League has obtained an injunction enabling it to work hand-in-hand with UK internet service providers (ISPs) to block illegal streams fed to Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) boxes running Kodi, in real time. It covers all of the current Premier League season's remaining fixtures, running from 18 March 2017 to 22 May 2017. If the measures prove successful, the Premier League will apply for a new injunction covering the 2017/18 season. The move represents a major change in the way content blocking works. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency secret new authority to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists, U.S. officials said, changing the Obama administration's policy of limiting the spy agency's paramilitary role and reopening a turf war between the agency and the Pentagon. The new authority, which hadn't been previously disclosed, represents a significant departure from a cooperative approach that had become standard practice by the end of former President Barack Obama's tenure: The CIA used drones and other intelligence resources to locate suspected terrorists and then the military conducted the actual strike. The U.S. drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour in May 2016 in Pakistan was the best example of that hybrid approach, U.S. officials said. The Obama administration put the military in charge of pulling the trigger to promote transparency and accountability. The CIA, which operates under covert authorities, wasn't required to disclose the number of suspected terrorists or civilian bystanders it killed in drone strikes.