With dozens of public satellites in orbit and many more scheduled over the next decade, the size and complexity of geospatial imagery continues to grow. It has become increasingly difficult to manage this flood of data and use it to gain valuable insights. That's why we're excited to announce that we're bringing two of the most important collections of public, cost-free satellite imagery to Google Cloud: Landsat and Sentinel-2. The Landsat mission, developed under a joint program of the USGS and NASA, is the longest continuous space-based record of Earth's land in existence, dating back to 1972 with the Landsat 1 satellite. Landsat imagery sets the standard for Earth observation data due to the length of the mission and the rich data provided by its multispectral sensors.

As Hurricane Matthew churns from Haiti toward Cuba and the Bahamas, millions along the Southeast U.S. coast are preparing for the storm. As of midday Tuesday, the entire East Coast from Miami to Boston was within the National Hurricane Center's (NHC) "cone of uncertainty" storm track forecast. With supermarket shelves already going bare in Florida, many are basing crucial storm decisions, such as whether to stay near the shore or head inland, in large part on forecast graphics like the cone of uncertainty map. Forecasters at the NHC produce this map multiple times each day based on new information from computer models, weather observations and other sources. But published, peer-reviewed research, along with an informal poll of Mashable newsroom colleagues, indicates that it's unlikely do itmost people truly understand what the cone of uncertainty graphic actually shows.

Personal data from more than 1.5 million users of a dating site network that encourages its members to "have a fling" and "have an affair" has been found online. The database, run by C&Z Tech Limited, a New Zealand-based dating company that runs a number of websites and mobile apps, like HaveAFling.mobi, HaveAnAffair.mobi, For years, thousands were tricked into buying low-quality ebooks. That data includes usernames and email addresses, passwords (stored in plain text), gender, dates of birth, profile photos, the country of residence. And other personal information like body type, height and weight (if a user chooses to enter it), desires, interests, race, turn-ons, the type of person a user is seeking to interact with, and whether the user smokes and drinks.

Financial markets, throughout their evolution, have always been susceptible to manipulations and various unscrupulous activities. The history can be traced back as far as 600 BC when a Greek merchant borrowed money from public to grow corn. The lenders were assured of repayment along with interest when the product was sold. In case of failure to repay on time, the lenders could acquire merchant's cargo along with the boat. The fraud designed by the borrower was to sink the empty boat and keep both the money and corn.

Andre van Rüschen has no memory of the day he lost all feeling in his legs. After a car accident in Germany, he had a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. When he woke up from a coma in a hospital in Hamburg, the doctors told him he would never walk again. But now, thirteen years later, van Rüschen is back on his feet, and he is training to compete as a pilot in the Powered Exoskeleton race at the Cybathlon in Zurich this month. In a high-rise office building on Leipziger Platz in Berlin, he slides out of his wheelchair onto a black leather pouf where a ReWalk exoskeleton sits folded.

Although technology seems to be everywhere, we continue to fill in the voids. Existing technologies evolve and change at a higher pace every year, making it challenging for some professionals to adjust.We have reached a point where some are having difficulty coping with game-changing technologies that are presumably contributing to progress. Such progress can be difficult to perceive if you are not directly benefiting from it. In my previous article, I discussed the ability of social robotics to make a positive impact on our society. This article provides an optimistic vision of the opportunity for this technology to include the general public in its development.

Over the years, society has become more dependent on digital technologies. Today, nearly every person, business, and government agency uses the internet to transmit and store data. As a result of that dependence, there is no shortage of hackers who try to access that data. We see this at every level. Celebrities have had their phones hacked and their personal photographs stolen and dispersed online.

Self-driving cars without steering wheels or pedals might have gotten a little bit closer to reality late last week. On Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released a revised draft of regulations that could give more flexibility to autonomous car manufacturers than they have today. The proposed regulations allow testing driverless cars that pass a federal safety inspection, even with no driver in the car. At the moment, states with self-driving car regulation normally require the presence of drivers. In California, 15 companies have permits to test vehicles as long as there is a licensed driver along for the ride, according to Reuters.

Advanced surveillance technology is already intensifying racial discrimination at police departments in the United States, and there's a good chance it's going to get worse. This is a fact well-documented by plenty of extensive reviews conducted by the Department of Justice that have unearthed a tremendous number of civil rights violations committed by officers against minority residents. What's less understood is how surveillance technologies employed by the police intensify the racially discriminatory strategies that already exist. Police use of captured cellphone data, social media monitoring tools, and facial recognition technology has already been called racially biased, and these technologies aren't likely to disappear from departments. One of the starkest examples of police using technology to compound racially biased policing comes out of Baltimore.

Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel by Lucas Carlson My rating: 5 of 5 stars Big Data: A Startup Thriller Novel is a new ingenious creation by Lucas Carlson, a fiction and non-fiction author and entrepreneur, who already got my attention and won me over with his first thrilling startup novel The Term Sheet. Big Data is a maddening ride through our near future where artificial intelligence is incorporated in our lives to the point that people rely on its services more than on their natural instincts, reasoning and decision making. It serves us, it helps us, it cures us, and then it kills us... This is exactly what happens when Luna Valencia's most-advanced supercomputer Ancien in history starts to refine and improve on its own code which can "solve many problems in the world of artificial intelligence without human assistance, interpretation, or intervention." It is the holy grail in the world of computers, but it is also the weapon for mass murder in the world of humans.