It's just the way it is: the human being is a lazy creature. If it's possible not to do something, we don't do it. However, paradoxically this is a good thing, because laziness is… the engine of progress! Well, if a job's considered too hard or long-winded or complex for humans to do, certain lazy (but conscientious) humans (Homo Laziens?:) give the job to a machine! In cybersecurity we call it optimization.

Since Google began testing its self-driving cars in 2012, the autonomous vehicles have been involved in a number of crashes. Most of these have been minor and at low speeds, so have not caused significant damage to either the car or the person at the wheel. But last week, one of Google's cars was involved in one of the worst autonomous vehicle accidents yet, which caused the airbags to be deployed, and caved in both the front and rear side doors. Last week, one of Google's cars was involved in one of the worst autonomous vehicle accidents yet, which caused the airbags to be deployed, and caved in both the front and rear side doors The crash occurred in California, when a van driver ran a red light and collided with the passenger side door of Google's modified Lexus SUV. Thankfully, neither driver was injured, but the Google car had to be towed away.

U.S. stocks are slumping in Monday morning trading as healthcare companies and banks take the biggest losses. Energy companies are inching higher as oil prices rise. Major indexes in Europe and Asia are also starting the week on a steep skid. The Dow Jones industrial average was down 108 points, or 0.6%, to 18,153 as of 10:15 a.m. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 10 points, or 0.4%, to 2,155.

Nine people were shot and wounded, one critically, in a Houston neighborhood Monday morning by a lawyer who had issues with his law firm, authorities said. The first report of the shootings began at about 6:30 a.m. CDT, Police Chief Martha Montalvo said at a news conference, and when officers arrived, the suspect began firing at them. Police shot the man, whom Montalvo did not identify and who later died at the scene. Numerous weapons were found at the scene, Montalvo said, and a bomb-squad robot is looking at a Porsche that's believed to be the shooter's.

Microsoft researchers are doing a bug bash on cancer, complete with software code names like "Project Hanover." Some of them are actually drilling down into our genetic code, looking for ways to reprogram the immune system to combat cancer cells more effectively. "If you can do computing with biological systems, then you can transfer what we've learned in traditional computing into medical or biotechnology applications," Microsoft's Neil Dalchau says in the company's in-depth report about its cancer moonshots. Others are enlisting the power of cloud computing to identify which treatment would work best for a particular cancer patient, based on his or her personalized medical profile. Microsoft and AstraZeneca are already using a software tool known as the Bio Model Analyzer to figure out why leukemia patients respond differently to different treatments.

Hackers and other nefarious types tend to hide their forums and marketplaces in one of two ways. The first relies on the widely used Tor software to anonymize traffic as it passes around the Internet and prevent it being tracked. This is known as the "dark net." Another option is to use websites hosted on the open portion of the Web but not indexed by search engines. This is the "deep net," and can be equally hard to navigate. To monitor hacker activity in these places, Nunes and co developed a crawler to gather information from HTML pages hosted on the deep net and the dark net. Obviously, a key part of this work is to point the crawler at the best starting pages, a task that must be done by humans familiar with these pages.

We have covered here at Equities many times the rising risk of cyber attacks and how new companies are coming out with unique products to prevent security hacks. One of the new companies we are following is SecBI (Security Business Intelligence). This Israel-based company was founded in 2014 under the leadership from experts at RSA. The company is headquartered in Be'er-Sheba as a part of the JCP Cyberlabs. SecBI's cyber-detection platform that combines advanced intelligent thinking-machine technology, cyber-security expertise and user feedback into a superior threat detector.

Airbus Group is using machine learning and data analytics to help guide pilots through catastrophic emergencies. In a speech at the Connect Expo in Melbourne, Airbus Group head of data driven technologies Ronny Fehling said the business was working on ways to reduce the information overload pilots face during a crisis. "Right now if there's something bad happening, every light goes on in the cockpit, and that's not what we want. We want to reduce the amount of information and false positives," Fehling said. "If the engines are burning, we need it to say'focus on this right now, and all the rest will be handled by the system'. We want to give [pilots] the right tools and information so they can make the right decision to save lives."

NEW YORK – Five years after Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by an American drone strike, he keeps inspiring acts of terror. Investigators say a bomb that rocked New York a week ago, injuring more than two dozen people, was the latest in a long line of incidents in which the attackers were inspired by al-Awlaki, an American imam who became an al-Qaida propagandist. Federal terrorism charges against the bombing suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, say a bloodstained notebook -- found on him after he engaged in a shootout with police in New Jersey and was arrested -- included passages praising al-Awlaki. And Rahami's father has said he went to the FBI two years ago in part because he was concerned about his son's admiration for al-Awlaki and the time he spent watching his videos advocating jihad, or holy war. Terror experts say al-Awlaki remains a dangerous inciter of homegrown terror.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Sunday that his counterparts in the Group of Seven developed nations welcomed U.S. guidelines on regulating self-driving cars and have agreed to work together on creating such standards to maintain safety. "There was actually a very enthusiastic reception to the policy," he said. "We did a good job of inventorying what each country is doing and laying out areas that we want to explore further." Such issues include cybersecurity, ethics and privacy, wireless spectrum questions and many other issues, he said, while noting that reaching a resolution might take years, meaning the technology will be moving faster. Foxx called the U.S. guidelines released earlier this month the most comprehensive on autonomous vehicles, coming out ahead of the rest of the world.