Microsoft's announcement, on Monday, that it would purchase LinkedIn--its biggest acquisition ever, at more than twenty-six billion dollars--brought to mind an earlier takeover attempt, almost a decade ago. Back in the mid-aughts, Microsoft's C.E.O. at the time, Steve Ballmer, flew to Palo Alto to try to convince Mark Zuckerberg, the young C.E.O. of Facebook, to let Microsoft buy his company. During Facebook's first couple of years, bigger companies had dismissed it, and social networking in general, as a fad for college kids; Zuckerberg had even admitted that he didn't care how Facebook would eventually make money. But Ballmer, who wanted to catch up to Google in the online-advertising business, was beginning to see Facebook's power. People were signing up for accounts in extraordinary numbers.

Via @washingtonpost: An Apple spokeswoman confirmed that the bug was fixed Tuesday morning. Most consumers should have a fix in place – without the need for a software update. Over time, Apple has quietly prevented several Siri "features" by server-side, remotely, so at any time can be opened and closed again, in case of…, without your knowledge, and you would never know. Even, server-side Apple can give Siri unrestricted/unlimited access to our iDevices; an "authorized" person could get full access to any iPhone in the world by asking Siri with a specific secret voice command that could be changed at any time. Still at present, Siri shows all reminders and events in calendar, and allows add, modify and delete, without asking for passcode.

By the nature of artificial intelligence, Apple's virtual assistant Siri needs a lot more data and a lot more people using it to get dramatically smarter. That's what Apple is shooting for by bringing Siri to the Mac and opening it to third-party developers. With more people using the smart digital assistant, Siri could become the service that it was expected to be. With Apple pushing ahead with expanding Siri, industry analysts expect the increasing A.I.-focused competition among industry giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple should propel smart technologies to a whole new level in a few years. "A.I. means a lot to all four of these companies," said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

SAP SE is exploring augmented reality and intelligent assistant software in initiatives intended to boost employee productivity, according to new SAP CIO Thomas Saueressig, who at 31 is the youngest CIOworking for a global 2000 company. More productive employees will ultimately improve the business software maker's ability to serve customers, one of the German company's core tenets. "I fundamentally believe that the new generation and the expectations of our customers and our employees are changing so significantly," says Saueressig, who took over for Helen Arnold on May 1. "And we need to shift our focus purely on the end-user [employees and customers]." Saueressig is something of a rarity among first-time IT leaders. As a millennial, he is a member of a generation HPE CEO Meg Whitman describes as as supremely confident if not entitled.

As more information continues to pour in about what happened at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, here's what we know about the shooter, Omar Mateen. The logo of Jack'd, an online dating and chat app for gay men. According to some reports, Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used the app to message men in the months prior to the shooting. SAN FRANCISCO -- The CEO of Jack'd, a Tinder-like gay chat and dating app, says he hasn't been contacted by law enforcement since reports surfaced Tuesday that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen might have been using the app for at least a year. The site also hasn't been able to substantiate that Mateen had been a member, said Hector Camacho, CEO of Jack'd parent company Online Buddies.

Apple has a plan, of course. Looking back, it's clear what that is. So when the iPhone 5s came with a fingerprint sensor, it seemed like a useful, convenient feature. But really it was just a precursor to a bigger function: Apple Pay. Apple keeps its plan secret and reveals a little bit at a time.

The logo of Jack'd, an online dating and chat app for gay men. According to some reports, Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used the app to message men in the months prior to the shooting. SAN FRANCISCO -- There are reports that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen had been using a gay chat and dating app called Jack'd for at least a year before his assault at a gay dance club left 49 victims dead and 53 wounded on Sunday. However the company that runs the app says it can't find profile information and that police haven't contacted them. According to the Los Angeles Times, Mateen, 29, had messaged at least one regular Pulse patron sporadically over the past year using the Jack'd app.

This post is by Amy Nicholson, Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. Here's a task for you: Type "I want to get started with machine learning" into your favorite search engine. I get back a whole list of options from Coursera, Azure, Amazon, kdnuggets, reddit,… and I could continue on and on. So where should one get started? In this post, I share my experiences of using the Cortana Intelligence Gallery in conjunction with the Azure ML Studio, and how that combination helped me break down the otherwise high barriers into popular ML techniques and start building my own ML models as well as my knowledge about this space. A little bit of background into how I got into this project.

"A breakthrough in machine learning would be worth ten Microsofts." - Bill Gates Machine learning (ML) is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that allows computers to learn and make predictions based on previous data sets. With significant overlap in fields like data mining and statistical modeling, machine learning exhibits distinct differences compared to more traditional forms of AI. Where traditional artificial intelligence focuses on areas like reasoning and abstract thinking, the primary purpose of machine learning is to create software that can learn from past experience. Applications of ML are vast, from facial recognition technology to conversational AI like Amazon's Alexa. As you will see in the coming paragraphs, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about the ever-expanding scope of this technology.

When will Siri come out on the Mac? Will Siri be on macOS Sierra? What features will Siri for Mac have? Apple announced a slew of new things at WWDC 2016 including the much anticipated introduction of Siri, its voice activated assistant, to its Mac computers. If you're after the full lowdown on the announcement of macOS Sierra, here is our roundup.