This undated image provided by the Orlando Police Department shows Omar Mateen, the shooting suspect at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Sunday, June 12, 2016. The gunman opened fire inside the crowded gay nightclub early Sunday before dying in a gunfight with SWAT officers, police said.

Slowly but surely, cyber security is evolving from the days of castles and moats into the modern era of software driven business. In the 1990s, after several failed attempts to build secure operating systems, the predominant security model became the network-perimeter security model enforced by firewalls. The way it works is clear: Machines on the inside of the firewall were trusted, and anything on the outside was untrusted. This castle-and-moat approach failed almost as quickly as it began, because holes in the wall had to be created to allow emerging internet services like mNews, email and web traffic through. Artificial intelligence will replace large teams of tier-1 SOC analysts who today stare at endless streams of threat alerts.

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. 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. Kevin West was at Pulse the night of the attack and said he recognized Mateen from the app.

This post originally appeared in ClickZ earlier this month. Forget all that "this is the year of mobile" nonsense. Mobile has more than arrived. From time spent to ad dollar growth, mobile is dominating; it's a rocket ship that's already in orbit. Over the past few weeks, I attended two different conferences – the Modern Marketing Summit Upfront and Eniac's M1 ("Mobile-First") Summit – where that was discussed a lot by thought leaders and mobile gurus from across today's leading agencies, brands, vendors and investors.

Apple unveiled a series of improvements to its Siri digital assistant on Thursday, but the tech giant still trails rivals such as Google and Amazon in the red-hot field of artificial intelligence, experts say. Apple's biggest move was to open up the talking iPhone assistant to third-party developers for inclusion in their apps, paving the way for users to hail a ride from Uber or send a message with Tencent's WeChat using voice commands. Experts in artificial intelligence applauded the move as an important step forward, in part because the more people use an artificial intelligence system, the better it becomes. But some wondered why Apple had not made Siri an open platform much sooner, noting that competing products including Amazon.com's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and the Google app are already open to developers. "Is it too little too late?"

The iPhone's talking pal Siri has, to date, been about as helpful as an umbrella in a hurricane. At the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple AAPL 1.07 % CEO Tim Cook touted new features and catch-up software tweaks, from the iPhone and Mac to the Apple Watch and TV. One of the few technologies that spanned all those products was Siri, the virtual assistant that lets us talk and interact with gadgets like they know us. Siri is growing up, and moving to the center of Apple's universe. In the months ahead, Siri will arrive on Mac computers and tackle more complex tasks on the Apple TV, where it first appeared last year.

Apple was not joking when it said that iOS 10 was a massive update for the operating system that runs iPhones and iPads. After a fairly ho-hum year of iOS 9 that was focused more on performance than features, Apple is back with a cadre of redesigns and updates to all the existing features in the operating system with iOS 10. Machine learning is--finally--playing a bigger role in iOS and is baked throughout the operating system, from the keyboard to photos and Siri. Developers will have a whole lot to do this summer with iOS 10. Apple is opening up several aspects of the operating system to developers that were previously cordoned off including the Maps app and Siri.

Back in December, when Slack integrations launched, I wrote Clippy's Revenge about the potential of "smart messaging" to become a new platform. Since then, big players have done much to nurture that possibility -- as if on some secret, jointly agreed-upon master schedule. This looks like the battleground of the next tech war, and all eyes are on Apple this week. But how much of the bot craze is hype, and what's worth paying attention to? The frenetic energy around this emerging ecosystem is well-placed, but often confusing. After meeting with more than 50 founders in this space, I'd like to offer a structured explanation of the emerging conversational economy and to propose some opportunities (for both big companies and startups).

Apple unveiled a series of improvements to its Siri digital assistant on Thursday, but the tech giant still trails rivals such as Google and Amazon in the red-hot field of artificial intelligence, experts say. Apple's biggest move was to open up the talking iPhone assistant to third-party developers for inclusion in their apps, paving the way for users to hail a ride from Uber or send a message with Tencent's WeChat using voice commands. Experts in artificial intelligence applauded the move as an important step forward, in part because the more people use an artificial intelligence system, the better it becomes. But some wondered why Apple had not made Siri an open platform much sooner, noting that competing products including Amazon.com's Alexa, Microsoft's Cortana and the Google app are already open to developers. "Is it too little too late?"

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, made the announcements at WWDC. Google and Facebook are widely regarded as being more innovative than Apple when it comes to developments in the coveted field of artificial intelligence (AI) - hailed as the next major area for computing. While Google and Facebook have developed self-learning AI agents that can learn and master complex games like Go, Apple has remained relatively silent - offering little more than a personal assistant known as Siri. Facebook has also shown off Chatbots, while Microsoft made a regrettable foray of its own into the world of bots with Tay, a controversial Twitter bot that ended up being highly offensive (as a result of humans). But Apple made a series of practical product updates at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday that show it is not ready to be left behind just yet.