"Less than a minute after finishing the call with Johannes, the fake Johannes rang again. His voice was identical but as soon as I asked who was calling, the line went dead." The criminals have yet to be identified, the company's insurer, Euler Hermes, said. Philipp Amann, head of strategy at the cybercrime centre at Europol, said that similar frauds may have already been made but gone undetected. Experts have raised concerns in the past year about the rapid acceleration of the technology but it had been believed that only video footage could be mimicked with such accuracy.

In this article we introduce Boss, the autonomous vehicle that won the challenge. Boss is a complex artificially intelligent software system embodied in a 2007 Chevy Tahoe. To navigate safely, the vehicle builds a model of the world around it in real time. This model is used to generate safe routes and motion plans both on roads and in unstructured zones. An essential part of Boss's success stems from its ability to safely handle both abnormal situations and system glitches.

Sensor abuse is a serious and debilitating condition. However, one must remember that it is a disease, not a crime. As such, it can be treated. This article presents a case study in sensor abuse. This particular subject was lucky enough to pull himself out of his pitiful condition, but others are not so lucky.

Guy Ryder is an old hand at Davos. The director general of the International Labour Organisation has seen it all: the years when the global business elite is brimful of confidence and the years, such as 2017, when the top 1% of the top 1% is fretful. Ryder detected parallels with 2009, when the global economy seemed to be heading for a second Great Depression. Eight years ago, the attendees were shaken by the banking collapse but showed little contrition. This year, they were alarmed by the populist anger that was evident in Brexit and Donald Trump's arrival in the White House but couldn't really understand why it was happening.

For some reason, telepresence--the concept of having your person (in audio and/or video form) represented by some kind of machine while you are physically elsewhere--has lent itself to extreme goofiness. It's not really a goofy idea, and yet we've seen squishy larval phones, shoulder-mounted robots, the Anybots robot (which recently ordered coffee in a Palo Alto shop), and now this blimp-like thing from Sony that projects your face onto what's essentially a motorized balloon. Created by Tobita Hiroaki and his team at Sony, the blimp (which is still nameless) shows a projection of the telepresence-r's face on a meter-wide balloon. It works generally like all blimps do, powered by a few small propellers located underneath the balloon. It's controlled remotely, with a webcam on the user's face updating live, and broadcasts audio through a built-in speaker.