He created Grand Theft Auto. Dan Houser was one of the masterminds behind revolutionary video game series Grand Theft Auto. Now, after leaving Rockstar Games and launching his own company, he's released a debut novel about a very different type of game. A Better Paradise is a dystopian vision of the near future in which an AI-led computer game goes rogue. Set in a polarised world, it finds Mark Tyburn attempting to create a virtual haven for people to find sanctuary and reconnect within themselves against an all-consuming social media hellscape.

Tech expert Kurt Knutsson reveals how Figure's robot shows advanced manufacturing skills at BMW plant. HP is a household name when it comes to printers, but the company employs questionable practices to maximize profits. Much like Apple, HP aims to create a closed ecosystem, forcing you to use only its ink with its printers, especially if you opt into HP . Recently, I was at my in-laws' home and signed up for HP for them through the app only to discover that once you accept, the printer firmware is updated permanently. There's no way to undo it, and you're locked into using HP ink cartridges to print anything.

Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash is the book that launched a thousand startups. It was the first book to use the Hindu term avatar to describe a virtual representation of a person, it coined the term "metaverse", and was one of Mark Zuckerberg's pieces of required reading for new executives at Facebook a decade before he changed the focus of the entire company to attempt to build Stephenson's fictional world in reality. The plot revolves around an image that, when viewed in the metaverse, hijacks the viewer's brain, maiming or killing them. In the fiction of the world, the image crashes the brain, presenting it with an input that simply cannot be correctly processed. Perhaps the first clear example came four years earlier, in British SF writer David Langford's short story BLIT, which imagines a terrorist attack using a "basilisk", images which contain "implicit programs which the human equipment cannot safely run". In a sequel to that story, published in Nature in 1999, Langford draws earlier parallels, even pulling in Monty Python's Flying Circus, "with its famous sketch about the World's Funniest Joke that causes all hearers to laugh themselves to death".

Summary: As a profession we do a pretty poor job of agreeing on good naming conventions for really important parts of our professional lives. "Machine Learning" is just the most recent case in point. It's had a perfectly good definition for a very long time, but now the Deep learning folks are trying to hijack the term. Let's make up our minds. As a profession we do a pretty poor job of agreeing on good naming conventions for really important parts of our professional lives.

Hijacking IP addresses is an increasingly popular form of cyber-attack. This is done for a range of reasons, from sending spam and malware to stealing Bitcoin. It's estimated that in 2017 alone, routing incidents such as IP hijacks affected more than 10 percent of all the world's routing domains. There have been major incidents at Amazon and Google and even in nation-states -- a study last year suggested that a Chinese telecom company used the approach to gather intelligence on western countries by rerouting their internet traffic through China. Existing efforts to detect IP hijacks tend to look at specific cases when they're already in process.

Deepfakes, an increasingly popular form of media that masks the face of a celebrity or other party over the face of a person in a video, continue to be pushed off internet platforms, a new website has cropped up as a popular home for the content--and is using its newfound popularity to mine for cryptocurrency. The forum, created less than one week ago, has drawn a considerable amount of traffic and has implemented cryptomining code that uses the computing power of visitors' machines to mine for cryptocurrency, according to security researchers at Malwarebytes. The forum, which boasts more than 2,300 registered users in just a few days since it began operating, is used to post so-called "deepfakes"--images and videos that map one person's face over the top of another, making it possible to place someone in a video and have their face show the same expressions as the person they are mapped over. Deepfakes can be used for any number of purposes but have gained popularity for creating pornographic content. Deepfakes users place the faces of celebrities and other people atop the faces of porn actors in explicit scenes.

Kitten videos are harmless, right? Except when they take over your phone. Researchers have found something new to worry about on the internet. It turns out that a muffled voice hidden in an innocuous YouTube video could issue commands to a nearby smartphone without you even knowing it. The researchers describe the threat in a research paper to be presented next month at the USENIX Security Symposium in Austin, Texas.

Cheap consumer drones are really just little computers on wings. It makes sense, then, that all it takes to disable one is another cheap computer, a wi-fi connection, and some technical know-how. Brent Chapman, an Army Cyber Warfare officer, already made a tool that remotely shuts off Parrot drones. Now, at Make, he's made a full tutorial for people to make their own anti-drone kit. To follow Chapman's instructions, a person will need a Parrot AR Quadcopter 2.0, which runs about 200 new and can be found online and used for less.

For intelligent agents modeled to emulate people, reference resolution is memory management: when processing an object or event – whether it appears in language or in the simulated physical or cognitive experience of the agent – the agent must determine how that object or event correlates with known objects and events, and must store the new memory with semantically explicit links to related prior knowledge. This paper discusses eventualities for memory-based reference resolution and the modeling strategies used in the OntoAgent environment to permit agents to fully and automatically make reference decisions.