Plus: The SEC lets SolarWinds off the hook, Microsoft stops a historic DDoS attack, and FBI documents reveal the agency spied on an immigration activist Signal group in New York City. Eight years after a researcher warned WhatsApp that it was possible to extract user phone numbers en masse from the Meta-owned app, another team of researchers found that they could still do exactly that using a similar technique. The issue stems from WhatsApp's discovery feature, which allows someone to enter a person's phone number to see if they're on the app. By doing this billions of times--which WhatsApp did not prevent--researchers from the University of Vienna uncovered what they're calling "the most extensive exposure of phone numbers" ever . Vaping is a major problem in US high schools.

OpenAI has committed to buying billions of dollars worth of compute from AWS--the latest in a string of major deals brokered by the AI startup. OpenAI has signed a multi-year deal with Amazon to buy $38 billion worth of AWS cloud infrastructure to train its models and serve its users. The deal is yet another sign of the AI industry becoming increasingly entangled, with OpenAI now at the center of major partnerships with industry players including Google, Oracle, Nvidia, and AMD. The AWS agreement is also notable because OpenAI rose to prominence in part through its partnership with Microsoft--Amazon's biggest cloud rival. Amazon is also a major backer of one of OpenAI's key competitors, Anthropic.

Your Friend Asked You a Question. Your friend came to you because they respect your knowledge and opinion, and outsourcing the answer to a machine is lazy and rude. Back in the 2010s, a website called Let Me Google That For You gained a notable amount of popularity for serving a single purpose: snark. The site lets you generate a custom link that you can send somebody who asks you a question. When they click the link, it plays an animation of the process of typing a question into Google.

Over the last decade, there has been an effort by lawmakers to reduce incarceration in the United States without impacting public safety. This effort includes parole boards making risk-based parole decisions -- releasing people assessed to be at low risk of committing a crime after being released. To determine how effective the current system of risk-based parole is, researchers from the UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and the University of Missouri, Kansas City, used machine learning to analyze parole data from New York. They suggest the New York State Parole Board could safely grant parole to more inmates. The study, "An Algorithmic Assessment of Parole Decisions," was published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.

So far we've spent a good 15 minutes with Joel and Ellie in conversations that weren't in the game. After cementing their relationship, the show finally returns to the game's story, except instead of Pittsburgh, the pair arrive in Kansas City, Mo., a more sensible, on-the-way location to Wyoming. In a scene ripped straight from the game, the pair encounter a man pretending to be hurt, and are jumped by the citizens of Kansas City, now freed from federal military rule. They crash the truck, and a firefight within a laundromat is lifted straight from the game. This echoes how enemy combatants from the second game react, calling out their fallen comrade's name in an attempt to humanize the "villains" of Joel and Ellie as other people trying to survive.

The 2019-2020 Kansas City Royals offseason should be a relatively eventful one for a team coming off consecutive 100-loss seasons. For the first time in almost a decade, there will be a new face as the manager. And for the first time since essentially 1993, the Royals will have a new face of ownership. Don't forget the standard offseason intrigue, either. Predicting baseball is often a hopeless exercise.

Digital transformation is more than just a buzzword, and it's got some real-life enterprise support. A report by Tech Pro Research found that 70 percent of companies either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one. Further, IT digital transformation budgets increased from 2016 to 2017 for 53 percent of survey respondents. Digital transformation projects that succeed are usually an enterprise-wide effort "best served by a leader with broad organizational purview," according to the latest "State of Digital Transformation" report by Altimeter, a Prophet company. CIOs mostly own or sponsor digital transformation initiatives (28 percent), with CEOs increasingly playing a leadership role (23 percent).

We're in the Wild West of artificial intelligence development and it is indeed an exciting time. Whether you fear AI or are part of the revolution, the rapid pace of development is showing no signs of slowing down. With advanced AI solutions popping up from every corner of the United States, AI is an equal-opportunist: a national landscape for developers across the country to shine. Tech giants like IBM and Microsoft are constantly iterating artificial intelligence engines to perform tasks from object recognition to transcription, and Watson is a household name-the AI landscape leaders are set, right? The limitation of AI tech coming out of these mega-companies is usability-applying the tech to extract meaningful, actionable data. It works, but does it matter?

Consumers are still mixed about Siri, but according to an exclusive new poll for USA TODAY, they like her more than other personal assistants. LOS ANGELES -- Face it, talking is more fun than typing, right? That's what we always suspected, and a new exclusive survey for USA TODAY confirms that's how people feel about using their personal digital assistants. In the poll, taken by SurveyMonkey Audience, 39.2% of consumers said they used voice commands with Apple's Siri because "it's easier/faster than typing," and even more opted for that with the Google Assistant, some 50.3%. For Amazon's Alexa, on the Echo speaker, 41.8% simply said "fun" was their top reason for using her.

Consumers are still mixed about Siri, but according to an exclusive new poll for USA TODAY, they like her more than other personal assistants. LOS ANGELES -- "Siri, will you finally catch up to Amazon and Google this year? We'd like to believe she might say, "Yes...Jefferson. I'll have more accurate, chattier responses, and good news -- I'll be able to understand you much better, too." Apple, which introduced the world to voice-activated computing in 2011 with the release of Siri, is feeling the heat. The tech press has given raves to the superior results from Google's Assistant, now available on the iPhone. It's also been wowed by the constant drumbeat generated by Amazon for its Alexa assistant, coming to new speakers and other devices on an ongoing basis. So on the eve of the Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple touts all the cool new things app makers get to do in 2017 with software updates, the company is expected to once again put the spotlight on a newer, improved Siri, ...