Note: only the third panel from the original image has been used here. Last month, Google announced SynthID Detector, a new tool to detect AI-generated content. Google claims it can identify AI-generated content in text, image, video or audio. But there are some caveats. One of them is that the tool is currently only available to "early testers" through a waitlist.

Password-cracking and guessing attempts are successful enough as it is to put more than a little gray in the hair of experienced cybersecurity professionals. Now new research shows even more effective cracking attempts could be perpetrated by attackers equipped with a cheap thermal camera and some simple deep-learning models. The AI-driven attacks were conceptualized and refined by Dr. Mohamed Khamis of the University of Glasgow School of Computing Science and his colleagues at the school, Norah Alotaibi and Dr. John Williamson, who are set to publish their results in an upcoming issue of the ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security journal. The paper details their work to use off-the-shelf thermal cameras and a probabilistic model that utilized 1,500 thermal images they took of recently used keyboards to create a method of accurately cracking passwords -- even in uncontrolled settings. Dubbed ThermoSecure, the method captures heat signatures via thermal cameras and analyzes them with the researchers' AI modeling to guess a password with 86% accuracy when the images are taken within 20 seconds of input, and 62% accuracy within 60 seconds of input.

As the U.S. sees record burning, the space-based technology, including drones and artificial intelligence, can map fires in real time and assist with …

Walmart customers in need of groceries have had two options in recent years: Go to the store and fill up a shopping cart by hand; or select food items online and have them delivered to their home or picked up in person. Now, the big box retailer has unveiled a third way to order groceries: via voice command. Beginning this month, customers who own a Google assistant can say, "Hey, Google, talk to Walmart" to add items to a virtual grocery cart, Tom Ward, senior vice president, Digital Operations, Walmart U.S., said in a statement Tuesday. The voice commands allow customers to add items to their cart one at a time over a few days -- not necessarily to complete their shopping for the week all at once. As the technology becomes more familiar with customers' shopping habits, Ward said, it will improve over time.

Before they pack into Times Square Monday night, thousands of New Year's Eve revelers will pass through the kind of intensive security measures that are normally found inside the nation's airports. While the crowd will probably be keenly aware of the heavy police presence, bomb-sniffing dogs and metal-sensing hand wands, there is one critical security measure that may escape their notice. This year -- for the first time in the New York Police Department's history -- officials will have a camera-equipped, remote-controlled quadcopter on hand with the ability to buzz above the exuberant crowd. The drone's camera will be one of more than 1,200 fixed cameras being used by police at the celebration, according to NBC's "Today" show. Compared with helicopters, NYPD officials said, the agency's drones have the ability to get much closer to the crowd.

Despite being a slow-moving disaster, famine is notoriously difficult to predict. The reason for this, experts say, is that severe food shortages are hardly ever about food supply alone. A famine might be triggered by drought or some other climatic interference in crop production, but other powerful forces usually bring the scourge to full bloom: food price inflation, political instability, military conflict and even too much rain. "The root cause of famine is extremely complex," said Franck Bousquet, senior director of the World Bank Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Group (FCV). "Usually, the poorest and most vulnerable are the most affected and the least able to cope with shocks that other populations can absorb. Out of the last 10 major famines, nine have resulted from conflict and war."

Communication Service Providers will now be able to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to turn vast amounts of telecommunications network data into proactive resolutions for pressing assurance challenges. Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled its HPE Intelligent Assurance Suite at Digital Transformation World this week, describing it as an AI platform that can automate a dynamic world and enable zero-touch operations. According to HPE's VP and GM of communications and media solutions, David Sliter, HPE intelligent Assurance is a new and'major' step in the achievement of the company's vision. "It combines machine learning based intelligence with AI-driven automation to predict problems and proactively resolve them, 24/7." Sliter also says communication service providers (CSPs) now have an opportunity to transform into digital service providers.

Cyber-security companies are turning to artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to ward off growing number of attacks on networks, Finland-based Internet security firm F-Secure said. As the world is fast moving towards Internet of Things and connected devices, deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) has become inevitable for cyber security firms to analyse huge amount of data to save networks from infiltration attempts, F-Secure's Security Advisor Sean Sullivan said. Networks are persistently exposed to threats like malware, phishing, password breaches and denial of service attacks. On a daily basis, F-Secure Labs on an average receives sample data of 500,000 files from its customers that include 10,000 malware variants and 60,000 malicious URLs for analysis and protection, Sullivan said. For humans, it is a big task to go through such huge amount of data and machine learning tools and AI are lending a helping hand at this stage, he said.