The images are so crafted and "painterly" that you may not realise at first they have been dreamed up by a machine in just a few minutes. Maybe you've seen one already, but not realised what it was. It may have looked like something you'd seen before in an art book or a museum. These images are the product of a new AI-generated art scene that's exploded thanks to the development of free and easy-to-use tools that require (at the very least) short text prompts to create unique pictures. The image in the tweet above, for example, was created by giving the text prompt "a summer day" to an AI tool.

Generative networks and OpenAI's CLIP are redefining what it means to be an artist.

What does an "Art Deco Buddhist temple" look like? The phrase is nearly nonsensical; it's hard to imagine a Buddhist temple built in the Art Deco style, the early-twentieth-century Western aesthetic of attenuated architecture and streamlined forms. But this didn't deter the Twitter account @images_ai, which promises "images generated by A.I. machines." When another Twitter user threw out that prompt, in early August, @images_ai responded with a picture that looks something like an Orientalist Disney castle, a mashup of pointy spires and red angled roofs with a patterned stone-gray façade. Or perhaps it resembles the archetypal Chinese Buddhist temple crossed with a McDonald's--a fleeting, half-remembered image from a dream frozen into a permanent JPEG on social media.

DefCon is an annual conference hosted every summer in Las Vegas, Nevada, where thousands of hackers from around the world congregate to learn on new technology vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. Over the past weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada, thousands of hackers congregated at the 27th annual DefCon, the world's oldest and largest running hacker convention, to learn from their peers about the latest hacking techniques. During the show, there were sessions like "Say Cheese, How I Ransomwared Your DSLR Camera" by Check Point Software security researcher Eyal Itkin (more on that in a later post), "Defeating Bluetooth Low Energy 5 For Fun", "Breaking Google Home" or "Reverse Engineering 4G Hotspots For Fun, Bugs, And Net Financial Loss". And if that's your thing, then check out the conference's schedule here as well as the event's media server where most of the presentations are available for free. In this report, I'll focus on the presentation titled "Black Mirror: You Are Your Own Privacy Nightmare–The Hidden Threat of Paying For Subscription Services" given by security expert Cat Murdock on how she used information from online subscription services like Netflix, Apple Music or Spotify to access a banking account and steal confidential financial information.

The SHOP2 planning system received one of the awards for distinguished performance in the 2002 International Planning Competition. This paper describes the features of SHOP2 which enabled it to excel in the competition, especially those aspects of SHOP2 that deal with temporal and metric planning domains.

The SHOP2 planning system received one of the awards for distinguished performance in the 2002 International Planning Competition. This paper describes the features of SHOP2 which enabled it to excel in the competition, especially those aspects of SHOP2 that deal with temporal and metric planning domains.