What it's like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate Just before Christmas the Trump administration dramatically escalated its war on digital rights by banning five people from entering the US. One of them, Josephine Ballon, is a director of HateAid, a small German nonprofit founded to support the victims of online harassment and violence. The organization is a strong advocate of EU tech regulations, and so finds itself attacked in campaigns from right-wing politicians and provocateurs who claim that it engages in censorship. EU officials, freedom of speech experts, and the five people targeted all flatly reject these accusations. Ballon told us that their work is fundamentally about making people feel safer online. But their experiences over the past few weeks show just how politicized and besieged their work in online safety has become.

OpenAI is seeking capital from new and existing investors, two people familiar with the company's plans tell WIRED. The fundraising effort is part of a 40 billion round announced in March. The round will reopen on Monday, July 28, according to one of the sources, who has direct knowledge of the fundraising effort. The 40 billion round announced earlier this year brought OpenAI's valuation up to 300 billion, making it one of the most highly valued private startups in history. The round was led by Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank, which committed to contributing 75 percent of the total funding.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Six individuals have been arrested in Hong Kong after allegedly using artificial intelligence to generate images for a loan scam. The six accused scammers are charged with doctoring pictures to deceive banks and moneylenders in a loose fraud syndicate busted by city police. "The racket used an AI face-changing program, commonly known as deepfake technology, to apply for loans online with financial institutions," said Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau Superintendent Dicken Ko Tik on Friday.

This research presents a novel Discrete Event Simulation (DES) of the Lloyd's of London specialty insurance market, exploring complex market dynamics that have not been previously studied quantitatively. The proof-of-concept model allows for the simulation of various scenarios that capture important market phenomena such as the underwriting cycle, the impact of risk syndication, and the importance of appropriate exposure management. Despite minimal calibration, our model has shown that it is a valuable tool for understanding and analysing the Lloyd's of London specialty insurance market, particularly in terms of identifying areas for further investigation for regulators and participants of the market alike. The results generate the expected behaviours that, syndicates (insurers) are less likely to go insolvent if they adopt sophisticated exposure management practices, catastrophe events lead to more defined patterns of cyclicality and cause syndicates to substantially increase their premiums offered. Lastly, syndication enhances the accuracy of actuarial price estimates and narrows the divergence among syndicates. Overall, this research offers a new perspective on the Lloyd's of London market and demonstrates the potential of individual-based modelling (IBM) for understanding complex financial systems.

WIRE)--Gradient AI, the leading enterprise software provider of artificial intelligence solutions in the insurance technology space, announced today that it has raised $6.0 million in a Series A financing led by Forte Ventures and Sandbox Insurtech Ventures. The round also includes participation from Gradient's existing investor MassMutual Ventures. Gradient's artificial intelligence helps commercial insurers automate and improve underwriting results, reduce claim costs, and improve operational efficiencies. The Gradient software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform boasts a proprietary dataset comprised of tens of millions of claims, which is complemented with several economic, health, and litigation datasets. This robust aggregation of data provides out-of-the-box claims and underwriting precision for new clients, and it is continuously refined with client-specific data over time.

WIRE)--Guidewire Software, Inc. (NYSE: GWRE), provider of the industry platform Property and Casualty (P&C) insurers rely upon, today announced that specialist insurer Beazley has selected Guidewire Cyence Risk Analytics (Cyence) to leverage its internet-scale data collection capabilities to improve underwriting, capital and pricing efficiencies, and offer policy terms and premiums as quickly as possible to its customers. Beazley will implement Cyence data models to augment its existing data modeling applications for its cyber insurance line of business, with plans to expand to other lines of business in the future. "We are pleased that Beazley has expanded its Guidewire relationship with the selection of Cyence, and applaud the company's global mission of providing its clients with the highest standards of underwriting and claims service," said Mike Rosenbaum, chief executive officer, Guidewire Software. "Guidewire is committed to bringing smart insurance solutions to the market. We look forward to working with Beazley to infuse data analytics to help achieve its strategic goals around enterprise risk management and overall business growth."

I haven't finished Assassin's Creed: Odyssey ($60 on Humble), nor will I for a while. I've been playing it for days now, over 30 hours and counting. "Surely I must be closing in on the end," I keep thinking. Then I check the map and find I've explored less than half of it. Everywhere I go, there's more stuff.

It all makes sense once you know the team who worked on Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag worked on Assassin's Creed: Origins. Which is to say: The reboot has been rebooted. After Black Flag's sprawling Caribbean adventure, Ubisoft said it wanted to rediscover the "roots" of I the Assassin's Creed franchise for its next installment, Unity. And laugh at Unity's abysmal launch all you want (I certainly did), it accomplished Ubisoft's goal. Unity brought the series back to the Assassin's Creed II era, focusing on a single city (Paris) with enough towering cathedrals and palaces to let the reworked parkour mechanics shine.

It was supposed to be an easy $1,000 job. All 25-year-old Jorge Edwin Rivera had to do was pilot a drone, carrying a lunchbox filled with 13 pounds of methamphetamine, from one side of the US-Mexico border to the other where an accomplice could retrieve the smuggled cargo. What he didn't count on was Border Patrol agents spotting the UAV in flight and tracking it back to his hiding spot, 2,000 yards from the national divide. This isn't the first time that smugglers have used commercially-available drones to carry contraband. In 2015, the Border Patrol caught a two people dropping off 28 pounds of heroin in Calexico, California, and, in the same year, caught another drug ring delivering 30 pounds of cannabis to San Luis, Arizona.

When Ubisoft announced last year that the Assassin's Creed series would take a year off, retool, and return in 2017, I anticipated huge sweeping differences. The series needs huge sweeping differences--with a grueling yearly release schedule, Assassin's Creed has suffered from consumer and critical malaise more than perhaps any Ubisoft property. But after playing Assassin's Creed: Origins for 20 or so minutes during E3, I don't think we're getting huge sweeping differences. Assassin's Creed: Origins has been tweaked in places, and its Cleopatra-era Egypt setting is certainly the most creative we've seen in years, but it doesn't feel like a true rebirth or a reimagining. First and foremost, the usual disclaimer applies: We played 20 minutes of an hours-long experience, so maybe the seeds of Assassin's Creed's redemption come later in the game.