MIT's Nightmare Machine Churns Out AI-Generated Horror

In honor of Halloween, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab launched the Nightmare Machine website, which allows visitors to vote on AI-generated horror images created via an open source deep neural network algorithm developed last year. Scientists from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization collaborated on the project. The Nightmare Machine features some 200,000 images of normal human faces the researchers fed into the neural network.

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Apple vs. Microsoft: Remixing the Magic

It's strange that most people can look at two companies, see the difference in their performance, and not learn the fundamental lesson. Microsoft and Apple are cases in point, because Apple was very successful under the initial founders, then was unsuccessful after the founders left, was successful again when Jobs came back, and now is struggling without him. Microsoft was very successful under Gates, struggled when Gates left, and is successful again now that it is run by someone very much like Gates.

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Bot Armies Boost Candidates' Popularity on Twitter

Internet bots have many useful online purposes, but they have a dark side, too, as three researchers demonstrated in their analysis of Twitter traffic during the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Bots are used to automate functions on the Net. For example, if you belong to several social networks, you could use a bot to post a photo to all of them at once, saving the time of logging onto each network. What the researchers found was that bots also can be used to amplify support on Twitter.

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Microsoft Open Sources AI Toolkit

Microsoft this week released an updated version of its Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit as an open source Beta. The deep learning system is used to speed advances in areas such as speech and image recognition and search relevance on CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. It also works with Microsoft's Azure GPU offering. The Microsoft computer scientists who developed the toolkit initially were looking for a tool to speed up and improve their own research. It morphed into an offering capable of taking on a wide variety of deep learning tasks.

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Apple Brings a Surprising Touch to MacBook Event

Apple on Thursday unveiled two new MacBook Pro laptops, adding a touch more power to the line. Both the new 13-inch and 15-inch models will be offered in silver and space gray. They have a Touch Bar that replaces the row of function keys found on laptops, as well as a Touch ID fingerprint scanner incorporated into the power button. They sport a Force Touch trackpad that's twice the size of the trackpad in previous models. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro is 17 percent thinner than its predecessor. It's also smaller, and it weighs half a pound less than the previous version.

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Conspiracy Theories in the Information Age, Part 1

One of the most volatile conspiracy theories in recent times ended with a whimper last month, when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made the terse statement, "President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period." Though birthers may be with us always, it seems that many have turned their attention to other potentially scandalous topics -- and they need look no further than the place most conspiracy theories are born these days, the Internet.

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Xiaomi Debuts Magical Mi Mix

Xiaomi on Tuesday fired another shot in the shrinking bezel wars, as it announced a smartphone with a front that's more than 90 percent display. The Mi Mix is a 6.4-inch phone that's stylishly crafted by French designer Philippe Starck. It sports a feature set that indicates Xiaomi wants to compete at the high end of the smartphone market. "For many years, Xiaomi has had a reputation of copying designs and branding from Apple and Samsung," said Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research. "This phone breaks with those designs."

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Microsoft's New Tech Targets Human Creativity

Microsoft made a slew of announcements at its New York City event Tuesday, focusing on the idea of user as creator. Among its new offerings: the Surface Studio, an all-in-one desktop computer with a touchscreen that's 12.5mm thick; the Surface Dial, a new input device that provides haptic feedback; the Surface Book i7; VR headsets for Windows 10; a revamped Paint app with 3D capability; and Creator's Update, an upcoming Windows 10 refresh providing 3D creation tools, live streaming, and custom Xbox app tournaments.

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Tech on TV: A Little Realism Goes a Long Way

Watching TV shows often requires the suspension of disbelief -- that is, a willingness to press pause on one's critical faculties in order to believe the unbelievable. Realism often must be secondary to story, in other words. This very often is necessary when computers are used to advance plot lines, when programmers and hackers alike can bang away on their keyboards and produce tremendous results in seconds. One need look no further than the keyboard cowboys on such shows as The Blacklist or Scorpion.

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Gadget Ogling: Magnificent Mics, Intriguing E-Ink, and Compact Computers

I've tried dipping my toes into the world of podcasting with a friend this year. We haven't found it easy to get together to record, but for the two trial runs we've had, I bought a Blue Snowball mic. I'm very pleased with the sound quality, so I'm fairly certain I'd be happy to have Blue's latest microphone, Raspberry. It's a gorgeous, portable little thing, which you can connect to a PC or Mac using a USB cable. Its Mini USB to Lightning cable makes it easy to capture quality audio using an iPhone or iPad too.

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Social Media Analytics, Meet Big Brother

The American Civil Liberties Union recently uncovered evidence that led Twitter, Facebook and its Instagram subsidiary to stop sharing data with Geofeedia, a firm accused of improperly collecting social media data on protest groups, and sharing that information with numerous law enforcement agencies. Geofeedia, a developer of location-based analytics, had been marketing its technology to law enforcement agencies. It was used for such purposes as monitoring Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland.

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Antique Kernel Flaw Opens Door to New Dirty Cow Exploit

A Linux security vulnerability first discovered more than a decade ago once again poses a threat, Red Hat warned last week, as an exploit that could allow attackers to gain enhanced privileges on affected computers has turned up in the wild. Users need to take steps to patch their systems to prevent the exploit, known as "Dirty Cow," from granting access to unprivileged attackers. "What's changed isn't the vulnerability itself, but rather the manner in which it's being exploited," said Josh Bressers, a security strategist at Red Hat.

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Microsoft Event: Come for Windows, Stay for Surface

Microsoft's Windows 10 event, scheduled for Wednesday, actually could focus more on hardware than on the operating system, given that the next Windows 10 refresh is expected in March. A new Surface device -- possibly an all-in-one computer with a 21-inch or larger screen -- could be in the offing. Whether Microsoft will unveil updates to its Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book devices or showcase products from its OEMs has generated some debate. "It'll be a hardware event," predicted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

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Battlefield 1: Big, Bombastic and Very Loosely Based

If filmmaker Michael Bay -- known for the Transformers and other over-the-top films -- were to decide to make a World War I movie, and if he chose to rely on comic books as his research materials, the result would be very much like Electronic Arts' newly released video game Battlefield 1. This latest entry in the popular series -- somewhat confusing given the "1" in its moniker -- moves the action from recent modern settings to the Great War, taking the action back in time 100 years, highlighting lumbering tanks and biplanes.

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New MacBook Will Headline Apple's Thursday Show

A refresh of Apple's flagship laptop, the MacBook Pro, likely will be the highlight of an event scheduled for this Thursday at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California. The update to its flagship MacBook line couldn't come at a more critical time. "Apple has been under increasing pressure from Dell, Lenovo and others in this space and needs to up its game considerably lest it be accused of neglecting notebook users and customers," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

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Why Large Companies Can't Innovate

One of the things that has made Dell World very different is that at the end, one or more controversial speakers take the stage and provide an incredible amount of insight for the folks who haven't left early. All three of the last three speakers were fascinating, but it wasn't until I wove all three speeches together that it became clear to me why innovation seems to evaporate the larger a company becomes. I was drawn in particular to why Netscape failed and Google, outside of ad revenue, largely has been unsuccessful.

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DDoS Attack Causes Waves of Internet Outages

Hundreds of websites -- including those of biggies such as Netflix, Twitter and Spotify -- on Friday fell prey to massive DDoS attacks that cut off access to Internet users on the East Coast and elsewhere across the United States. Three attacks were launched over a period of hours against Internet performance management company Dyn, which provides support to eight of the top 10 Internet service and retail companies and six of the top 10 entertainment companies listed in the Fortune 500.

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Linux Foundation Spurs JavaScript Development

The Linux Foundation earlier this week announced the addition of the JS Foundation as a Linux Foundation project. The move is an effort to inject new energy into the JavaScript developer community. By rebranding the former JQuery foundation as the JS Foundation and bringing it under the Linux umbrella, officials hope to create some stability and build critical mass. The goal is to spark greater interest in pursuing open source collaboration by intermingling some promising new players with some venerable stalwarts.

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Rez Infinite Rocks Worlds

Rez Infinite, one of the first virtual reality games for Sony's new PlaystationVR, this week earned praise from early reviewers for its graphics and immersing qualities. Sony announced the game -- an update of a remake -- last year. Featuring support for 1080p resolution graphics, along with 3D audio sound, Rez Infinite is designed for the PSVR, but it's also compatible with the regular PlayStation 4. Sega introduced the original Rez for the Dreamcast in 2001 and the PlayStation 2 a year later. It was a huge hit.

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Tesla: Everyone Gets a Self-Driving Car

Tesla has announced plans to install hardware that will allow all of its cars to become driverless. The equipment will enable self-driving at a safety level substantially greater than human-driven cars, according to the company. The hardware includes eight cameras to provide 360-degree visibility; 12 ultrasonic sensors to detect hard and soft objects; and forward-facing radar capable of seeing through rain, fog, dust and other vehicles. Tesla also will install a new onboard computer with 40 times the computing power of previous Tesla models.

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Nintendo Switches It Up

After months of speculation and buildup, Nintendo on Thursday officially unveiled its new gaming system, the Nintendo Switch. Previously known only by the codename "NX," rumors about this latest video game console began last year with a hint from Satoru Iwata, the company's late president. At the time Iwata suggested only that Nintendo was working on a new video game system, and few details have leaked since then. The Switch is Nintendo's first home gaming system since it launched the Wii U in 2012.

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Microsoft AI Beats Humans at Speech Recognition

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Unit earlier this week reported that its speech recognition technology had surpassed the performance of human transcriptionists. The team last month published a paper describing its system's accuracy, said to be superior to that of IBM's famed Watson artificial intelligence. The error rate for humans on the widely used NIST 2000 test set is 5.9 percent for the Switchboard portion of the data, and 11.3 percent for the CallHome portion, the team said.

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New Tag Helps Google News Readers Unearth Facts

Google last week launched a Fact Check tag to help readers find fact-checking in major news stories published in the United States and the UK. Readers will see tagged articles in the expanded story box on news.google.com and in the Google News & Weather apps for iOS and Android. One factor the Google News algorithms consider in determining whether an article might contain fact checks is the Schema.org ClaimReview markup. Another is whether sites follow commonly accepted criteria for fact checks.

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Assange Lives to Leak Another Day

The status of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange grew a bit murky on Tuesday after the group accused the U.S. State Department of pressuring Ecuadorian officials to block him from posting additional emails linked to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The Ecuadorian foreign ministry on Tuesday acknowledged placing temporary restrictions on Assange's access, saying in a statement that it did not wish to interfere in a foreign election. It also said that it was acting on its own and not in response to any outside pressures.

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Apple Downshifts Driverless Vehicle Plans

Apple appears to be shifting its driverless car ambitions into a lower gear. Changes in the company's automotive strategy reportedly have resulted in hundreds of job cuts and the shelving of plans to build a car of its own. "Project Titan" -- Apple's internal name for the automotive initiative -- has a new focus. It will develop an autonomous driving system that will give the company the option of partnering with an established auto maker or producing a robo car of its own.

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Meet Maui 1, the Slick New Hawaiian Netrunner

Maui 1 "Aurora," which launched this summer, is one of the latest newcomers in the continuously changing list of Linux distributions. Maui Linux, with its new Hawaii desktop environment, is a replacement and rebranding of the discontinued Netrunner project. Its developers are attempting to continue the Kubuntu-based heritage, while adopting some of the latest technologies impacting other Linux distros in varying stages. The demise of Netrunner and the birth of Maui 1 occurred simultaneously.

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Battlefield 1 Delivers Great War Action, Say Early Reviewers

Electronic Arts' new epic first-person shooter Battlefield 1 could be the war game to end all war games, based on the first wave of reviews published Monday. This latest title in the popular franchise from Swedish developer DICE is an action-packed, rip-roaring take on World War I. There's a single-player campaign that features a story worthy of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which lets the player partake in key moments in the global conflict. There's also intense online multiplayer action with support for 64 players.

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This Election May Be Scarier Than You Think

Not that it isn't scary enough -- but if you look at both candidates, who have had their images destroyed largely by technology, i.e., tapes and emails -- there is a huge warning inherent in the process. Email really wasn't a big thing until the late 1990s and even having your own email server wouldn't have been likely before 2005, let alone thinking through the security aspects. The Trump tape, which wasn't indexed based on the off-air segment, would have been nearly impossible to find before it was digitized and indexed.

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Fake News Taints Facebook's Trending Topics

Facebook's Trending Topics section recently has carried a number of trending stories that were either "indisputably fake" or "profoundly inaccurate," according to a report this week. The news feed six weeks ago ran a false story claiming Fox News had fired anchor Megyn Kelly for being a closet liberal who supported Hillary Clinton. Facebook removed the story, apologized, and promised to do better. It appears that despite that commitment, the Trending Topics section is not yet problem free.

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What Should be on the Next President's Cyberagenda?

When the new president takes up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., cybersecurity will be on the shortlist for action. What's a president to do? TechNewsWorld asked more than a dozen experts what should be at the top of the new leader of the free world's cyberagenda. Following are some of their responses. "The president has to set the tone early on cybersecurity -- within the first 100 days -- and say right off the bat that this matters," said Sam Curry, chief product officer at Cybereason.

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HP Debuts Flashy New Computers

Watch out, Apple. HP on Wednesday introduced a new generation of premium computer products that could generate the kind of excitement in the market that's usually the domain of the folks at One Infinite Loop. Among the new HP offerings are a new tablet-laptop convertable, a svelte laptop, an innovative all-in-one model, and a 4k display designed for dual screen setups. "HP has absolutely raised their bar in design, quality and performance," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

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Fedora 25 Beta Resets the Linux Performance Bar

Red Hat on Wednesday released the beta version of Fedora 25, an open source Linux operating system maintained by the Fedora Project community. The beta release sharpens cloud and developer features, making this Linux distro more attractive to enterprise users. Fedora Linux is the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL. Fedora 25 is comprised of a set of base packages that form the foundation of three distinct editions -- Cloud, Server and Workstation -- that target different user bases.

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Amazon Music Unlimited Rolls Gently Down the Stream

Amazon on Wednesday rolled out its Music Unlimited cut-rate subscription streaming service, available on its Echo, Echo Dot and Amazon Tap devices for as little as $4 a month for a single device. Setting a low-entry price point "is a logical move, given that the company has invested heavily into the AI and voice recognition powering Alexa in its move to catch up to Google in those areas," said Paul Erickson, senior analyst for the connected home at IHS Markit. Amazon "needs to incentivize potential Echo owners as much as it can," he said.

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US Considers 'Proportional Response' to Russia's Election Tampering

The Obama administration on Tuesday indicated it was considering a proportional response to retaliate against Russia for its efforts to influence the U.S. election process. The administration last week officially linked Russian operatives to a series of cyberattacks against the DNC and other organizations, apparently in an effort to influence the November presidential race. White House press secretary Josh Earnest confirmed that leaks to WikiLeaks, DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 were "consistent with methods and motivations of Russian efforts."

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Gadget Ogling: Google Embraces a Hardware Future

The first smartphones Google has made by itself, Pixel and Pixel XL, are the first to bear Android 7.1 and the first to have the impressive Google Assistant built in. The Pixel has a 5-inch HD screen, while the Pixel XL offers a 5.5-inch QHD display. The phones have a quad-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. I like that the fingerprint sensor is on the back -- that would nullify the awkward fidgeting I deal with every time my iPhone fails to recognize my thumbprint -- and the inclusion of an analog headphone jack is extremely welcome.

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Cyanogen's Android Alternative Goes Modular

Cyanogen, the maker of an alternative version of Android, on Tuesday announced that it was going modular. Future releases of its open source firmware product will not support a full stack of the Android OS. The new modular setup will bring a slew of benefits to phone makers and developers, according to Cyanogen. "The new partnership program offers smartphone manufacturers greater freedom and opportunity to introduce intelligent, customizable Android smartphones," noted Cyanogen CEO Lior Tal.

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Tech Heavyweights Join Forces to Lasso AI

Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft last month announced the creation of the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit organization dedicated to formulating best practices in artificial intelligence and educating the public about the field. The group will invite academics, other nonprofits, and specialists in policy and ethics to join its board, which will represent corporate and noncorporate members equally. The partnership will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license.

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Yahoo Makes It Harder for Email Users to Jump Ship

Yahoo in recent days disabled autoforwarding for Yahoo Mail -- and in at least one corporate client's case, it disabled the webmail deletion feature. The autoforwarding feature "is under development," reads a statement on the Yahoo site. "While we work to improve it, we've temporarily disabled the ability to turn on Mail Forwarding for new forwarding addresses." There has been speculation that Yahoo turned off the autoforwarding feature to stem the tide of users quitting Yahoo Mail.

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All Systems Go for Andromeda

Although Google didn't drop any new details on the progress of Andromeda at its big Pixel event, that doesn't suggest any tempering of enthusiasm for the new operating system. Andromeda reportedly is a mashup of Android and Chrome, with features from Chrome having been ported into Android rather than the other way around. It's expected to show up next year in a new laptop, dubbed "Pixel 3." The project is known internally as "Bison." Google also plans to launch a Huawei-manufactured Nexus tablet that will run Andromeda.

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Google's New Fonts Chip Away at Written Language Barriers

Project Noto, one of Google's most ambitious undertakings ever, has reached a milestone. Noto now supports 800 languages and 100 writing scripts, the companies announced last week. Google and Monotype launched the open source initiative to create a typeface family that supports all the languages in the world, even rarely used languages. Both serif and sans serif letters with up to eight weights are supported, as well as numbers, emoji, symbols and musical notation. "Noto" is short for "no tofu."

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Google Resurrects Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

This almost sounds like a plot for a novel. Microsoft creates a successful strategy called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" and then promptly forgets it, resulting in a string of failures. Google, which up to now seemed happy to repeat Microsoft's mistakes, accidentally picks up a successful Microsoft practice and uses it against Apple -- likely taking out a number of its Android partners. When Microsoft was starting out, its most powerful platform wasn't Windows, which was almost an industry joke at the time -- it was Microsoft Office.

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Consumers Warned of Exploding Samsung Washers

That's the situation Samsung found itself in last week when the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning about certain top-load washing machines made by the company between March 2011 and April 2016. "CPSC is advising consumers to only use the delicate cycle when washing bedding, water-resistant and bulky items," reads a statement at the commission's website. "The lower spin speed in the delicate cycle lessens the risk of impact injuries or property damage due to the washing machine becoming dislodged."

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Torvalds Blows Stack Over Buggy New Kernel

Linux creator Linus Torvalds this week apologized for including in the just-released Linux 4.8 kernel a bug fix that crashed it. The bug the dev was trying to fix has existed since Linux 3.15, "but the fix is clearly worse than the bug ... since that original bug has never killed my machine," Torvalds wrote. "This type of situation, while rare, is common enough in smaller and less visible projects, where testing processes and protocol are typically less sophisticated than those used by Linus and his team," noted tech analyst Al Hilwa.

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Nevada Issues Historic License to Paralyzed Race Car Driver

The state of Nevada last week issued paralyzed former Indy driver Sam Schmidt a license to drive a specially made autonomous vehicle, equipped with a series of high-tech sensors and other equipment that will allow him to operate it with head motions, voice commands and breathing techniques. The license allows Schmidt to operate the Arrow SAM car, a modified Corvette Z06 developed by Arrow Electronics, alongside regular passenger traffic -- an important development in the history of the burgeoning autonomous vehicle industry.

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Insulin Pump Susceptible to Hacking

Medical device manufacturer Animas on Tuesday warned that its OneTouch Ping insulin pump system was susceptible to hacking. "We have been notified of a cybersecurity issue with the OneTouch Ping, specifically that a person could potentially gain unauthorized access to the pump through its unencrypted radio frequency communication system," reads the company's letter to users of the device. The probability of anyone accessing the pump without authorization was "extremely low," the letter notes. Animas is owned by Johnson & Johnson.

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Galaxy Note 7 Snaps, Crackles and Pops, Spurring Evacuation of Plane

Southwest Airlines on Wednesday evacuated a plane in Louisville, Kentucky, after a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 began popping and issuing thick smoke. Samsung last month began replacing Galaxy Note 7s globally, following reports of several of the devices catching fire or exploding. It blamed the problem on an "isolated" faulty battery cell issue. The device involved in the Southwest Airline incident reportedly was a replacement phone, according to owner Brian Green. Samsung has said it will verify whether the phone actually was a replacement.

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Google: There's No Hub Like Home

No longer willing to let Amazon have the space to itself, Google on Tuesday officially launched Google Home, its long-awaited wireless hub. Google Home is an interactive personal assistant and entertainment center that takes full advantage of the company's deep advantages in Web search, AI and machine learning. Google's vision is to place a customized version of its Google Assistant technology into the hands of every customer, said CEO Sundar Pichai, so it can be wherever they are.

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IoT Could Become Playground for Botnets Gone Wild

The source code for Mirai, the malware behind the botnet that launched a massive attack on the Krebs on Security website -- the largest DDoS attack on record -- has been released in the wild, according to Brian Krebs, author of the blog. A hacker who goes by the handle "Anna-senpai," apparently because of increased scrutiny from the cybersec industry, last week announced the release on Hackforums, Krebs said. The code release has heightened fears that the Internet of Things will be flooded with attacks from new botnets.

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Apricity: Slip Into Something More Comfortable

Apricity OS is a great, two-pronged Linux distro that recently reached a milestone that will ensure its continued success. Apricity's first public beta, which was GNOME-only, was released more than a year ago. A choice of either the GNOME or Cinnamon desktops later became available in the monthly development snapshot releases. This rolling release delivery method already provided a pleasant computing experience. Both desktop versions performed well. Each monthly build brought more functionality.

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Google Plasters Its Name on a New Hardware Collection

Google on Tuesday unveiled a new smartphone and home hub that squarely aim at products from market leaders Apple and Amazon. The company's new branded smartphone, called "Pixel," marks a departure from past efforts. Up to now, Google's Nexus phones were made by a variety of manufacturers that sold them under their brands. "Google is trying to position itself as a complete supplier rather than simply offering Nexus-branded handsets that were rebatched by another company," said Jeff Orr, senior practice director for mobile devices at ABI Research.

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