Next time you schedule a meeting and an assistant named Amy or Andrew Ingram sets up the logistics, here's a pro tip: You may be chatting with a robot. And if it's one of x.ai's bots, you might never know the difference.
That was my experience when I exchanged emails with "Andrew" to set up an interview with x.ai's CEO. After I emailed x.ai's press contact, she referred me to Andrew to hammer out the details. Andrew proposed a time, thanked me when I accepted and sent out a calendar invitation. Had I not been clued in ahead of time, I never would have realized Andrew wasn't human.
Therein lies x.ai's value proposition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Mark Pickett was a captain in the Marines, he knew he couldn't be there to make every decision for his soldiers.
"You can't rehearse every scenario, and there will be times when you can't communicate," he explained. "You want to groom your Marines to be able to rely on themselves and their unit."
It's not so different in the business world in this era of big data.
Now senior director for online analytics and business intelligence at Sears, Pickett has been an early champion of the so-called citizen data scientist movement, by which employees in multiple parts of an organization are empowered with the analytics tools and skills to get the answers they need from their data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New wireless technology developed by researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab promises to kill the Wi-Fi password at last.Dubbed Chronos, the new system enables a single Wi-Fi access point to locate users to within tens of centimeters without relying on any external sensors. What that means is that it could figure out where people are in a home or office and adjust heating and cooling accordingly. It could also enable a small cafe to better restrict its free Wi-Fi to paying customers.
Existing Wi-Fi devices don’t have wide enough bandwidth to measure the "time of flight" of a signal from transmitter to receiver, or router to device, so typically a person's position can be determined only by triangulating multiple angles relative to the person from multiple access points.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the obstacles that have kept quantum computers on the distant horizon is the fact that quantum bits -- the building blocks with which they're made -- are prone to magnetic disturbances. Such "noise" can interfere with the work qubits do, but on Wednesday, scientists announced a new discovery that could help solve the problem.Specifically, by tapping the same principle that allows atomic clocks to stay accurate, researchers at Florida State University’s National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (MagLab) have found a way to give qubits the equivalent of a pair of noise-canceling headphones.The approach relies on what are known as atomic clock transitions. Working with carefully designed tungsten oxide molecules that contained a single magnetic holmium ion, the MagLab team was able to keep a holmium qubit working coherently for 8.4 microseconds -– potentially long enough for it to perform useful computational tasks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HTTPS is widely considered one of the keys to a safer Internet, but only if it's broadly implemented. Aiming to shed some light on how much progress has been made so far, Google on Tuesday launched a new section of its transparency report dedicated to encryption.Included in the new section is data highlighting the progress of encryption efforts both at Google and on popular third-party sites."Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the Web even safer for everyone," wrote HTTPS evangelists Rutledge Chin Feman and Tim Willis on the Google Security Blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HTTPS is widely considered one of the keys to a safer Internet, but only if it's broadly implemented. Aiming to shed some light on how much progress has been made so far, Google on Tuesday launched a new section of its transparency report dedicated to encryption.Included in the new section is data highlighting the progress of encryption efforts both at Google and on popular third-party sites.MORE: Agony & Ecstasy of Google I/O 2016 Invite Day"Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the Web even safer for everyone," wrote HTTPS evangelists Rutledge Chin Feman and Tim Willis on the Google Security Blog.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Slow-loading Web pages are surely one of the top frustrations on the Internet today, but new technology from MIT and Harvard promises to change all that. Announced on Wednesday, Polaris is a framework that determines how to sequence the downloading of a page's objects for faster load times overall.Created by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University, the new system promises to decrease page-load times by more than 30 percent -- with the potential for reductions of almost 60 percent -- by minimizing the number of network "trips" the browser must make.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Home Depot has agreed to pay as much as $19.5 million to remedy the giant data breach it suffered in 2014, the company confirmed on Tuesday.Included in that figure is a reported $13 million to reimburse customers for their losses and $6.5 million to provide them with one and a half years of identity protection services.Home Depot was not required to admit any wrongdoing."We’re working to put the litigation behind us," spokesman Stephen Holmes said via email. "This was the most expeditious path, but it’s not an admission of liability."Customers "were not responsible for fraudulent charges, and they’ve been our primary focus throughout," he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Much of the encryption world today depends on the challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they've created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to crack the security of traditional encryption schemes.In traditional computing, numbers are represented by either 0s or 1s, but quantum computing relies on atomic-scale units, or “qubits,” that can be simultaneously 0 and 1 -- a state known as a superposition that's far more efficient. It typically takes about 12 qubits to factor the number 15, but researchers at MIT and the University of Innsbruck in Austria have found a way to pare that down to five qubits, each represented by a single atom, they said this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM will acquire Resilient Systems, it announced Monday, and along with the company, it will gain a big name in the security world: Bruce Schneier.Resilient makes an incident-response platform that automates and orchestrates the processes for dealing with cyber incidents such as breaches and lost devices, and enabling companies to respond more quickly. The acquisition will give IBM Security the industry's first integrated end-to-end platform combining analytics, forensics, vulnerability management and incident response, the company said.IBM intends to bring Resilient's full staff of roughly 100 on board once the acquisition is completed, including cryptographer and security guru Bruce Schneier, Resilient's CTO.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For U.S. taxpayers, the news just keeps getting worse about the cyberattack discovered last year on the IRS's Get Transcript application,At first, it looked like just over 100,000 taxpayers had been affected. Then, last August, the number was updated to more than 300,000.Now, it looks like a further 390,000 people's information could have been breached, bringing the total estimate to over 700,000."The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration conducted a nine-month-long investigation looking back to the launch of the application in January 2014 for additional suspicious activity," the Internal Revenue Service announced on Friday. "This expanded review has identified additional suspicious attempts to access taxpayer accounts using sensitive information already in the hands of criminals."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Containers are revolutionizing enterprise IT in much the way smartphones have transformed the world of consumer technology, but there's still much more to come.That's according to Alex Polvi, CEO of Linux server vendor CoreOS, which has set its sights on improving Internet security.Too many companies today operate their data centers as if on egg shells, because "any little change can break things," Polvi explained. That makes it hard to keep software updated and secure.In general, companies need what Polvi calls "Google infrastructure for everyone else," or GIFEE. Essentially, he's referring to the way hyperscale companies like Google and Facebook operate, with infrastructures designed for maximum robustness, scalability, security and reliability.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A buffer-overflow vulnerability uncovered Tuesday in the GNU C Library poses a serious threat to countless Linux users.Dating back to the release of glibc 2.9 in 2008, CVE-2015-7547 is a stack-based buffer overflow bug in the glibc DNS client-side resolver that opens the door to remote code execution when a particular library function is used. Software using the function can be exploited with attacker-controlled domain names, attacker-controlled DNS servers or man-in-the-middle attacks.Glibc, which was also at the core of the "Ghost" vulnerability found last year, is a C library that defines system calls and other basic functions on Linux systems. Its maintainers had apparently been alerted of the new problem last July, but it's not clear if any remediation effort was launched at that time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you work in finance or accounting and receive an email from your boss asking you to transfer some funds to an external account, you might want to think twice.
That's because so-called "whaling" attacks -- a refined kind of phishing in which hackers use spoofed or similar-sounding domain names to make it look like the emails they send are from your CFO or CEO -- are on the rise, according to security firm Mimecast.
In fact, 55 percent of the 442 IT professionals Mimecast surveyed this month said their organizations have seen an increase in the volume of whaling attacks over the last three months, the firm reported on Wednesday.
Those organizations spanned the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Australia.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A few months ago Salesforce committed to a goal of eventually powering its global operations entirely with renewable energy, and on Monday it took a key step in that direction by signing a 12-year agreement to back a brand-new wind farm in West Virginia.The farm is expected to become operational in December 2016. Once it does, the electricity generated under the agreement is expected to be 125,000 megawatt hours annually, which is more than Salesforce used in its data centers during all of fiscal year 2015.It's also equivalent to about 90 percent of its total electricity use over that time period, putting Salesforce well on the way toward that 100 percent goal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Privacy issues will likely stay at the forefront of the FTC's focus next year thanks to the commission's appointment of Lorrie Cranor as its new chief technologist.Cranor, who is currently a professor of computer science and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. She will succeed Ashkan Soltani, the privacy expert who assumed the role in November 2014, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday.Cranor will join the FTC in January.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dropbox on Wednesday became the latest major cloud provider to announce new storage options in the European Union.Not only will the San Francisco-based company add two new European offices next year to its current roster of three, but it will also build new infrastructure for storing data within the EU.Customer requirements in the region have evolved, explained Thomas Hansen, the company's global vice president of sales and channel, in a post on the Dropbox for Business blog."This will not only build on the technical lead we have over competitors," Hansen wrote, but "will also give our customers more options about where their data is stored."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Making containers enterprise-ready has been a theme at this week's DockerCon EU conference in Barcelona, and on Tuesday Docker itself launched a new tool with that goal in mind.Aiming to give companies operational control while maintaining developers' productivity, Docker Universal Control Plane runs on-premises and is designed to help deploy and manage Dockerized distributed applications in production on any infrastructure."Portability has always been one of the premier attractions of modern application containers such as Docker, so it's no surprise to see the company and community focused on enhancing and extending that portability," said Jay Lyman, a research manager with 451 Research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It would be difficult to overstate the impact container technology is having on the software-development world, so it's no wonder vendors large and small are jumping on board with tailored offerings. The latest example: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which just rolled out an entire portfolio of Docker-focused products.Making containers enterprise-ready will be a key focus over the next two years, according to Dave Bartoletti, a principal analyst with Forrester."Large users will need the same degree of control over containers that they now have over virtual machines: they need to integrate them into their development processes, monitor them, configure them, connect them to each other over the network, and assign storage and other resources," he pointed out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It's a case that would seem to defy the odds many times over: Two Florida women born on the same day, in the same state, and given almost the same name. Though no one realized it at the time, it turns out they were also given the same Social Security number.Joanna Rivera and Joannie Rivera only recently discovered the problem, according to a report this week, but in the meantime it's caused no end of trouble for them. Credit applications have been denied; tax returns have been rejected.Identity theft might have been a likely assumption, but in this case, it was something different.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes