Self-taught AI’s are better at GO, Building your own modem, and The FBI can’t break encryption on today’s phones. All this and more on this week’s Geek Speak with Lyle Troxell and Miles Elam.
DeepMind’s Go game-playing AI—which dominated its human competition—just got better
Google’s artificial intelligence company, DeepMind, has developed an AI that has managed to learn how to walk, run, jump, and climb without any prior guidance. The result is as impressive as it is goofy.
In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests that humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers.2 Valley denotes a dip in the human observer’s affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica’s human likeness.3
Lately, I’ve been working with a client where my development computer is not connected to the Internet. This is a huge inconvenience, as the unavailability of Google and Stack Overflow vastly impact my productivity. Only recently have I begun to grasp how much of my time is actually spent copy/pasting between Visual Studio and the browser.
For decades, the utopians of Silicon Valley have firmly believed that digital connectivity will bridge all misunderstanding and difference. It increasingly feels like it is doing the precise opposite, fueling a tribal form of identity politics based on narrow markers of gender, race, religion or so on.
Mark Felt – The Man Who Brought Down the White House centers on “Deep Throat”, the pseudonym given to the notorious whistleblower for one of the greatest scandals of all time, Watergate. The true identity of the secret informant remained a mystery and source of much public curiosity and speculation for more than 30 years. That is until, in 2005, special agent Mark Felt shockingly revealed himself as the tipster.
The FBI hasn’t been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sunday, turning up the heat on a debate between technology companies and law enforcement officials trying to recover encrypted communications.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a conference of law enforcement officials on Sunday that he and his colleagues have been unable to open nearly 7,000 digital devices in the first 11 months of the 2017 fiscal year.
Well maybe. 2FA that actually implements a second factor is fantastic, but Google Authenticator, Facebook Code Generator, and any of the other app-based “second factors” are really just a second password. And worse, that second password cannot be stored hashed in the server’s database, which means that when the database is eventually compromised, your “second factor” blows away with the breeze.
A paper by two Belgian researchers has cast more light on the vulnerabilities discovered in the Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) implementations on most, if not all, wireless networking devices that use the protocol.
Police body cams worn by 2,600 officers in the nation’s capital did not affect citizen complaints or the use of force by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), according to a new study.
