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A few weeks ago, Google researchers announced that they had peered inside the mind of an artificial intelligence program. What they discovered was a demonic hellscape. You’ve seen the pictures. These are hallucinations produced by a cluster of simulated neurons trained to identify objects in a picture. The researchers wanted to better understand how the neural network operates, so they asked it to use its imagination. To daydream a little. At first, they gave the computer abstract images to interpret — like a field of clouds. It was a Rorschach test. The artificial neurons saw what they wanted to see,...

Two heads are better than one, and three monkey brains can control an avatar better than any single monkey. For the first time, a team has networked the brains of multiple animals to form a living computer that can perform tasks and solve problems. If human brains could be similarly connected, it might give us superhuman problem-solving abilities, and allow us to communicate abstract thoughts and experiences. "It is really exciting," says Iyad Rahwan at the Masdar Institute in Dubai, UAE, who was not involved in the work. "It will change the way humans cooperate." The work, published today, is...

Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself. Why? Because the tiny device that can easily be hidden in an object or taped to the underside of a table doesn’t use conventional communications to pull off capers. Instead it reads radio waves emitted by your computer’s processor, and there’s...

Researchers have shown that machines are inching closer to self-learning, and perhaps even copping a little attitude. Over at Google, a computer program using a database of movie scripts was asked again and again by researchers to define morality. It struggles to do so, and in a conversation recorded by its human engineers, becomes exasperated and ends the conversation by lashing out at its human inquisitor. Here’s part of the exchange, as related in a paper presented this week: Human: Tell me the definition of morality. Machine: I don’t have ethics. Human: Look, I need help; I need to know...

An Office of Personnel Management investigative official said Tuesday the agency entrusted with millions of personnel records has a history of failing to meet basic computer network security requirements.Michael Esser, assistant inspector general for audit, said in testimony prepared for delivery that for years many of the people running the agency's information technology had no IT background.

On Friday, the second day of its annual developer conference, Google I/O, one of the search giant’s semi-secretive research divisions announced a project that aims to make conductive fabrics that can be weaved into everyday clothes. The effort, called Project Jacquard, is named for the French inventor of the Jacquard Loom, which revolutionized textile manufacturing and helped pave the way for modern computing. Much like the screens on mobile phones, these fabrics could register the user’s touch and transmit information elsewhere, like to a smartphone or tablet computer. They are made from conductive yarns that come in a rainbow of...

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — A writer desperate to get a movie script read suffered the ultimate rejection Thursday when police blew up a briefcase he said contained the screenplay after an agent refused to read it, police said. The bizarre story was set in Beverly Hills, where a man visited the office of a literary agent and left behind a briefcase that he said contained a computer, police Sgt. Brad Cornelius said. The man left instructions for it to be delivered to someone at the business, who told another person in the office, "This guy's been kind of pestering me...

An ultracompact beamsplitter – the smallest one in the world – has been designed and fabricated by researchers in the US. Using a newly developed algorithm, the team built the smallest integrated polarization beamsplitter to date, which could allow computers and mobile devices of the future to function millions of times faster than current machines.

Millions of routers and other embedded devices are affected by a serious vulnerability that could allow hackers to compromise them. The vulnerability is located in a service called NetUSB, which lets devices connected over USB to a computer be shared with other machines on a local network or the Internet via IP (Internet Protocol). The shared devices can be printers, webcams, thumb drives, external hard disks and more. NetUSB is implemented in Linux-based embedded systems, such as routers, as a kernel driver. The driver is developed by Taiwan-based KCodes Technology. Once enabled, it opens a server that listens on TCP...

Turns out, there are a few savvy (and super-easy) keyboard tricks that can do just that. Your desktop, browser, Gmail, and even Facebook all have simple keyboard-based shortcuts you can press to more quickly accomplish things you do all the time — things like creating a new tab in Chrome or favoriting a tweet. We’ve rounded up 10 super-handy keyboard hacks that will help you zip through your daily grind, so you can spend more time on things that matter — or at least save your index finger from repetitive stress syndrome. And, we've organized them from the most basic...

A Californian start-up is seeking funding to make a computer that will cost $9 (£6) in its most basic form. Next Thing wants $50,000 to finish development of the credit-card sized Chip computer. The first versions will have a 1Ghz processor, 512MB of Ram and 4GB of onboard storage. The gadget, due to go on general release in early 2016, could become yet another rival to the popular Raspberry Pi barebones computer.

Such glitches emerge with surprising frequency. It’s suspected that the reason why Nasa lost contact with the Deep Impact space probe in 2013 was an integer limit being reached. And just last week it was reported that Boeing 787 aircraft may suffer from a similar issue. The control unit managing the delivery of power to the plane’s engines will automatically enter a failsafe mode – and shut down the engines – if it has been left on for over 248 days. Hypothetically, the engines could suddenly halt even in mid-flight. The Federal Aviation Administration’s directive on the matter states that...

Racing across the U.S. in your taco truck, you must fight off animals mutated by fallout from a nuclear war, and you must also turn them into delicious filling for the tacos you sell inside fortified towns. Your mission: Make it to the Canadian city of Winnipeg. You are “Gunman Taco Truck.” “It’s pretty much only a game that a kid would come up with,” says Brenda Romero, a videogame designer for more than 30 years and the mother of Donovan Romero-Brathwaite, the 10-year-old inventor of the game. And yet GTT already has been licensed by a videogame publisher for...

The race is on around the world as scientists strive to develop a new generation of batteries that can perform beyond the limits of the current lithium-ion based battery. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have taken a significant step toward the development of a battery that could outperform the lithium-ion technology used in electric cars such as the Chevy Volt. They have shown they can replace the lithium ions, each of which carries a single positive charge, with magnesium ions, which have a plus-two charge, in battery-like chemical reactions, using an electrode with a structure like those...

Molybdenum disulfide sheets -- which are "sandwiches" of one molybdenum atom between two sulfur atoms -- may improve rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, according to the latest research from Gurpreet Singh, assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering. Credit: Kansas State University The key to better cellphones and other rechargeable electronics may be in tiny "sandwiches" made of nanosheets, according to mechanical engineering research from Kansas State University. Gurpreet Singh, assistant professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering, and his research team are improving rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The team has focused on the lithium cycling of molybdenum disulfide, or MoS2, sheets, which Singh...

Tech Ping: Bought the Computer, Trying to Do Wireless File Transfer HELP!! Is there any help out there for Win7 among the Freepers? Wanted to file transfer from the old WIN 7 machine to the new WIN7 machine and the new computer wont recognize the old computer and vice versa. Both computers I think have the same name, could that be a problem. The old computer has a home group and the new computer keeps trying to make its own home group, the hussy! The last legs are rapidly approaching for old computer Last conversation was this: Question about Laptop...

Pranksters be warned Eight-grader Domanik Green was arrested on felony charges in Holiday, Fla. Wednesday after breaking into his teacher’s computer to change the background picture to two men kissing. Green, 14, who was released the day of his arrest, said that he broke into the computer of teacher he didn’t like after realizing that faculty members’ passwords were simply their last names, the Tampa Bay Times reports. Green, who previously faced a three-day suspension for a similar prank, said that many students got in trouble for breaking into teachers’ computers.

Are smartphones making our children mentally ill?Leading child psychotherapist Julie Lynn Evans believes easy and constant access to the internet is harming youngsterstelegraph.co.uk/news/health/children/11486167/Are-smartphones-making-our-children-mentally-ill.html

No browsers are safe as proved yesterday at Pwn2Own, but crashing one of them with just one line of special code is slightly different. A developer has discovered a hack in Google Chrome which can crash the Chrome tab on a Mac PC. The code is a 13 character special string which appears to be written in Assyrian script *break* Matt C has reported the bug to Google, who have marked the report as duplicate. This means that Google are aware of the problem and are reportedly working on it.

The world’s first fully digital radio transmitter has been developed by Cambridge Consultants, paving the way for 5G high-speed broadband for mobile devices. Unlike software-defined radio (SDR), the breakthrough – named Pizzicato – is not a mixture of analogue and digital components but is completely digital, which can enable new ways of using the radio spectrum intelligently. When transmitting data, only low frequency signals of 1GHz or lower propagate well over distance or through walls, so they are in great demand. Expanding to make use of frequencies of 10GHz and beyond will require techniques such as meshing and beamforming...