How-to
Privacy
Could what you ask your Amazon Echo be used against you in a court of law? A murder case in Bentonville, Arkansas, is putting that question to the test. As detailed in the Information (subscription required), local police have issued Amazon a warrant for the voice recordings of Echo owner James Andrew Bates, who is accused of murdering Victor Collins in his hot tub after a night of drinking in November 2015.
Tech
Driving your car until it breaks down on the road is never anyone's favorite way to learn the need for routine maintenance. But preventive or scheduled maintenance checks often miss many of the problems that can come up. An Israeli startup has come up with a better idea: Use artificial intelligence to listen for early warning signs that a car might be nearing a breakdown.
He realized the city didn't need to give its people another reason to be suspicious. It was too easy for the public to interpret predictive policing as another form of racial profiling.
Norm Jouppi, a hardware engineer at Google, announced the existence of the Tensor Processing Unit two months after the Go match, explaining in a blog post that Google had been outfitting its data centers with these new accelerator cards for more than a year. Google has not shared exactly what is on these boards, but it's clear that it represents an increasingly popular strategy to speed up deep-learning calculations: using an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC.
Researchers from two universities in Italy and Bell Labs decided to take a crack at answering this hugely important question by looking at data from Tumblr and Flickr, both Yahoo properties. They published their results to the arXiv preprint server last week, and the research was also presented at a conference earlier in the year. Their surprising conclusion: Tumblr has a lot of porn, while Flickr, not so much.