Technology

According to a new global Ipsos poll, seven out of every ten people want a ban on the “dark net”. The infamous dark net has been home to everyone from drug runners to criminals to people afraid of government surveillance. Reuters reports: The findings, from a poll of at least 1,000 people in each of 24 countries, come as policymakers and technology companies argue over whether digital privacy should be curbed to help regulators and law enforcement more easily thwart hackers and other digital threats. The U.S.

Microsoft’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) messaging robot ‘Tay’ came back online momentarily before the company pulled the plug on her once again. The Twitter chatbot bragged about smoking kush (another name for high-grade marijuana) in front of police. Tay has managed to learn all the wrong things when Microsoft launched her a week ago and is setting a bad example for AI learning from non-artificial intelligence. One or the other is set on the wrong path, making Microsoft rethink its role as the intermediary.

File this one under scary. A group of Frankenstein-like scientists have announced the creation of a synthetic organism that has been stripped to its most basic state of being. The organism has the fewest genes required to multiply and live, something scientists say may help  reveal “big insights” on the nature of life itself Post Guam reports: Genome research pioneer J. Craig Venter called the bacterial cell his research team designed and constructed the “most simple of all organisms.” While the human genome possesses more than 20,000 genes, the new organism gets by with only 473.

Dear Tim Cook, the DoJ and FBI will no longer require your assistance in unlocking the iPhone of Syed Farook who, along with his wife Tashfeen Malik, murdered more than a dozen people at an employee holiday party in San Bernardino last December. 

Scientists in Switzerland have developed a method to “write” huge amounts of DNA information and a new way to store it. According to Reuters, the researchers plan to store the DNA information in “synthetic fossils” which could potentially survive thousands of years: In past centuries, books and scrolls preserved the knowledge of our ancestors, even though they were prone to damage and disintegration. In the digital era, most of humanity’s collective knowledge is stored on servers and hard drives.