Deep-learning systems can struggle to handle more than one task, but a fresh approach by Google Brain could turn neural networks into jacks of all trades

In the latest Top500 supercomputer race, only two -- count 'em, two -- of the world's fastest computers aren't running Linux.

The 2017 iPad Pro is a powerhouse, and it's the best iPad Apple has ever made. Find out why. When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPad, he positioned it in between an iPhone and MacBook (literally). He argued that a tablet device had to do some key things better than an iPhone and MacBook in order for it to exist. Those goals were arguably achieved, and now Tim Cook and Apple envision the iPad outright replacing traditional computing devices for the everyday user.

Discovery that Apple has intentionally removed restrictions on NVMe in the High Sierra beta suggests that future Macs won't be limited in which mass-storage flash drives may be used, possibly including both the "modular" Mac Pro and the iMac Pro.

Repair specialists iFixit have dubbed the new laptop a ‘Russian nesting doll from hell.’

There are days in this profession in which I am surprised. The longer I stay in the technology industry, they become further and further apart. There are several reasons to be surprised: someone comes out of the blue with a revolutionary product and the ecosystem/infrastructure to back it up, or a company goes above and beyond a recent mediocre pace to take on the incumbents (with or without significant financial backing). One reason is confusion, as to why such a product would ever be thought of, and another is seeing how one company reacts to another.

More worrying than the internet’s role in the rise of far-right populism is the digital tsunami poised to engulf us: AI and and ‘crypto-anarchists’ are radically restructuring life – and politics – as we know it

Facebook is considering secretly watching and recording users through their webcams and smartphone cameras, a newly discovered patent suggests.

Microsoft’s Xbox One X presents an interesting challenge for PC builders. Sure, if you want raw power, nothing beats the PC. But can you put together an Xbox One X equivalent for $500? At that price point (and outside of that golden window of Black Friday sales and stellar combo/bundle deals on PC components), you're pushing the limits of what’s possible, particularly if you want to completely replicate the same experience Microsoft is promising hardcore console fans.

Inside the ridiculous media panic that scared parents silly. By Michael Z. Newman.

A few months ago, Apple offered a rare near-apology for the Mac Pro. “We designed ourselves into a bit of a corner,” said Craig Federighi, which is probably the best way to say it. Apple was so focused on whether it could put workstation components into a beautiful, tiny trash can form factor, that it never bothered to ask if it should.

The product’s unveiling sent shockwaves through the telecom industry, putting gear makers on notice that the lucrative market they controlled for decades was about to get turned upside down — and not necessarily to their advantage.

Judge rules images found on a defendant’s hard drive inadmissible – but bats away contention that he had an expectation of privacy when he passed his PC to Geek Squad

That fancy new HP Elite laptop you just bought? It may be silently recording every keystroke. For what it’s worth, it doesn’t look like there’s malice here – just staggering incompetence. According to ModZero’s blog post, an update to HP’s audio drivers released in 2015 introduced new diagnostic features. One of these is used to detect if a special key had been pressed or released. Except it seems this was poorly implemented, as the driver ultimately acted like a keylogger, capturing and procesing every single keypress.

Confidential details of a top-secret encryption-breaking supercomputer were left completely exposed on an unsecured computer server belonging to New York University (NYU), according to a new report.

Time for some peace and quiet.

A look at the balanced ternary notation and it’s use in Setun, a Soviet computer. By Andrew Buntine.

SIGGRAPH

It's been a long time in the works, but a memory management feature intended to give machine learning or other GPU-powered applications a major performance boost is close to making it into one of the next revisions of the kernel. Heterogenous memory management (HMM) allows a device’s driver to mirror the address space for a process under its own memory management. As Red Hat developer Jérôme Glisse explains, this makes it easier for hardware devices like...

The "blue screen of death" lives on thanks to a simple Windows file system bug.

IT architect Keith Townsend says companies must get out in front of shadow IT rather than view it as an unmanageable threat.

Intel’s latest and definitively greatest Xeon processor, the E7-8894 v4, has an MSRP of $8,898. There are other specs I can (and will) tell you about this, but really, that’s the most important one: $8,898. Now, to be clear, this is a professional-grade piece of hardware that’s really only meant for companies running servers with big databases. Sure, it’s set a whole bunch of benchmarking records, but it’s not really the kind of chip you’d use to play Overwatch. I’m not even sure you could use this to play Overwatch.

A full operating system and film stored on DNA were recovered with no errors. The world is churning out so much data that hard-drives may not be able to...

The good news is that it doesn't have to suck, if you build it out properly.

Researchers have overcome one of the major stumbling blocks in artificial intelligence with a program that can learn one task after another using skills it acquires on the way. Developed by Google’s AI company, DeepMind, the program has taken on a range of different tasks and performed almost as well as a human. Crucially, and uniquely, the AI does not forget how it solved past problems, and uses the knowledge to tackle new ones.

The philosophers he influenced set the stage for the technological revolution that remade our world.

Teaching computers to read was one of the 20th century's great challenges. At first, the secret to optical character recognition was purpose-built type.

Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical is to end its investment in Unity 8, Mir, Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and convergence.

And Windows 10 S is no Chrome OS either.

Shannon had a weakness for juggling and unicycles, but his fingerprints are on every electronic device we own. By Siobhan Roberts. (Apr. 30)

Forget the CPU, GPU, and FPGA, Google says its Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. “TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday.

We're just at the beginning of working out the tasks machines will make us better at.

And what it could mean for the future of computing. By Philip Ball. (June 22, 2016)

AI finally works—we just don’t know how. By Jordan Pearson.

User: Siri, call me an ambulance. Siri: Okay, from now on I’ll call you “an ambulance.” Apple fixed this error shortly after its virtual assistant was first released in 2011. But a new contest shows that computers still lack the common sense required to avoid such embarrassing mix-ups. The results of the contest were presented at an academic conference in New York this week, and they provide some measure of how much work needs to be done to make computers truly intelligent.