It's been a busy week, it's time for some high-tech relaxation with Koding's selection of the most disruptive, smart or simply hot tech news.
Teach a robot to walk on asphalt and it will walk on asphalt. But not on the sand. Teach the robot to imagine walking and soon it will be walking anywhere. That's what researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have done with a robot programmed to simulate the activity in the brain of a child learning to walk. More precisely, the robot imagines, that is, makes several simulations of possible movements, in order to then choose the variants with the highest chance of success.
The imagination exercise takes place in one neural network, while another network takes care of the actual walking, applying one of the simulated solutions and responding to body movements depending on the situation on the ground. The researchers managed to make the robot learn on its own how to stand, reach for an object and stand straight when the ground beneath it starts to move. 🙂 The future is getting very interesting, in a way that give me something to think about.
But until we see the Terminator-like premonitions come true, artificial intelligence is attracting huge funding for good intentions. Toyota is investing $1 billion to establish an AI research company, right in Silicon Valley.
Ransomware in incredible numbers. For those who haven't heard, ransomware is a form of extortion in which a virus hijacks a device and the data on it, making it impossible to access until the owner pays a sum of money to those who created the software/virus. Researchers from Cisco Systems they announced that they helped thwart a massive ransomware operation carried out by a group of cybercriminals who used the Angler exploit. Here are the figures revealed on this occasion:
-up to 90,000 victims were targeted daily
-the exploit generates $60 million annually
-a $300 reward was paid by approximately 31% of the victims
-the servers used for this exploit had an average usage time of one day
No word yet on the authors and beneficiaries of the exploit.
Satya Nadela brand opening: In a move that a few years ago would have horrified IT executives in Redmond, Microsoft has announced a partnership with Red Hat Inc. The two companies have joined forces to enable the deployment of Red Hat solutions on Microsoft Azure. Under the agreement, Microsoft offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred option for enterprise Linux deployments on Microsoft Azure.
And also from Microsoft: PPT presentations are now going social. Microsoft has launched Social Share, a free plugin for PowerPoint that allows you to share those brilliant slides on Facebook and Twitter, as videos or photo albums. Social Share comes from Microsoft Garage, a program through which the company launches experimental projects like Arrow – an Android launcher.
How are laptops used aboard the International Space Station? In fact, the first question would be "why is the station controlled from laptops and not from dashboards?" Because some physical interfaces installed in the station structure would have been difficult to repair or replace. With few exceptions, almost all commands are sent through a... laptop-type interface.
The Motion Control Group interface. Photo via Gizmodo
There are about 80 Lenovo T61P and A31p laptops. They are distributed in each section of the station (American, Russian, Japanese, European) and have different graphical interfaces for each section. Some of them run Linux and ensure direct interaction with the various components of the space station. The other laptops run Windows and are used for support activities – reading procedures, inventories, notes, e-mail, video-conferencing, Twitter, Facebook. When they are not floating melancholy while astronaut Chris Hadfield sings Space Oddity.