I don't know if I should mention this... It's the home invasion of dumb artificial intelligence.

We have the car that talks and the TomTom that tells you "where to go". But then one has to think of people who are lonely or disabled. These devices, mentioned, lampooned and adopted by the GRUEN team of experts, last night on ABC/TV, Alexa by Amazon, and others such as by Google and Apple, are designed to respond to your command in your home — actually make sure you're awake, awake, awake as you live your now excitingly product-managed life. There is a lot of cash to be made from this device, not for you but for whoever is selling you pizza, pineApple and lightbulbs. And the machine cares about you. You are important to the machine.

As Donald Trump jets around Asia this week, US allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific will be looking for signs that his administration has a vision for strengthening America's commitment to regional leadership.

Prince Charles campaigned to alter climate-change agreements without disclosing his private estate had an offshore financial interest in what he was promoting, BBC Panorama has found.

Labor has signalled it will drive a hard bargain with Malcolm Turnbull’s proposed citizenship disclosure solution, identifying several core problems ahead of talks between the two leaders.

news...

Americans are outraged by allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an intelligence service to hack email accounts of the Democratic National Committee. How inexpressibly heinous that one country, Russia, would try to influence elections in another sovereign country, in this case the United States!  How unprecedented!  How diabolical! How uniquely Russian!

The story reads like a spy novel in which none of the characters are clean, few are identified and the origins of the work is still either secret or attributed by default, without ANY proof, to Russia. By this I mean that from early on it seems that the US secret services (?) or someone in the US cyber industry “knew” that “Russia” had infiltrated the DNC in a major breach. So the question is why was not this fully disclosed before now? The main investigation was carried out by SecureWorks. What was the relationship between SecureWorks and the DNC? 

It hit me this week, around the time when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blithely seconding Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Civil War revisionism, that I missed Sean Spicer.

31 October 2017

Actor Russell Crowe has lashed out at Australia's handling of the escalating situation at the Manus Island detention centre, labelling it a "nation's shame" and offering to house and support refugees himself.

More than 600 men are refusing to leave the now-decommissioned centre in Papua New Guinea and relocate to alternative accommodation. They have expressed concerns for their safety, and asylum seeker advocates say the facilities are not ready.

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Examples of some of the roughly 3,000 Facebook ads bought by Russian operatives to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election have been released by the US House Intelligence Committee.

On 25 October, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and I visited The Baker at Sutton to further understand the pressures facing small businesses and discuss electricity prices.

Mathematics and chance have made some strange bedfellows, especially in the realm of games. For example anyone playing chess at the highest level would know that the white team, having the first move, should always win, unless a mistake is made and this advantage is lost. But there are games where chance is a greater factor in success or failure. You could be given a rotten hand at poker and win on bluff alone but this stretches the “Game Theory” beyond mathematical equations. Or does it? 

Some readers were alarmed that the book was "redacted": indeed, names (only a few on a large set) were blackened, so as to make them illegible ...

This decision is fully agreed between the author and the publisher.

In fact, the author does not reside in France for the reasons that we know, the editions Demi-Lune could be considered legally responsible for his remarks, and would be exposed to expensive lawsuits, even to the removal of the book. Consequently, we decided by mutual agreement, not to withdraw the contentious paragraphs, but to hide some names.

The book is available in foreign language versions, and from the Voltaire Network website.

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The author: Thierry MEYSSAN