An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: After three weeks, 12 straight draws and a day of tiebreakers, Norway's Magnus Carlsen finally retained the world chess championship in London on Wednesday with a victory against Fabiano Caruana (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), his American challenger. Carlsen's victory came in what amounted to sudden-death chess: a scheduled series of four so-called rapid games in which the players started with 25 minutes to make their moves. The speedier pace of the games, after the far more deliberate matchups of the previous three weeks, meant players were more likely to make blunders. And that increased the chance of a victory by one player. Carlsen won the first two games, then closed out Caruana in Game 3. Caruana, 26, was bidding to become the first American champion since Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky to win the world title in 1972. The famously cantankerous Fischer forfeited his title in 1975 amid a dispute with the world chess federation, and the sport has been dominated by Russians and Eastern Europeans in the decades since then. The tiebreaker result was not a shock. While Carlsen, 27, and Caruana, 26, are closely matched in longer conventional chess games, known as classical chess, Carlsen had been considered the favorite in the tiebreaker because he has had better rapid chess results than Caruana. "It was the first time in the history of the world championship, which dates to the 1800s, that regulation play ended with every game a draw," the report notes.

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Brazil backs out of hosting COP25 next year due to budget constraints and a presidential transition.

Facebook is accused of undermining democratic institutions, but its CEO fails to face up to MPs at a hearing in London.

The Federal Trade Commission this week agreed to investigate video game loot boxes, accepting an official request by Senator Maggie Hassan. In a Congressional oversight committee hearing yesterday, FTC chairman Joe Simons affirmed Sen. Hassan's request that loot boxes be investigated. From a report: During her turn to ask questions at the hearing, Hassan cited a recent report by Great Britain's Gambling Commission that found 31% of children in the country had at one point or another paid money to open a loot box, a well as moves by Belgium (which prompted Square Enix to pull three mobile games from the country), Japan, and other countries to limit how loot boxes can be used in games. "Given the seriousness of this issue, I think it is in fact time for the FTC to investigate these mechanisms to ensure that children are being adequately protected and to educate parents about potential addiction or other negative impacts of these games," Hassan said. "Would you commit to undertaking this project and keeping this committee informed about it?" In response, Simons said "yes," but declined to go into any more detail about the FTC's current position on loot boxes and whether they constitute a form of gambling. Despite vocal criticism from Hassan and a few others on the topic, regulators have not been jumping to get involved in the debate.

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Amazon Web Services announced a slew of new or updated offerings at its cloud-computing conference in Las Vegas, seeking to maintain its lead in the market for internet-based computing. Following is a rundown. Amazon Elastic Inference is a new service that lets customers attach GPU-powered inference acceleration to any Amazon EC2 instance and reduces deep learning costs by up to 75 percent. From a report: "What we see typically is that the average utilization of these P3 instances GPUs are about 10 to 30 percent, which is pretty wasteful with elastic inference. You don't have to waste all that costs and all that GPU," AWS chief executive Andy Jassy said onstage at the AWS re:Invent conference earlier today. "[Amazon Elastic Inference] is a pretty significant game changer in being able to run inference much more cost-effectively." While the majority of workloads in the cloud are Linux-based, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy said he is well aware that Windows is still significant, and as a result his company launched a new fully managed Windows file system built on native Windows file servers. From a report: "What we were hoping to do was make this Windows file system work as part of EFS -- would have been much easier for us to layer on another file system ... because it's much easier if you're trying to build a business at scale," he explained. However, he said customers wanted a native Windows file system and they "weren't being flexible." "So we changed our approach," he continued. Inferentia is company's own dedicated machine learning chip. From a report: "Inferentia will be a very high-throughput, low-latency, sustained-performance very cost-effective processor," AWS CEO Andy Jassy explained during the announcement. Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research, says that while Amazon is far behind, this is a good step for them as companies try to differentiate their machine learning approaches in the future. Inferentia supports popular frameworks like INT8, FP16 and mixed precision. What's more, it supports multiple machine learning frameworks, including TensorFlow, Caffe2 and ONNX. TechCrunch writes about SageMaker Ground Truth: You can't build a good machine learning model without good training data. But building those training sets is hard, often manual work, that involves labeling thousand and thousands of images, for example. With SageMaker, AWS has been working on a service that makes building machine learning models a lot easier. But until today, that labeling task was still up to the user. Now, however, the company is launching SageMaker Ground Truth, a training set labeling service. Using Ground Truth, developers can point the service at the storage buckets that hold the data and allow the service to automatically label it. What's nifty here is that you can both set a confidence level for the fully automatic service or you can send the data to human laborers. GeekWire writes about the self-driving racing league and DeepRacer : Amazon Web Services chief and big sports fan Andy Jassy on Wednesday in Las Vegas unveiled a first-of-its-kind global autonomous racing league called AWS DeepRacer. The league features AWS DeepRacer, a 1/18th scale radio-controlled, self-driving four-wheel race car designed to help developers learn about reinforcement learning, a type of machine learning feature found in Amazon SageMaker. It features an Intel Atom processor; a 4-megapixel camera with 1080p resolution; multiple USB ports; and a 2-hour battery. And OutPosts: Starting next year, AWS will allow customers to order the same hardware that it uses to power its cloud services to run in their own data centers through a service called AWS Outposts. Building on its partnership with VMware, AWS Outposts will allow customers to enjoy a consistent set of hardware, software and services across their own servers and cloud servers, said AWS CEO Andy Jassy. Customers will have two options: they can run VMware Cloud on AWS on AWS Outposts, or they can run something called "AWS native" to enable this hybrid cloud setup. AWS will "deliver racks, install them, and then we'll do all the maintenance and repair on them," Jassy said.

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Norwegian world number one beats beats US opponent in a tie-breaker to retain World Chess championship title.

Support grows for Yemen resolution after briefing by Trump officials on Khashoggi's killing leaves senators frustrated.

Zorro shares a report: Silicon Valley researchers are attacking flying bloodsuckers in California's Fresno County. It's the first salvo in an unlikely war for Google parent Alphabet: eradicating mosquito-borne diseases around the world. A white high-top Mercedes van winds its way through the suburban sprawl and strip malls as a swarm of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes shoot out of a black plastic tube on the passenger-side window. These pests are tiny and, with a wingspan of just a few millimeters, all but invisible. "You hear that little beating sound?" says Kathleen Parkes, a spokesperson for Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Alphabet. She's trailing the van in her car, the windows down. "Like a duh-duh-duh? That's the release of the mosquitoes." Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential. These particular vermin, he explains, were bred in the ultra-high-tech surroundings of Verily's automated mosquito rearing system, 200 miles away in South San Francisco. They were infected with Wolbachia, a common bacterium. When those 80,000 lab-bred Wolbachia-infected, male mosquitoes mate with their counterpart females in the wild, the result is stealth annihilation: the offspring never hatch. Better make that 79,999. "One just hit the windshield," says Crawford. Mosquito-borne disease eradication is serious stuff for Alphabet, though it is just one of many of the company's forays into health care and life sciences.

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Amazon.com is jumping on the blockchain wave with new cloud services that help customers build the technology needed to record transactions. From a report: Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy on Wednesday announced Amazon Managed Blockchain, a new service underpinning blockchain networks that record millions of transactions. The company spent the past year studying the needs of customers interested in blockchain solutions before creating the new products, Jassy said. The service can be used to manage peer-to-peer payments, process loans and help businesses transact with distributors and suppliers, Jassy said. AWS announced a string of other new or updated cloud offerings, seeking to maintain its lead in the market for internet-based computing. The company also announced a new service called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or QLDB, which is a fully managed ledger database with a central trusted authority. The service, which is launching into preview today, offers an append-only, immutable journal that tracks the history of all changes, Amazon said. And all the changes are cryptographically chained and verifiable.

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China's relentless campaign to erase the identity of the Uighurs continues, as the world remains silent.

Moscow is pushing for breakthrough on UN constitutional committee that it can sell to the West.

Microsoft's stock market value surpassed Apple's and pulled ahead by as much as $3 billion on Wednesday as the Windows software maker benefited from optimism about demand for cloud computing services. From a report: Shares of Microsoft jumped 3 percent, pushing its market capitalization up to $848 billion. With the broad market rebounding following a recent slump, Apple also rose, but less than Microsoft. Its 2.17 percent increase put Apple's market capitalization at $845 billion, just four months after the iPhone maker breached the $1 trillion mark for the first time. Microsoft and Apple briefly traded at about the same level after the bell on Monday, but Microsoft's intraday lead over Apple on Wednesday was more substantial. Further reading: 'This is Not Your Father's Microsoft': CEO Satya Nadella On Helping a Faded Legend Find a 'Sense of Purpose'.

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Brian Merchant, writing for Medium : In 2017, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the professional services firm that advises 440 of the Fortune 500 companies, published a blueprint for using science fiction to explore business innovation. The same year, the Harvard Business Review argued that "business leaders need to read more science fiction" in order to stay ahead of the curve. "We're already seeing science fiction become reality today," said Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt in 2012. "Think back to Star Trek, or my favorite, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- much of what those writers imagined is now possible," he said, ticking off auto-translation, voice recognition, and electronic books. Jeff Bezos' product design team built the Kindle to spec from Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. (Stephenson himself is the chief future at the multibillion-dollar-valued Magic Leap.) Josh Wolfe, a managing partner at Lux Capital, is pouring millions of dollars into companies building what he explicitly describes as "the sci-fi future." "I'm looking for things that feel like they were once written about in science fiction," he told Fortune. "The gap between 'sci-fi,' -- that which was once imagined -- and 'sci-fact,' that which becomes manifest and real, is shrinking." A number of companies, along with a loose constellation of designers, marketers, and consultants, have formed to expedite the messy creative visualization process that used to take decades. For a fee, they'll prototype a possible future for a client, replete with characters who live in it, at as deep a level as a company can afford. They aim to do what science fiction has always done -- build rich speculative worlds, describe that world's bounty and perils, and, finally, envision how that future might fall to pieces. Alternatively referred to as sci-fi prototyping, futurecasting, or worldbuilding, the goal of these companies is generally the same: help clients create forward-looking fiction to generate ideas and IP for progress or profit. Each of the biggest practitioners believe they have their own formulas for helping clients negotiate the future. And corporations like Ford, Nike, Intel, and Hershey's, it turns out, are willing to pay hefty sums for their own in-house Minority Reports.

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EU court upholds bloc's decision to recover money paid by French far-right leader for her security.

For more than 30 years, Intel has dominated chipmaking, producing the most important component in the bulk of the world's computers. That run is now under threat from a company many Americans have never heard of. From a report: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. was created in 1987 to churn out chips for companies that lacked the money to build their own facilities. The approach was famously dismissed at the time by Advanced Micro Devices founder Jerry Sanders. "Real men have fabs," he quipped at a conference, using industry lingo for factories. These days, ridicule has given way to envy as TSMC plants have risen to challenge Intel at the pinnacle of the $400 billion industry. AMD recently chose TSMC to make its most advanced processors, having spun off its own struggling factories years before. TSMC's threat to Intel reflects a sea change in chipmaking that's seen one company after another hire TSMC to manufacture the chips they design. Hsinchu-based TSMC has scores of customers, including tech giants Apple and Qualcomm, second-tier players like AMD, and minnows such as Ampere Computing. The explosion of components built this way has given TSMC the technical know-how needed to churn out the smallest, most efficient and powerful chips in the highest volumes. "It's a once-in-a-50-year situation," said Renee James, the former No. 2 at Intel who heads startup Ampere. Her company is less than two years old and yet it's going after Intel's dominant server chip business. That Ampere thinks it can compete is a testament to stumbles by Intel, and TSMC's ability to benefit from those mistakes. It's been a decade since Intel faced major competition and its 90 percent revenue share in computer processing will again deliver record results this year. But some on Wall Street are concerned, and rivals are emboldened, because TSMC has a real chance to replace Intel as the best chipmaker in the business. Last year, the Taiwanese company amassed a bigger market value than its U.S. rival for the first time.

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