An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A master player of the Chinese strategy game Go has decided to retire, due to the rise of artificial intelligence that "cannot be defeated." Lee Se-dol is the only human to ever beat the AlphaGo software developed by Google's sister company Deepmind. In 2016, he took part in a five-match showdown against AlphaGo, losing four times but beating the computer once. The South Korean said he had decided to retire after realizing: "I'm not at the top even if I become the number one." "There is an entity that cannot be defeated," the 18-time world Go champion told South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Lee Se-dol is considered to be one of the greatest Go players of the modern era. "On behalf of the whole AlphaGo team at DeepMind, I'd like to congratulate Lee Se-dol for his legendary decade at the top of the game, and wish him the very best for the future," said Demis Hassabis, chief executive and co-founder of Deepmind. "During the AlphaGo matches, he demonstrated true warrior spirit and kept us on the edges of our seats to the very end."

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Brian Krebs: Tiny hidden spy cameras are a common sight at ATMs that have been tampered with by crooks who specialize in retrofitting the machines with card skimmers. But until this past week I'd never heard of hidden cameras being used at gas pumps in tandem with Bluetooth-based card skimming devices. Apparently, I'm not alone. "I believe this is the first time I've seen a camera on a gas pump with a Bluetooth card skimmer," said Detective Matt Jogodka of the Las Vegas Police Department, referring to the compromised fuel pump pictured here. . It may be difficult to tell, but the horizontal bar across the top of the machine (just above the 'This Sale $' indicator) contains a hidden pinhole camera angled so as to record debit card users entering their PIN.

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Iranian diplomatic staff unharmed as anti-government demonstrators storm and set fire to consulate in the southern city.

What if you could manipulate the facial features of a historical figure, a politician, or a CEO realistically and convincingly using nothing but a webcam and an illustrated or photographic still image? From a report: A tool called MarioNETte that was recently developed by researchers at Seoul-based Hyperconnect accomplishes this, thanks in part to cutting-edge machine learning techniques. The researchers claim it outperforms all baselines even where there's "significant" mismatch between the face to be manipulated and the person doing the manipulating. MarioNETte is technically a face reenactment tool, in that it aims to synthesize a reenacted face animated by the movement of a person (a "driver") while preserving the face's (target's) appearance. It's not a new idea, but previous approaches either (1) required a few minutes of training data and could only reenact predefined targets, or (2) would distort the target's features when dealing with large poses. MarioNETte advances the state of the art by incorporating three novel components: an image attention block, a target feature alignment, and a landmark transformer. The attention block allows the model to attend to relevant positions of mapped physical features, while the target feature alignment mitigates artifacts, warping, and distortion. As for the landmark transformer bit, it adapts the geometry of the driver's poses to that of the target without the need for labeled data, in contrast to approaches that require human-annotated examples. The researchers trained and tested MarioNETte using VoxCeleb1 and CelebV, two open source corpora of celebrity photos and videos.

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Giuliani said he had 'insurance' if Trump turned on him in the impeachment inquiry into their Ukraine dealings.

I saw a thing on CNN how Trump is using Facebook ads to refute bad news on TV. You wouldn't know if you (like me) are not in his base. They showed a graph with the money spent by various Democrats on FB ads. In total it's small fraction of what Trump is spending. Now I think about Bloomberg's entry into the race in a whole new way. Not only is he rich, and can afford to spend a lot on ads, he also understands tech and media. That's how he made his billions. So when people count him out based on today's polling, they're getting caught in horse-race thinking and forgetting to look at the horse itself. He won't be afraid to use Facebook. He'll have some catching up to do, but he has a mind for tech media and lots of unique experience. Trump should be concerned.

'I am really tired of this word: 'sorry',' says seven-month pregnant asylum seeker Zeinab.

NPR reports: Back in September, India's hopes for a historic first ended -- inconclusively. High hopes had been riding on its Chandrayaan-2 orbiter. The spacecraft was sending a landing vehicle down to the moon -- an operation that, if successful, would be the first robotic mission at the moon's unexplored south pole and that would make India only the fourth country in history to make a moon landing. Unfortunately, it was not to be. At the time, the Indian Space Research Organisation didn't offer much explanation for the operation's failure besides an ill-timed loss of contact, adding little more than a terse, "Data is being analyzed." Now, the Indian government has offered its first conclusive statement on the incident, in a brief report responding to a lawmaker's question last Wednesday: Put simply, the Vikram lander's braking thrusters malfunctioned, and it crashed. "During the second phase of descent, the reduction in velocity was more than the designed value. Due to this deviation, the initial conditions at the start of the fine braking phase were beyond the designed parameters," said Jitendra Singh, minister of state for the Department of Space, the ISRO's parent department. "As a result, Vikram hard landed within 500 m of the designated landing site." Singh did not clarify what caused the malfunction in the lander's landing system. The statement is believed to be the first formal acknowledgment by India's government that the craft crashed. In the ISRO's previous public updates on Vikram -- the latest on its website was released back on Sept. 10, several days after the intended landing date -- the agency noted only that it had located the lander but had made "no communication with it yet."

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The new Martin Scorsese movie is out on Netflix. I'm watching it now. What can I say it's a Scorsese movie. Lovin it.

Twitter clarifies its inactive account policy. My concern was linkrot. Twitter accounts are websites, we point to them and include them, as I point to the new Twitter policy above. Jack was around when the web was very young. The idea is that we're creating a record. It's not ephemeral. It should survive us. It shouldn't matter if a site is active. Now we know that users care about preserving the web. Twitter is part of that.

Samuel Opoku, 23, was arrested late on Tuesday and faces 10 counts of mischief and assault with a weapon.

ardmhacha writes: Apple has complied with Russian demands to show the annexed Crimean peninsula as part of Russian territory on its apps. Russian forces annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, drawing international condemnation. The region, which has a Russian-speaking majority, is now shown as Russian territory on Apple Maps and its Weather app, when viewed from Russia. But the apps do not show it as part of any country when viewed elsewhere. The State Duma, the Russian parliament's lower house, said in a statement: "Crimea and Sevastopol now appear on Apple devices as Russian territory." Russia treats the naval port city of Sevastopol as a separate region. The BBC tested several iPhones in Moscow and it appears the change affects devices set up to use the Russian edition of Apple's App Store. Apple had been in talks with Russia for several months over what the State Duma described as "inaccuracy" in the way Crimea was labelled. Further reading: Apple Has No Backbone.

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As prime minister's post remains vacant, deadlock is widening sectarian divide, leading to rise in violence.

Mexico says it will defend its soveriegnty after Trump said drug cartels will be designated as 'terrorists'.

Resentment has been growing among farmers over allegedly being unfairly blamed for environmental and animal welfare issues.