“I have a virus.”
“Stop visiting all those porn sites!”
Pretty much every conversation about malware ever, right? Well, Symantec’s 17th Internet Threat Security Report found another genre of sites that, on average is worse than porn: Religion.
Religious sites had and average of 115 software threats, while porn sites only had 25. The religious sites were mostly full of fake anti-virus software, which sounds relatively harmless, but it can leave an unsuspecting user’s computer totally vulnerable. Symantec wasn’t able to come up with a good explanation for why the religious were such a popular target for the fake software. [Symantec via WSJ]
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One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it’s possible to imagine a machine making the grade.
Turing was one of the 20th century’s great mathematicians, a conceptual architect of modern computing whose codebreaking played a decisive part in World War II. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent.
Artificial intelligences are now ubiquitous, from GPS navigation systems and Google algorithms to automated customer service and Apple’s Siri, to say nothing of Deep Blue and Watson — but no machine has met Turing’s standard. The quest to do so, however, and the lines of research inspired by the general challenge of modeling human thought, have profoundly influenced both computer and cognitive science.
There is reason to believe that code kernels for the first Turing-intelligent machine have already been written.
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