One of the shrewdest things Microsoft did in the last few years was buy Minecraft, one of the most ubiquitous video games among the younger set. The company plans to take advantage of that popularity by running a few tests (opt-in only) to help train AI algorithims on dealing with complex, open-ended worlds,
according to BBC News.
THE EPIC STORY OF DROPBOX'S EXODUS FROM THE AMAZON CLOUD EMPIRE One topic I like to ask fast-growing cloud-native web startups about at Structure is how they think about "the datacenter tipping point;" the point at which -- if you're fortunate enough -- you've grown so big that it starts to make sense to bring more things in-house.
Wired takes us through the two-and-a-half year process Dropbox went through in moving its storage system, arguably the very core of its service, from Amazon Web Services to its own hardware.
GET RICH OR HACK TRYIN' In what might have been the first hip-hop themed blog post title ever written by Google,
the company announced it was doubling its bug bounty for those trying to hijack a Chromebook. It also introduced a new bounty on bugs involving its Safe Browsing feature on Chrome, showing how important web companies continue to feel that keeping the outside hacker network friendly and active is a good security measure.
QUIETLY, SYMBOLICALLY, US CONTROL OF THE INTERNET WAS JUST ENDED We won't be able to judge the effects of this for a long time, but this is a big deal: ICANN members, after a two-year process, have agreed to transfer control over internet addresses and domain names from a non-profit kinda-sorta controlled by the U.S. government to a consortium of leaders from multiple countries.
The Guardian has a nice analysis piece from former ICANN member Maria Farrell on how the world got to this point.
WHAT WE LEARNED IN SEOUL WITH ALPHAGO Google's AlphaGo contest was an amazing thing to follow for anyone interested in the future of artificial intelligence, and Dennis Hassabis, CEO of the company's DeepMind unit,
shared a few reflections in a blog post this week. "But as they say about Go in Korean: 'Don’t be arrogant when you win or you’ll lose your luck,'" he wrote. "This is just one small, albeit significant, step along the way to making machines smart."
US GOVERNMENT PUSHED TECH FIRMS TO HAND OVER SOURCE CODE The tech industry's side-eye looks at the intentions of government law enforcement officials this year might be partly informed by what they've had to put up with already.
ZDNet reported Thursday that the U.S. government has pushed companies to share source code with the government (it's not clear if any actually had) through the secret FISA court, which is an amazing request of a modern software company that no sane executive would ever willingly sign off on.
