Research into artificial intelligence is going gangbusters, and the frenetic pace won't let up for about five years -- after which the industry will concentrate around a handful of core technologies and leaders, the head of Intel's new AI division predicts.

Intel is keen to be among them. In March, it formed an Artificial Intelligence Products Group headed by Naveen Rao. He previously was CEO of Nervana Systems, a deep-learning startup Intel acquired in 2016. Rao sees the industry moving at breakneck speed.

"It's incredible," he said. "You go three weeks without reading a paper and you're behind. It's just amazing."

It wasn't so long ago that artificial intelligence research was solely the domain of university research labs, but tech companies have stormed into the space in the last couple of years and sent technical hurdles tumbling.

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In late March when I got an unsettling message on my Gmail account: "Warning: Google may have detected government-backed attackers trying to steal your password."

Google sends them out when it detects a "government-backed attacker" has attempted to hack an account through phishing or malware.

Last time I saw one, I added two-factor authentication to many of my accounts. This time it prompted me to ask: Can I do even better?

Martyn Williams/IDGNS

The BlackBerry KeyOne, an Android-based smartphone with a hardware keyboard, will be available in the U.S. and Canada from May 31, the phone's maker said Thursday.

TCL Communications, the Chinese company that acquired rights to produce BlackBerry-brand handsets, originally had said the phone would go on sale in April, so the delay may disappoint potential users. This could be a bad time to test the patience of potential buyers, as Samsung and LG are both heavily promoting their new flagship handsets, the S8 and G6.

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Google servers inside Cuba are now live on the internet, marking a major milestone in the country's communications evolution and promising faster access to Google's services for Cuban users.

The computers are part of Google's global network of caching servers, which store frequently requested content locally so it doesn't have to be accessed over long distances.

That speeds up access in any country but is particularly important in a nation like Cuba, which has relatively low connectivity to the rest of the world.

Cuba is connected to the rest of the internet almost exclusively via the ALBA-1 submarine cable, which runs from the island to Venezuela, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn Research. Dyn was first to spot the emergence of the Google caching servers on the internet.

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Data analytics company Palantir will pay US$1.7 million in back pay and stock options to settle charges that it routinely discriminated against Asian job applicants. In addition, it must also hire eight people from among those it allegedly discriminated against.

The charges go back to September last year, when the Department of Labor accused Palantir of rejecting Asian software engineers for jobs even though they were as qualified as white applicants. Palantir also maintained a discriminatory employee referral system, the Labor Dept. alleged.

Tuesday's deal ends a threat to Palantir's government contracting business. Under federal law, companies that work for the government are obliged to ensure their hiring practices and policies are free of all forms of discrimination.

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On the shelves of a laboratory near San Francisco sit tanks and tanks of mysterious-looking liquids. Labels identify some as simulations of human heads, while others relate to muscles.

It sounds like the ghoulish headquarters of a mad scientist, but it isn't. It's the Silicon Valley offices of UL, a product testing organization previously known as Underwriters Laboratory, and these liquids play an important part in smartphone safety.

You might not know UL, but you can probably find its logo on a number of products around your home.

Martyn Williams

On the shelves of a laboratory near San Francisco sit tanks and tanks of mysterious-looking liquids. Labels identify some as simulations of human heads, while others relate to muscles.

It sounds like the ghoulish headquarters of a mad scientist, but it isn't. It's the Silicon Valley offices of UL, a product testing organization previously known as Underwriters Laboratory, and these liquids play an important part in smartphone safety.

You might not know UL, but you can probably find its logo on a number of products around your home.

Martyn Williams

On Jan. 6, weeks before he was due to become president, Donald Trump sat down with U.S. intelligence officials for a two-hour briefing at Trump Tower on cyberattacks conducted during the U.S. election. The meeting resulted in a pledge: a plan to counter cyberattacks against the U.S. within 90 days of taking office.

On Wednesday, President Trump marks his 90th day in office with no sign of a report or indication that one is on the way. That’s a surprise, given the recent string of successful, high-profile cyberattacks against the federal government.

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Samsung Electronics has appointed the former CIO of the U.S. Department of Defense to help a global push to expand its mobile enterprise business.

Terry Halvorsen served as chief information officer at the Pentagon from 2015 until this year. Before that, he served as deputy commander of the Navy Cyber Forces and deputy commander of the Naval Network Warfare Command.

At Samsung, he will be an executive vice president and global enterprise advisor to J.K. Shin, president of Samsung's Mobile Communications division.

Samsung said it wants Halvorsen to help expand its business in the corporate, government, and regulated industries space, where there are higher demands on security.

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Twitter has withdrawn a lawsuit against the U.S. government after the Customs and Border Protection backed down on a demand that the social media outlet reveal details about a user account critical of the agency.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday, contended that the customs agency was abusing its investigative power. The customs agency has the ability to get private user data from Twitter when investigating cases in areas such as illegal imports, but this case was far from that.

The target of the request was the @alt_uscis account, one of a number of "alt" accounts that have sprung up on Twitter since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. The accounts are critical of the new administration and most claim to be run by current or former staff members of government agencies.

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U.S. President Donald Trump is extending by one year special powers introduced by former President Barack Obama that allow the government to issue sanctions against people and organizations engaged in significant cyberattacks and cybercrime against the U.S.

Executive Order 13694 was introduced on April 1, 2015, and was due to expire on Saturday, but the president sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday evening informing it of his plans to keep it active.

"Significant malicious cyber-enabled activities originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States, continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States," Trump wrote in the letter. "Therefore, I have determined that it is necessary to continue the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13694 with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities."

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Researchers at Cornell University have developed a new type of radio-on-a-chip that could mean cheaper, more flexible wireless systems. Smartphone makers could, for example, use the technology to make a single model of each phone that works anywhere in the world.

Single-chip radios have become a popular choice for communications hardware in the last decade because most characteristics of the radio are determined through software, not discrete hardware components. For this reason, they are often referred to as software-defined radios.

But software can only do so much. In many transceiver devices -- ones that transmit and receive -- an array of filters is needed to protect the sensitive receiver circuity from signals being transmitted. Those signals can be up to a billion times more powerful that the ones being received, so without the filters, the radio would be overwhelmed and useless.

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