"When Coders Become Stickup Artists" on page 35 of April 3 - April 9, 2017 Issue of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. What is the emerging issue in the article? According to the ITRC report of 2017, cy

You can’t run faster than real time. You can’t run millions of them in parallel.” Some influential executives have turned their noses up at game research.

“We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games,” Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella said at his company’s developers conference in September.

Instead, he said, Microsoft had staked much of its future on AI as a means to help solve “the most pressing prob - lems of our society and economy.” Chris Bishop, who heads Microsoft’s AI research lab in Cambridge, England, says making competitive games the benchmark for AI also reinforces fears that smart computers threaten people. That said, Microsoft has created Project Malmo, an AI research envi- ronment based on the video game Minecraft, which it happens to own. Bishop says Minecraft doesn’t feed the man-vs.-machine narrative because it has no set objectives and isn’t necessarily competitive. Knocks on the gaming model haven’t deterred other AI researchers.

Besides Grand Theft Auto V, they’re using dozens of games as tests, includ- ing StarCraft II, Montezuma’s Revenge, and Freeciv, a free game based on Sid Meier’s Civilization series. But, as OpenAI’s Schulman says, the real trick is developing AI that can solve not one game but any game you give it. Then the technology might be ready for the game of life, and not the Milton Bradley version. �Jeremy Kahn The bottom line AI researchers are using increasingly complex video games as proving grounds for their software.

Cybersecurity When Coders Become Stickup Artists ▶ Anonymous and other hacking groups target central banks ▶ “All you need is one employee to click on the wrong link” In 2008 thieves stole $700,000 from Russia’s central bank the old- fashioned way: They infiltrated a processing center, handcuffed a guard, and made off with the cash. These days, thefts from the Bank of Russia are less labor-intensive—and far more lucra- tive. Last year hackers looted as much as $21 million from accounts at the bank, part of a surge in cyberattacks on global monetary authorities. “For a central bank, the question is not if, but when, they will be victims of online assaults,” says Giulio Coraggio, a lawyer focusing on cybersecurity at DLA Piper LLP in Milan.

This year is likely to be even worse.

Cyberattacks on the financial system are among “the most significant risks our country faces,” Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said in testimony before the congressional Joint Economic Committee in November.

North Korean hackers have started targeting central banks, according to two people familiar with the matter. And the hacking collective Anonymous, known for harassing corporations and governments, is also going after those institutions, accord- ing to two people with direct knowl- edge of the group’s activities. While the people wouldn’t say which banks might be hit, they said Anonymous has been recruiting members to aid in its forays. The group last year attacked at least eight monetary authorities, including the Dutch central bank, the Bank of Greece, and the Bank of Mexico, said the two people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. In a change of strategy, the so-called hacktivists may sell confidential information they obtain rather than simply disrupt websites as a publicity stunt, according to one of the people. The most notable such theft was in Bangladesh, where hackers last year used Swift, the interbank mes- saging system, to steal $81 million StarCraft: Brood War Who Facebook and University of Oxford researchers Skills Navigating a complicated visual landscape; also dealing with imperfect information, memory, and long-term planning in real-time play rather than making players wait their turn Project Malmo (Minecraft) Who Microsoft Skills Moving in 3D space from an embodied, first- person point of view, plus planning and cooperating with human players and other AI agents Universe Who OpenAI Skills Visualizing the pixels on a screen and manipulating a virtual keyboard and mouse Lab Who DeepMind Skills Navigating a mazelike 3D world from a first-person perspective, remembering routes, accounting for multiple allies or rivals “We are very interested in what happens when you have several intelligent agents in the same environment. How do they interact? Can they learn to cooperate?” ——Katja Hofmann, the Microsoft researcher who helped create Project Malmo StarCraft II Who DeepMind and others Skills Planning and priority-setting akin to that in the earlier StarCraft game, plus active competitions involving some of the world’s best pro gamers Grand Theft Auto V Who Craig Quiter, a software engineer at Otto (the self-driving technology company Uber owns); Intel; Darmstadt University Skills Driving— yes, driving, not murdering people 35 Technology COURTESY BELL HELICOPTER (3) Hardware Samsung Would Love to Talk About This Phone ▶ The Galaxy S8 has a taller screen and isn’t on fire or under arrest ▶ “It’ll be a while before consumers feel confident” Samsung Electronics Co. has a big new smartphone coming, and this one hasn’t been banned by the Federal Aviation Administration. The Galaxy S8, unveiled on March 29, ahead of its April 21 release, marks the first serious test for Samsung’s phone division since the recall of its exploding Note7 cost the company more than $6 billion and its global lead in smartphone sales. While the S8 is packed with new features— curved screens, encrypted facial recognition, better voice commands— Samsung is also advertising an “eight- point battery safety check” meant to assure customers that unlike the Note7’s power supplies, the S8’s aren’t at risk of blowing up. “We’ve put our utmost effort to provide our cus- tomers with near- perfect devices to earn back their trust,” says Lee Young-hee, executive vice president for Samsung’s mobile business.

The company accounted for 17.8 percent of global smart- phone sales in the last three months of 2016, slightly less than Apple Inc. , according to researcher Gartner Inc. The S8 is the company’s first major product launch since Jay Y. Lee, Samsung Group’s heir and functional Encrypted facial- recognition software Taller, curved screen Home button built into the screen itself Phone can function as a desktop when attached to a docking station Assistant AI with wide- ranging voice controls head, was arrested on bribery and embezzlement charges related to a national influence-peddling scandal.

He’s denied wrongdoing, but the company has yet to sort out its chain of command while his case goes to court. “The biggest issue hobbling the company is still the trial of its de facto chief,” says Koo Chang-hwan, who researches corporate brands at the Korea Reputation Center in Seoul.

“That will overshadow the S8.” That’s saying a lot, given how ginor - mous this phone is. The Galaxy S8 comes in two sizes, a standard model with a 5.8-inch screen and an S8+ with a 6.2-inch screen. Both are larger and, in a company demo, showed richer colors than the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, their main competition until Apple’s 10th-anniversary iPhone comes out later this year. Samsung’s corporate logo is gone from the front of the S8, making room for a taller, 18.5:9 ratio screen that eliminates the thin black bars around widescreen videos and makes them larger. Likewise, the home button is integrated into the bottom of the screen. The phones come in five colors: silver, blue, gold, black, and gray. On the software side, users can clip specific apps to the top of the screen so they can, say, keep a relevant web page up while writing an email. The S8 also introduces a digital assistant, Bixby, that lets users operate many of the phone’s functions via from the central bank—an attack the U.S. government suspects may have been carried out by North Koreans, two people familiar with the matter say. The case “really brought the focus on payments systems within central banks,” says Adrian Nish, head of threat intelligence at BAE Systems Plc .

Poland’s financial regulator says hackers in January planted code on its site aiming to infect computers of visitors from the country’s com- mercial banks. The Polish Financial Supervision Authority says it’s since secured the site and has beefed up security, without giving any details.

However, the IT systems of several Polish banks were recently attacked, and prosecutors in Warsaw say they’re investigating. Similar code was placed on the sites of banks in Uruguay and Mexico last year, BAE and U.S. software company Symantec Corp. say. “Cyberattacks have become military attacks,” says Biagio De Marchis, a senior vice president at Italian defense company Leonardo SpA, which offers cybersecurity services. Recognizing the problem, financial institu- tions are hiring security consul- tants to increase their protection.

In June, Swift execs engaged BAE and British cybersecurity adviser NCC Group Plc to help the messaging system better analyze whether it needs to flag potential issues to member banks. BAE says it’s detected multiple warning signs regarding Swift’s secu- rity, ranging from crashes because of software update errors to intruders hacking into banks’ systems. And the Bank of England is working with Anomali Inc., a cyber security startup, to find ways to better investi- gate intrusions. Central banks must make online security a top priority as attacks get more sophisticated, says Tasnoova Zaki, a cybersecurity expert at finan- cial consultant Bovill Ltd. in London.

She says any financial institution is vulnerable as hackers use social networks and phishing strategies to worm their way into systems. “All you need is one employee to click on the wrong link,” Zaki says. “It’s a low- investment and high-return crime: A hacker makes a thousand attempts but only needs to be successful once.” �Chiara Albanese, Daniele Lepido, and Giles Turner The bottom line Diversifying beyond mere disruption, hacktivists and other techno-rogues appear to be adding cybertheft to their arsenal. The Essentials Samsung Galaxy S8 $81 million Amount hackers stole from the central bank of Bangladesh in 2016 36 Technology Copyright ofBloomberg Businessweek isthe property ofBloomberg, L.P.anditscontent may notbecopied oremailed tomultiple sitesorposted toalistserv without thecopyright holder's expresswrittenpermission. However,usersmayprint, download, oremail articles for individual use.