Facebook's Notify news app sends headlines to your lock screen

If you're an iPhone user who feels like they don't quite have enough notifications being pushed to your lock screen, fear not -- Facebook has you covered. The company just released a new app called Notify that is focused on bringing you notifications for a curated set of news and events that you mercifully can pick and choose yourself. Content is grouped by expected categories like business, culture, entertainment,food and drink and so on. Once you dig into a category, you're presented with a list of stations that tell you exactly what kind of alerts it'll deliver.
For example, under entertainment you can get "hot new trailers" from Fandango or "today's best TV moments" from Hulu. The Local category has things like breaking news for your zip code or a morning weather alert from The Weather channel. There's a pretty wide variety of content to choose from here -- all told, Notify is launching with 72 content partners like ABC, Vice, Bloomberg Business, CNN, The New York TImes and many more.

Apple's iPad Pro to go on sale Wednesday

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) said its iPad Pro will be available to order online on Wednesday and arrive at stores later this week.
The 12.9 inch-screen tablet, which starts at $799 but costs more than $1,000 if buyers also want a keyboard and an optional stylus, will be available in more than 40 countries, including the United States, the UK, China and Japan.
Sales of iPads have been falling for several quarters as big-screen iPhones appeal to more consumers.
Apple sold 54.86 million iPads in the year ended Sept. 26 - a drop of 19 percent from a year earlier.
Since launching iPad with a 9.7-inch screen in 2010, Apple has released a mini version in 2012 with a 7.9-inch screen.

Scientists built an AI robot that’s figuring life out just like humans do

There are so many precious moments in a newborn’s life that parents love to capture on film: The first time their child sits up on her own, the first time she stands, her first cautious steps. Igor Mordatch, a robotics post-doctorate student at the University of California, Berkeley, has been doing similarly for a humanoid robot, called Darwin, which he programed to learn just like a human child might.
Mordatch and his team at Berkeley’s Robotics lab started out by working for two years on a computer system that simulates how a robot might act in certain situations. The system is a group of neural networks—computer algorithms modeled after the structure of a human brain. In the last few months, his team has been transferring that system over into Darwin itself. There, the simulations act like a game-plan that Darwin can use to figure out how to perform tasks on its own—much as a child sees other people walking and figures out, gradually and with lots of mistakes, that she can do it too.
“The neural networks act as a map, a way to make decisions,” Mordatch told Quartz. Darwin has multiple sensors that feed data to the neural networks—the position of its limbs, the amount of pressure on its feet, the load on its joints, for instance—and the system outputs what actions the robot should be taking. “The robot only knows where it is, where it wants to be, and the the neural networks output the actions it should take to keep achieving the action it wants to do,” Mordatch added.
© Provided by Quartz Woah there. Right now, Mordatch is working on taking the data from Darwin’s walking tests and feeding that back into the simulations to make them more accurate. The goal is to create a machine-learning system that could theoretically allow Darwin to wander around on itsown. Mordatch said that the team is working towards being able to potentially have Darwin walking around the Berkeley campus on its own in January (presumably with a handler explaining the situation to passers-by), and tackling more complex tasks, like recognizing and picking up objects, in June.

How to protect your email when you're in China

Going on an international business trip is a hassle, almost inherently. But traveling abroad and staying connected in a country with high-stakes cybercrime is downright stressful and possibly dangerous.
© Provided by CNBC As China has shown repeatedly and Iran demonstrated prominently by hacking Obama administration emails just last week, the world's autocratic governments utilize cybertheft to get the information they want. Vigilance in protecting sensitive email communication is especially critical when working for a company that does business in unsafe regions of the world.
"If you are an executive, what you are doing and where you are going will be captured through email," said Will Ackerly, co-founder and CTO of Virtru, an email encryption and digital privacy company. "In one case, we received a call from an oil company whose executives were kidnapped in Mexico because their email communications and calendar invitations were not protected."

The Dream Life of Driverless Cars

On a brisk afternoon in October, an oddly-­equipped Honda CR-V inched through London traffic. At the wheel was Matthew Shaw, a 32-year-old architectural designer; with him was a fellow designer, William Trossell, 30, and a small team of laser-­scanner operators. All were skilled in their technical fields, but their goal was art. What they hoped to scan was not just the shape of the city streets but the inner life of the autonomous cars that may soon come to dominate them.