We don’t often write about screensaver or wallpaper apps but we’ve found one that’s capable of seriously pimping out your sexy tablet. Pimp Your Screenoffers a variety of different graphics that can be browsed by category or by the most popular images that have received the most ratings within the app. The categories sport numerous themes including one of my favourites, an “app shelves” theme. The app shelves category contains numerous gorgeous graphics that look similar to the iBooks user interface, an app that sports your digital books on virtual shelves....

In May last year, we brought you news onPing.it, a Web-based RSS reader thatlets you create tailored feeds by keywords and popularity. At its most basic level, Ping.it was an RSS reader, but it was the ‘Probes’ feature that was particularly interesting. For example, if you only want to receive feeds on “YouTube videos on Reddit with more than 1,000 Likes”, you could create a Probe that taps both YouTube and Reddit to present this information directly in your feed....

Deep neural networks will move past their shortcomings without help fromsymbolic artificial intelligence, three pioneers of deep learning argue in a paper published in the July issue of theCommunications of the ACMjournal. In their paper, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun, recipients of the 2018 Turing Award, explain the currentchallenges of deep learningand how it differs from learning in humans and animals. They also explore recent advances in the field that might provide blueprints for the future directions for research in deep learning....

The sentence against one of the founders of BitTorrent search service The Pirate Bay has been made final after he failed to attend a court hearing last month – even though he has gone missing. Gottfrid Svartholm was not included in the verdict of an appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay caselast November, as he was absent from the court hearings due to ill health. However, it appears that he has since disappeared, untraceable even by his own lawyer....

Rickard Falkvinge(@Falkvingeon Twitter) will be speaking atTNW2011about recurring themes in history. We might think that everything is changing and we are going through unprecedented times but we are wrong. The fight for freedom of information has been going on for ages and Rickard has several, some very amusing, examples to illustrate this. Bottom line: people in power will use their power to keep their power, even if it goes against the public interest....