Author: Sebastian Anthony

Late on Tuesday night, Google's DeepMind AI group will face down against one of the world's best human Go players, Lee Se-dol of South Korea. The game will be streamed live on YouTube (of course), which is embedded at the end of this story.

There will be five matches in total between AlphaGo (DeepMind's Go-playing software) and Lee, all played at the Four Seasons hotel in Seoul over the next few days. The first match begins at 1pm local time on March 9, which equates to 4am GMT, or 11:00pm (March 8) EST if you happen to live on the east coast of the US. Each match should last more than four hours, so you might be able to catch the end of the match in the UK if you wake up early.

The winner of the series will win a $1 million (£700,000) prize—but if DeepMind wins, it will donate the proceeds to charity. Lee, by virtue of being a champion prizefighter who has spent most of his life honing his Go skills, will also get about £100,000 just for turning up and £15,000 for each match that he wins.

Kanye West, after reportedly considering legal action against The Pirate Bay for facilitating mass piracy of his new album The Life of Pablo, has seemingly been caught trying to pirate some music software from The Pirate Bay.

Early Wednesday morning, Kanye tweeted a photo that showed him listening to Sufjan Stevens on YouTube. If you look closely at Kanye's browser tabs, however, you can see that prior to watching the video he was researching—and possibly attempting to download—some advanced wavetable synthesiser software called Serum.

Deadmau5, music producer and co-founder of Xfer Records, which makes Serum, was not amused by Kanye's actions. "What the fuck @kanyewest ... Can't afford serum? Dick," he tweeted. A few minutes later he followed up with this zinger: "Let's start a Kickstarter to help @kanyewest afford a copy of Serum."

BARCELONA—After trying out VR porn for the first time, the obvious next port of call was the other barb of the early-adopter pincer attack: VR games. At MWC in Barcelona there were myriad virtual reality gaming demos, from on-rails shooting games, to full VR-and-HOTAS Elite: Dangerous setups, to whacky HTC Vive stuff. But there was one game that really intrigued me, way out in the hinterlands of Hall 7: Lost Cities VR, the world's first VR board game.

Lost Cities, developed by Campfire Union, is a game for Gear VR that's based on a board game of the same name. The board game itself is fun, simple, and very popular. Both versions of the game are played in exactly the same way, except the board game allows for up to four players and the VR game only supports two (for now).

I won't go into the exact rules of the game, but it's pretty straight forward. Each player starts with a hand of cards (see image above). You take it in turns to pick one card from your hand, strategically place the card in one of five areas in front of you, and then pick up another card from a shared stack of cards. When all the cards have been drawn, the game ends, the scores are tabulated, and one of you wins. It's one of those games that's incredibly simple to pick up, but a huge strategic game-space opens up once you play it a bit.

DVDFab, a software tool for ripping and decrypting DVDs and Blu-ray discs, will not be upgraded to support newer Ultra HD (4K) Blu-ray discs.

Fengtao Software, which makes DVDFab, said in a statement that it "will not decrypt or circumvent AACS 2.0 in the days to come. This is in accordance with AACS-LA, (which has not made public the specifications for AACS 2.0), the BDA [Blu-ray Disc Association] and the movie studios." AACS-LA is the body that develops and licenses the Blu-ray DRM system.

Curiously, Fengtao's announcement comes just a day after SlySoft—the company that makes the ripping tool AnyDVD—ceased operations and vanished from the Web. All that's left is a cryptic message on SlySoft's website: "Due to recent regulatory requirements we have had to cease all activities relating to SlySoft Inc."

Kanye West is reportedly meeting with his legal team to discuss the possibility of suing file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay. West's new album The Life of Pablo has been "setting illegal download records" as would-be listeners flock to grab it from illicit file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay.

Back on February 14, The Life of Pablo was released exclusively on Tidal, a subscription-based music streaming service. The exclusive release had two effects: first, the Tidal app rocketed to the number-one spot on the iPhone App Store, and second, hundreds of thousands of people flocked to file-sharing websites to grab a free copy of the album.

West's new album also appeared briefly as a direct download from his website for $20, but the download link vanished soon after launch, possibly to drive more people toward a Tidal subscription. There are reports that some people paid their $20 for the direct download but were unable to download the album before it was pulled.

Apple chief Tim Cook has attacked the recent court order that compels Apple to unlock and decrypt the San Bernardino gunman's iPhone. "Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the US government," says an open letter published by Cook early this morning.

Late yesterday, a federal judge in California ordered Apple to help the US government (the FBI) unlock and decrypt the iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook, who shot up an office party in San Bernardino in December 2015.

In the past, Apple has helped extract data from iPhones when issued with an appropriate warrant. Since iOS 8, however, full encryption has been enabled by default—a move that was seemingly introduced specifically to prevent such data-grabs by governments. "Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data," the company wrote on its website at the time. "So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."

Spoiler warning: If you haven't seen the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, you probably shouldn't read this story.

It's now officially teaser-trailer season for the sixth season of Game of Thrones, which premieres on both HBO and Sky Atlantic on April 24. Playing off the first teaser poster, which hinted that Jon Snow might be alive, this new trailer suggests quite the opposite. In fact, this new trailer seems to suggest that a lot of people are going to die as winter descends upon Westeros.

The first trailer for GoT season six, embedded above, shows a rather spooky scene from the Hall of Faces, which was first introduced last season. The Hall of Faces houses the cleansed, flayed faces of dead people. The Faceless Men (Valar Morghulis!) use these masks, plus a bit of magic, to camouflage themselves as that person.

At long last, the BBC has revealed the full cast for Top Gear, which is scheduled to return in May this year.

If you were expecting just one other presenter alongside Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, you're in for a surprise. Not only have Sabine Schmitz (the first female Top Gear presenter in 15 years!) and Chris Harris been confirmed, but there are also two more presenters joining the team: Formula 1 commentator Eddie Jordan, and Rory Reid. If we include the Stig that brings the total cast count to seven—almost as many as the original Top Gear series...

Sabine Schmitz is probably the most exciting addition to the team. The Queen of the Nurburgring made quite an impression when she previously appeared on Top Gear, driving a diesel Ford Transit van around the German track at a terrifying clip.

The US government has cleared the way for Google to create a self-driving car that doesn't also have a human driver inside the vehicle that can take over if necessary. In this setup, the autonomous driving software itself would be the vehicle's legal "driver"; none of the human passengers would require a driving licence.

In November last year, Google submitted a proposed design to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for a self-driving car that has "no need for a human driver." On February 4, as reported by Reuters, the NHTSA responded:

"NHTSA will interpret 'driver' in the context of Google's described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants. We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a 'driver' in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years."

As tensions mount over civilian usage of drones in the UK, London's Metropolitan Police is considering using eagles to snatch illicit quadcopters out of the sky.

Last week, a Dutch security company—Guard From Above—released a video (embedded below) of an eagle easily grabbing a flying drone with its talons. The country's national police, who partnered with Guard From Above to train the eagles, is looking at the feasibility of using the birds in real-life aircraft-intercept scenarios. Seemingly, the Met Police saw the video and decided that it wanted in on the action as well.

Looking at the video it's hard to believe that the eagle's talons aren't damaged by the quad's propellers—but that isn't the case, according to the security company's CEO. "These birds are used to meeting resistance from animals they hunt in the wild, and they don't seem to have much trouble with the drones," Sjoerd Hoogendoorn told Reuters. Their talons are strong enough and tough enough to grab most consumer-grade drones, he added.