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San Francisco is still pleasingly sunny, and we're still on the scene for Microsoft's Build developer conference. Day 2 brings another keynote and we'll be liveblogging it from Moscone Center.

Starting at 8:30am PDT, we're expecting to see a fair bit of coding on stage, lots of Visual Studio, and the latest new features to be added to Microsoft's Azure platform. The ability for Windows to run Linux apps is sure to be shown off, something that will no doubt make many developers very happy.

This is the first Build since Microsoft bought Xamarin, and we'd expect at least some time spent talking about just what that's going to mean both for Xamarin developers and existing Windows ones.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is offering new tools to help developers build interactive bots that understand natural language, the company announced at its Build conference today.

There are two key components, which are available in preview and are both part of the larger Cortana Intelligence Suite. "The first, Microsoft Cognitive Services, is a collection of intelligence APIs that allows systems to see, hear, speak, understand and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication," Microsoft said. "The second, the Microsoft Bot Framework, can be used by developers—programming in any language—to build intelligent bots that enable customers to chat using natural language on a wide variety of platforms including text/SMS, Office 365, Skype, Slack, the Web and more."

Though Microsoft's own "Tay" bot became a public relations nightmare, the company demonstrated how artificial intelligence applications built with Microsoft technology can be useful in the real world. Most impressive right now is "Seeing AI," an application to help blind people navigate the world, built by a blind Microsoft software engineer named Saqib Shaikh.

(credit: Ben Salter)

More than ever, websites are blocking users of the anonymizing Tor network or degrading the services they receive. Data published today by Web security company CloudFlare suggests why that is.

In a company blog post entitled "The Trouble with Tor," CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says that 94 percent of the requests the company sees coming across the Tor network are "per se malicious." He explains:

That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network.

A graph in the blog post shows that nearly 70 percent of Tor exit nodes were listed as "comment spammer" nodes at some point over the last year.

Enlarge / Satellite imagery of the seaward edge of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Thwaites Glacier accounts for a big chunk of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and it's vulnerable to major retreat. (credit: Knut Christianson)

It’s obvious that a warming climate will mean less glacial ice and higher sea level, but putting a precise number on these things is another matter. The landscapes concealed beneath the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are complex in hugely important ways. The interplay of ocean currents, which deliver warmer water to eat away at the underside of floating ice shelves, also varies regionally and even locally. And the ice itself is a dynamic thing, flowing in response to changes at the coastal edges.

So while we use measurements in the present and records from the past to forecast the future, we're stuck with scientific uncertainty, which means we need the language of risk analysis to discuss things sensibly. What is the possible range of sea level rise? And what are the probabilities for different parts of this range?

While some work in this regard has already been done, we're continually sharpening those assessments. As data and knowledge accumulate, our models of the ice sheets become more reliable guides to the future.

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Just in case you were craving an army of beetle minions to do your bidding, a group of engineers in Singapore has invented a new kind of "biobot." Fitted out with a microcontroller and electrodes implanted in the muscles of its legs, it's a cyborg beetle that can be made to run faster or slower at the whim of its human master.

Similar kinds of biobots have been built before—the last few years have seen the invention of everything from ratbots to mind-controlled cockroaches—but this is the first variable-speed model. That's because the engineers are directly controlling the insect's leg muscles rather than driving it by manipulating signals in its brain or antennae.

The engineers, who report on their creation in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, admit that there are a few drawbacks to making robots out of living animals. "There are demerits and disadvantages in insect platform due to living organism including limited lifespan, relatively narrow operation temperature range," they write. That said, the team is convinced the good outweighs the bad.

8ninths virtual workstation. Video shot by Esy Casey and edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

The first HoloLens Development Edition kits are shipping today to developers selected to be in the first wave of availability. Over the weekend, the $3,000 kits should get into the hands of developers not bound by NDAs and other restrictions, making this the first time we'll start to see and understand just what the device can be used for.

However, these aren't the first developers outside of Redmond to use the HoloLens. The company has been working with a select group of teams to develop apps for the augmented reality headset and to better learn how to use the hardware.