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(credit: IBM/Hilton)

Just arrived to your hotel, desperate for some munch at a decent restaurant nearby, and not really into speaking with human beings? Connie the robo-concierge is here to help. American hotel multinational Hilton has teamed up with tech giant IBM to trial a robotic concierge powered by IBM’s AI software Watson.

The bot has been christened “Connie” after the chain’s founder, Conrad Hilton, and it is currently assisting residents at Hilton McLean hotel, in Virginia. From its station next to the reception desks, Connie helps guests navigate around the hotel and find restaurants or tourist attractions in the area—but it is not able to check them in just yet.

Connie’s physical support is Nao, a French-made 58cm-tall android that has become the go-to platform for educational and customer care tasks, thanks to its relative affordability (about £6,000 or $9,000). But the concierge’s brain is based on IBM’s flagship AI program Watson—the Jeopardy!-winning system engineered to understand people’s questions and answer them in the best way possible.

Simulation games have always felt lonely to me, almost empty. For all of their enticements, their promises of endless adventure, they invariably fall short. Somewhere, somehow, something breaks the immersion, laying bare the machinery behind the curtains. It's never the virtual life advertised, just a simulacrum of a dream.

So, when the first mentions of farm-life simulator Stardew Valley bloomed on Twitter, I raised an eyebrow. It's been described as Harvest Moon crossed with Animal Crossing and Zelda, a love letter to the pastoral classics. But I'd been there, done that, and while I adored my time with Starbound—my last farming-type flirtation—it left me feeling as though I was a child with a diorama of talking action figures, rather than an extraterrestrial colony leader.

Nonetheless, circumstances led to the acquisition of the game, and I went ahead with it, sceptical at first, only to become completely infatuated by the end of the first growing season. Where other titles barrage you with features, with new twists, and new iterations on the latest big new idea, Stardew Valley asks you, both as your pixelated avatar and as the player, to breathe.

(credit: Richard Ying et Tangui Morlier)

French parliamentarians have adopted an amendment to a penal reform bill that would punish companies like Apple that refuse to provide decrypted versions of messages their products have encrypted. The Guardian reports: "The controversial amendment, drafted by the rightwing opposition, stipulates that a private company which refuses to hand over encrypted data to an investigating authority would face up to five years in jail and a €350,000 (£270,000) fine."

This is only the bill's first reading, and the final fate of the amendment is uncertain. Earlier this year, the French government rejected crypto backdoors as "the wrong solution." "Given the government’s reluctance to take on the big phone companies in this way, it remains to be seen whether the thrust of the amendment can survive the lengthy parliamentary process that remains before the bill becomes law," The Guardian writes.

Amendment 90 (original in French) is just one of several proposals that sought to impose stiff penalties on companies that refused to cooperate with the authorities. As the French site Numerama notes, even harsher proposals were rejected. For example, Amendments 532 and 533 suggested imposing a fine of €1,000,000 (£770,000) on companies that refused to decrypt messages.

Here’s a conversation starter that wouldn’t have gotten you very far 10 years ago: “Let’s talk about earthquakes in Oklahoma.” But the Sooner State has experienced an amazing boom in (mostly very minor) seismic activity over the last decade as a result of industrial wastewater disposal in deep injection wells.

Wastewater in many of the wells is altering fluid pressures in the old igneous and metamorphic basement beneath the state’s sedimentary bedrock. Those pressure changes have facilitated movement on small, ancient faults that would otherwise have stayed locked together.

Oklahoma has started trying to rein this in, acting before there are more potentially damaging earthquakes like the magnitude 5.6 quake in 2011 and a magnitude 5.1 event earlier this year. The effort includes a pair of new rules, enacted in the last few months, to cut back on the amount of wastewater being injected into these disposal wells. As The New York Times reported, a new rule announced Monday basically caps injections in a portion of the state including Oklahoma City to 60 percent of the volume from 2014, when over 1 million barrels of wastewater were being handled per day in this area. Last month, a similar cap was placed on injections in the northwestern part of the state.

(credit: Surrey County Council)

Last fall, a Maryland man’s frequent activities at a local casino resulted in robbers using a GPS tracker to follow him home. Days later, they bound and gagged his two children, then stole $6,000 in cash plus an iPhone 6.

If that wasn't crazy enough, Mario Guzman (a pseudonym) was also followed by someone else less than a week earlier. His wife, Alicia Guzman (another pseudonym), had hired a private investigator to keep tabs on her husband, according to a Montgomery County Police report. (Ars has changed the names of this feuding couple to protect their privacy interests.)

Mario Guzman regularly drove 50 miles, six days a week, from his home in Germantown to a casino in Baltimore, according to a recently-released police report that Ars obtained Tuesday from the Montgomery County Police Department. The report notes that Alicia Guzman suspected her husband of adultery and "gambling with large sums of money."