| How do you build a cyber army? The answer to that question and more in The Daily Crunch for January 20, 2017. And if you take a pretty selfie, be ready for not-so-pretty privacy trade-offs. 1. The U.S. Army needs hackers Cyber warfare requires a cyber army, and Kate looks at what that means for how the nation's defense force is seeking out talent. Hackathons run by the government inviting intrusion efforts? Sounds crazy, but it's table stakes for a modern armed forces. Programs like this might not survive under Trump's leadership, but it's worth taking a long look at what efforts have been made to hep try to ensure the new generation of wars is something the U.S. can actually effectively fight. 
2. Uber settles FC lawsuit for $20 million Uber has settled an FTC lawsuit with a $20 million payout to the FTC. The suit claimed that Uber had misled drivers regarding their projected earnings, skewing the numbers much higher than the average driver would end up actually making in practice. By setting, Uber doesn't have to technically admit any wrongdoing, but the FTC did warn against any kind of misleading marketing re: earnings in the future. 3. The U.S. now has 10 official self-driving proving grounds Proving grounds just sounds cool. "PROVING GROUNDS!" I imagine it's an area for superheroes engaged in a deadly contest created by an alien race. But really it's 10 places in the U.S., including schools, cities and purpose-built testing facilities that will collaborate on best practices and information sharing regarding autonomous vehicle testing. 4. AI sans supercomputer AI's big limiting factor is still resources – it needs a lot of computing power to function at even a basic level. XNOR.ai is a breakthrough in that regard, allowing AI-style models of vision and speech recognition programs to run on almost any hardware, including embedded chips with relatively little processing power that power things like smartphones and cameras. 5. Amazon's virtual Dash buttons are kind of a weird idea Hey Amazon's Dash was a cool concept – hardware buttons you press to order staples automatically from the online retailer. Now it's made virtual versions of the same... which basically seems backwards since you can just use Amazon's site to order this stuff if you want. I don't know, maybe it's a tad more convenient. Maybe. 6. Samsung's blaming irregular battery sizes and manufacturing problems for Galaxy Note 7 fiasco Sounds like Samsung is basically saying that improper tolerances in terms of quality control in battery manufacturing were to blame in the Note 7 explosion debacle. The batteries were improperly sized in some cases, meaning they didn't fit the phones, leading to overheating. Weird that it didn't fix the replacements, but Samsung says that also led to "manufacturing issues" which resulted in the same problems. Clear as mud, but the company is holding a press conference to discuss these findings this weekend so maybe it'll be better explained there. 7. That weird beautifying selfie app is not great on privacy Everybody loves Meitu, but Meitu loves your data more than anything. The app asks for a lot of permissions, but so do most apps in China, so it's probably actually nothing unusual. But if you're sensitive about your data, steer clear unless you really, really love the ability to make your face all weird. | 
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