According to a company blog post, Microsoft states its facial recognition tools are getting better at identifying people with darker skin tones than before. The error rates have been reduced by as much as 20 times for men and women with darker skin and by nine times for all women.

In the blog post, the company’s states it’s been training its AI tools with larger and more diverse datasets, which has led to the progress. “If we are training machine learning systems to mimic decisions made in a biased society, using data generated by that society, then those systems will necessarily reproduce its biases,” said a quote by Hanna Wallach, a Microsoft senior researcher.

WiFi security to get an update after 14 years

The Wi-Fi Alliance, a non-profit group that certifies WiFi products to ensure an interoperability standard, has officially launched the next generation of its security protocol, WPA3. The alliance has just begun to certify WPA3-enabled WiFi products.

The biggest change from WPA2 to WPA3 fixes a huge security flaw that plagued the old system from the start. If someone wanted to access your WiFi device, under WPA2, they had unlimited, unhindered chances to guess your WiFi password. This is an issue even the most basic websites fought head-on years ago, via tech like reCAPTCHA.

Now hackers will have to work much harder to break into your WiFi network. Ostensibly, WPA3 solves this security issue by allowing a single password attempt. If the first try at the password is incorrect, you’ll need to physically interact with the WiFi device.

Barbie turns engineer

Astronaut. Developer. Scientist. Paleontologist. And now: engineer. Today's Barbie is way more into science than surfboards.

Robotics Engineer Barbie is the latest career for Mattel's 59-year-old fashion doll. She's decked out with safety glasses, a laptop with a cluttered screen of coding windows -- and of course, she's got a little robot accessory.

Mattel's giving Barbie more of a science twist right as the toy industry is seeing an increased demand in STEM toys, which encourage kids to explore concepts of science, technology, engineering and math. There's also a rise in STEM subscription boxes, for which parents pay a flat rate to get a new educational toy every month.