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Josh Constine writes at TechCrunch that you send Gigster your app idea and it sends you back a fully-functional app. "No coding. No hiring. No wrangling freelancers. Just a fundamental shift in how software gets built." Gigster’s artificial intelligence engine converts a client’s product proposal into a development plan, and helps Gigster’s army of remote developers plug in pre-made code blocks to efficiently build the app. Gigster has already helped build a dating app for muslim millenials, a way for citizens of the developing world to buy electricity, and has over fifty more projects in the pipeline. Gigster finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only accepts 5% of applicants. A sales engineer discusses proposals with clients, and using the AI engine, comes back with a price quote and production schedule in about 10 minutes. Then Gigster manages the entire development process through delivery of the fully-functional app. Gigster charges a flat fee, so there is no incentive for developers to work more hours and run up charges. Both developers and customers interact with a project manager, who insulates them from the potential hassles of dealing with each other. Gigsters who satisfy customers can earn karma points and qualify for higher-paying contracts, and the company uses artificial intelligence to learn from and assign every new project.

One caveat: Gigster will still own the code to the app it designs for you and "lease" it to you. The reason is that they want to be able to reuse certain components that they develop for reuse on other projects. "Software development that requires continuous recruiting and months of development time writing code from scratch is slow and costly, and not necessarily a consistent internal need of all startups or large enterprises," says CEO Roger Dickey. "Hiring talented engineers is hard – so don't. Instead, let Gigster be your engineering department."

CBS reports that hot on the heels of its campaign against ISIS, the shadowy hackers' collective known as Anonymous is going after a new target: Donald Trump. The latest Anonymous operation -- #OpTrump -- was announced in a YouTube video featuring a masked activist claiming to speak for the group. In a computer-generated voice, he takes aim at Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States, claiming "This is what ISIS wants." He goes on to say that "the more the United States appears to be targeting Muslims, not just radical Muslims," the more ISIS will be able to recruit sympathizers. The video concludes with Anonymous' now-familiar threat: "You have been warned, Mr. Donald Trump. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. Expect us."

After a video message was posted, the website of Trump Tower in New York City went down for at least an hour. However the campaign didn't appear to have much success. Despite the group’s apparent distributed-denial-of-service attack, which aimed to take down a web server by flooding it with fake traffic, the Trump Tower website was up and running by 11 a.m. and the alleged damage might not have been apparent, to visitors to the page, because a cached version of Trump's site was programmed to hold the fort in the event of an attack or maintenance issues. Gabriella Coleman, who studies hackers and online activism as the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University, in Montreal, told CBS News it's no surprise that Anonymous would find Trump a juicy target. "He's the biggest bully and the only other bully that's bigger is possibly trolls and Anonymous," says Coleman. "Anonymous isn't necessarily going to take down his campaign, per se, but they could embarrass him."

David Sharp reports at the Boston Globe that the the futuristic 600-foot, 15,000-ton USS Zumwalt, the largest destroyer ever built for the US Navy is heading out to sea for the first time for sea trials. The ship has electric propulsion, new radar and sonar, powerful missiles and guns, and a stealthy design to reduce its radar signature. Advanced automation will allow the warship to operate with a much smaller crew size than current destroyers. ‘‘We are absolutely fired up to see Zumwalt get underway. For the crew and all those involved in designing, building, and readying this fantastic ship, this is a huge milestone,’’ says the ship’s skipper, Navy Capt. James Kirk. With an inverse bow jutting forward to slice through the waves. and sharp angles to deflect enemy radar signals, the Zumwalt-class destroyer looks like nothing ever built before. The Zumwalt — which will receive its “USS” designation when it is christened — also is to be a test-bed for one of the Navy’s most futuristic weapons, an electromagnetic rail gun under development by the Office of Naval Research. It uses electromagnetic pulses to launch projectiles at Mach 7, or seven times the speed of sound, at targets up to 110 miles away.

However critics say the ‘‘tumblehome’’ hull’s sloping shape makes it less stable than conventional hulls, although it contributes to the ship’s stealth and the Navy is confident in the design. Doubts about the radical hull form emerged as soon as the shape was revealed in the competitive stage for what was first called DD-21, then DD(X). Ken Brower, a civilian naval architect with decades of naval experience says the ship will capsize in a following sea at the wrong speed if a wave at an appropriate wavelength hits it at an appropriate angle. “The trouble is that as a ship pitches and heaves at sea, if you have tumblehome instead of flare, you have no righting energy to make the ship come back up. On the DDG 1000, with the waves coming at you from behind, when a ship pitches down, it can lose transverse stability as the stern comes out of the water — and basically roll over.”

Mike McPhate reports in the NY Times that two home shopping industry veterans, Valerie Castle and Doug Bornstein, are set to premier GunTV, a new 24-Hour shopping channel for guns, that aims to take the QVC approach of peppy hosts pitching “a vast array of firearms,” as well as related items like bullets, holsters and two-way radios. The new cable channel hopes to help satisfy Americans’ insatiable appetite for firearms. The channel’s forthcoming debut might seem remarkably ill-timed, given recent shootings at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and at a social services center in San Bernardino, California but gun sales have been rising for years, with nearly 21 million background checks performed in 2014, and they appear on track to a new record this year. The boom has lately been helped by a drumbeat of mass shootings, whose attendant anxiety has only driven more people into the gun store. The proposed schedule of programming allots an eight-minute segment each hour to safety public service announcements in between proposed segments on topics like women’s concealed weapon’s apparel, big-game hunting and camping. Buying a Glock on GunTV won’t be quite be like ordering a pizza. When a firearm is purchased, a distributor will send it to a retailer near the buyer, where it has to be picked up in person and a federal background check performed. “We saw an opportunity in filling a need, not creating one,” says Castle. “The vast majority of people who own and use guns in this country, whether it’s home protection, recreation or hunting, are responsible …. I don’t really know that it’s going to put more guns on the streets.”

Critics suggest that Gun TV could make the decision to purchase a weapon seem trivial—on the same level as ordering a Snuggie or a vertical egg cooker. “Buying a gun is a serious decision,” says Laura Cutilletta, senior staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “If you are going to buy a gun for your home, it’s not a decision you should be making at three in the morning because you are watching TV.”

Dave Phillipps has an interesting article in the NY Times about B-52's and why the Air Force’s largest bomber, now in its 60th year of active service and scheduled to fly until 2040, are not retiring anytime soon. “Many of our B-52 bombers are now older than the pilots who fly them," said Ronald Reagan in 1980. Today, there is a B-52 pilot whose father and grandfather flew the plane. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, the B.U.F.F. — a colorful acronym that the Air Force euphemistically paraphrases as Big Ugly Fat Fellow - continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement’s replacement. And its replacement’s replacement’s replacement. The unexpectedly long career is due in part to a rugged design that has allowed the B-52 to go nearly anywhere and drop nearly anything the Pentagon desires, including both atomic bombs and leaflets. But it is also due to the decidedly underwhelming jets put forth to take its place. The $283 million B-1B Lancer first rolled off the assembly line in 1988 with a state-of-the-art radar-jamming system that jammed its own radar. The $2 billion B-2 Spirit, introduced a decade later, had stealth technology so delicate that it could not go into the rain. “There have been a series of attempts to build a better intercontinental bomber, and they have consistently failed,” says Owen Coté. “Turns out whenever we try to improve on the B-52, we run into problems, so we still have the B-52.”

The usefulness of the large bomber — and bombers in general — has come under question in the modern era of insurgent wars and stateless armies. In the Persian Gulf war, Kosovo, Afghanistan and the Iraq war, the lumbering jets, well-established as a symbol of death and destruction, demoralized enemy ground troops by first dropping tons of leaflets with messages like “flee and live, or stay and die,” then returning the next day with tons of explosives. In recent years, it has flown what the Air Force calls “assurance and deterrence” missions near North Korea and Russia. Two B-52 strategic bombers recently flew defaintly near artificial Chinese-built islands in the South China Sea and were contacted by Chinese ground controllers but continued their mission undeterred. “The B.U.F.F. is like the rook in a chess game,” says Maj. Mark Burleys. “Just by how you position it on the board, it changes the posture of your adversary.”

The NYT reports that Hillary Clinton spoke at the Brookings Institution’s annual Saban Forum on Sunday and said that the Islamic State had become “the most effective recruiter in the world” and that the only solution is to engage American technology companies in blocking or taking down militants’ websites, videos and encrypted communications. “We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS. We need Silicon Valley not to view government as its adversary. We need to challenge our best minds in the private sector and work with our best minds in the public sector to develop solutions that would both keep us safe and protect our privacy," said Clinton. "We should take the concerns of law enforcement and counterterrorism professionals seriously. They have warned that impenetrable encryption may prevent them from accessing terrorist communications and preventing a future attack. On the other hand we know there are legitimate concerns about government intrusion, network security, and creating new vulnerabilities that bad actors can and would exploit."

Tom Simonite writes at MIT Technology Review that the Wikimedia Foundation is rolling out new software trained to know the difference between an honest mistake and intentional vandalism in an effort to make editing Wikipedia less psychologically bruising. One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000. Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians’ complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers’ mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy. The new ORES system, for “Objective Revision Evaluation Service,” can be trained to score the quality of new changes to Wikipedia and judge whether an edit was made in good faith or not. ORES can allow editing tools to direct people to review the most damaging changes. The software can also help editors treat rookie or innocent mistakes more appropriately, says Aaron Halfaker who helped diagnose that problem and is now leading a project trying to fight it. “I suspect the aggressive behavior of Wikipedians doing quality control is because they’re making judgments really fast and they’re not encouraged to have a human interaction with the person," says Halfaker. “This enables a tool to say, ‘If you’re going to revert this, maybe you should be careful and send the person who made the edit a message.’”