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Just because we're decades away from seeing real robo-killing machines... RotM Robots will destroy humanity unless we write new laws to control them, a Parliamentary committee has been told.…

Spending increases in nation's budget for 2017 driven by corporate tax increase Even without the €13bn tax bill which Ireland was told collect from Apple, the nation's arrangements with Cupertino is driving tax revenue and spending increases in its budget for 2017.…

Yep, it’s time for another reader poll Sometimes the thought of walling yourself off from the outside world and just focusing on the technology can be quite tempting. But like it or not, life in IT is obviously affected by what’s going on in the business, and that, in turn, is driven by what’s going on in the big wide world around us.…

New plans to slurp pupils' nationality won't be passed to Home Office. Honest The government's National Pupil Database has already been used to combat "abuse of immigration control" - despite ministerial assurances that the collection of pupils’ nationality will not be passed to the border officials.…

Containers, security and better hypervisor – but not much for small biz peeps Review Microsoft has released Windows Server 2016, complete with container support and a brand new Nano Server edition.…

Orbital ATK only has 5-minute gap for launch this weekend Tropical storm Nicole has ruined NASA and Orbital ATK’s plans to send off a resupply package to the waiting astronauts on the International Space Station.…

A Roos by any other name SAP is making a number of senior management changes in its UK cloud business in the UK.…

Applies disk-drive style branding to SanDy-driven SSDs WD has produced Blue and Green branded SATA SSDs, based on SanDisk technology, with these brands having been used for WD disk drives previously.…

Containers, standards ... switchblades at dawn?

Device-agnostic diagnostics “Giving away budget never felt so good." Those were the words of an IT manager attending one of our roundtables recently. But why was he so happy about losing control of a chunk of his IT funding?…

Pick a partner, eat the Nougat, feel the love Analysis There was a distinct whiff of the retro about Google’s launch of its Pixel smartphone. Exclusives with selected large mobile operators; yet another attempt to create a unified Android experience; even the clear focus on Apple as the primary competition – all these should be issues of the past.…

Well done for not being a naughty girl Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second has been awarded the Long Service and Good Conduct medal for 65 years' military service without a criminal record.…

Select committee slams Blighty's techno-ignorance The UK government does not have a clear strategy on how to maximise AI and robotics for economic benefit, according to the Commons Select Committee for Science and Technology.…

Testing reveals the past, not what someone will do once you make them bitter and twisted A former top US Government investigator into classified document leaks by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden has criticised the effectiveness of background checks - saying such checks will not prevent further leaks.…

Move to the cloud and you may need 'vendor managers' and more governance In Australia fast-food history played out differently to the rest of the world and the nation no longer has Burger King. So when you want a Whopper down under you head to a chain called “Hungry Jack's” that is pretty much a BK clone.…

Operators to show their MANRS, aka Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security For all its robustness, the Internet is built on remarkably fragile systems.…

68 million units a quarter and falling as 'Some consumers may never upgrade a PC again' New data from analyst outfits IDC and Gartner suggest the PC market continues to crater.…

The plan is to to build wider experience useful for Izzy's successor NASA has opened the door to allow private sector companies to add modules to the International Space Station (ISS).…

Region needs to skill-up, says minister Singapore is slinging S$10 million (around US$7.2 million) into a fund to help infosec in ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations).…

Reader, Acrobat, Flash get fixes. Adobe has patched 83 vulnerabilities in its Reader, Acrobat, and Flash offerings including remote code execution holes.…

For example, not-China* didn't “hack the BoM's supercomputers” Sensationalist language is making it hard to educate businesses and the public about infosec risks*, according to the Australian Cyber Security Centre's 2016 threat report.…

Stick this on your pole, instead of fibre Fabless G.fast silicon house Sckipio hopes to give the fibre-most-of-the-way, copper to the home market a kick along with silicon that gets close to symmetric performance, at whatever data rate the copper can support.…

SOHOpeless CCTVs and video recorders It shouldn't surprise anyone that closed circuit television (CCTV) rigs are becoming the world's favourite botnet hosts: pretty much any time a security researcher looks at a camera, it turns out to be a buggy mess.…

Holding back Assistant and apps drawer for Pixel Developers can get their hands on Android 7.1 by the end of the month, Google has said.…

One string to bring them all and in the installation bind them Facebook, working with Exponent, Google, and Tilde, has released software to improve the JavaScript development experience, which can use all the help it can get.…

From cute game dev to serious mass production Pics The team behind the popular $9 C.H.I.P. single-board-computer has come up with a version for engineers, startups, and larger organizations to embed in their products.…

Dell drops antitrust claims over power pack pricing Samsung has received a welcome bit of news about its batteries that doesn't involve the words "fire" or "explosion."…

Will Australian privacy researchers still be at risk of hard time? Privacy and data researchers will, later today, get to see what's in the Australian government's proposed bill banning re-identification of anonymised data.…

Hyper-converged infrastructure comes home Hyper-converged appliance and all-flash system vendor Pivot3 has produced Edge Office, a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) for remote and branch offices and small/medium businesses.…

Redmond kicks off the era of the force-fed security update Microsoft is kicking off a controversial new security program this month by packaging all of its security updates into a single payload.…

Telco weeps as three hours of profits go up in smoke Updated The US Federal Communications Commission is trumpeting the “largest civil penalty assessed from a cable operator” after it fined Comcast $2.3m for charging its customers for services they didn’t ask for and equipment they didn’t need.…

Tracking for marketing, that's fine – but the cops? No way Updated Twitter has suspended its commercial relationship with a company called Geofeedia – which provides social media data to law enforcement agencies so that they can identify potential miscreants.…

Might help cover the cost of scrapping the Note 7 Samsung received good news of a sort on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court heard arguments for why Apple should reimburse the company $399m.…

Big Red says it wants to integrate intelligence into existing apps Oracle, like so many other enterprise IT specialists, is talking up plans to integrate machine learning into its software.…

Odinaff shares links with Carbanak A second group of hackers – Odinaff – has broken into the SWIFT system, the fulcrum of the global financial payments system.…

Old telco, rather than Silicon Valley, tops the list Which corporations invest most in the USA? A ranking by the favourite think-tank of the Democratic Party leadership might leave the Party's net roots choking on their muesli.…

'Nothing to do with Brexit' says corporate mouthpiece IT giant Fujitsu is to axe 1,800 jobs in Blighty – around 18 per cent of its UK workforce.…

New command has better info-sharing practices, apparently UK police sat on intelligence about more than 2,000 child abuse suspects for 15 months, according to a damning report from independent watchdogs published on Tuesday.…

Everyone but Intel and Cisco working together to build storage-class memory A group of suppliers have got together as a consortium to develop Gen-Z - a scalable, high-performance bus or interconnect fabric linking computers and memory.…

Data data everywhere Promo Data, data everywhere and not an insight in sight. Tableau, the business intelligence and analytics software firm, is on a mission to help you see and understand your data and enable you to make informed, fast decisions.…

Under -16s involving themselves with other under 16s, potentially criminally The majority of suspects in underage "sexting" cases are actually underage themselves, according to South Yorkshire Police.…

Funnily enough, BT really doesn't agree Mobile telcos Three and TalkTalk told MPs today they want more power to go to Ofcom in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill, in order to rebalance the market away from the dominance of BT/EE.…

The trouble doesn't stop here. It starts here Analysis Samsung’s rivals in the cut-throat flagship phone market shouldn’t pop open the champagne just yet. While in the short term, Sony, HTC and Google could see some upside from Samsung’s now-deceased “Death Note”, in the long term the market and the consumer benefit from a high margin leader.…

Hi-cap drives, inline compression, cloud tiering to chop flash storage costs Dell EMC is driving full tilt to extend flash support and lower costs in its storage array hardware and software product set, with in-line compression, high-capacity SSD support and the spinning off old data to the cloud.…

But by god we're developing some niches. Starting with shoe-based analytics Cisco may have conceded defeat to Amazon in the mass market for public cloud consumption, but there are a raft of niche areas that are ripe for the plucking, starting with, er, footwear.…

Chinese firm's Noah's Ark lab to hook up with US brainboxes Huawei is handing $1m to the University of California Berkeley’s AI lab to foster a research and development partnership between industry and academia.…

Cheap doesn't mean nasty Review Not so long ago, the idea of buying an operator-branded phone would have filled most people with horror. For years these were typically budget feature phones for skint punters, too time-poor to do their own homework.…

They're all simulated – but the drones aren't RotM The Royal Navy's Unmanned Warrior roboat exercise is currently taking place off the coast of Scotland.…

Parliamentary committee needed to make global businesses accountable Former chair of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge has renewed calls for greater transparency of global companies' tax affairs - following revelations of Facebook and eBay's recent tax affairs.…