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Professor Mark Bishop on the dangers of deep stupidity Minds Mastering Machines Mark Bishop, a professor of cognitive computing and a researcher at the Tungsten Centre for Intelligent Data Analytics (TCIDA) at Goldsmiths, University of London, celebrated the successes of deep learning during a lecture at the Minds Mastering Machines conference on Monday, but stressed the limits of modern AI.…

Belfiore's done it again "Without the end points you aren't going to have the impact in the world and people's lives so you have to think about this next generation of computing as mobile-first, cloud-first," said Microsoft's CEO three years ago.…

Which means higher capacity, according to L2 Drive Stealthy storage startup L2 Drive's technology could enable higher-capacity disk drives.…

Stealth launch in Gulf, no sign when to expect it in US/EU Enterprise-focussed phones are vanishingly rare, and that's unlikely to change after BlackBerry Mobile gave its newest model the stealthiest launch possible.…

Director Jeremy Fleming sets out priorities for intel agency Keeping the UK safe from cyber attacks is now as important as fighting terrorism, the new GCHQ boss has said.…

Warton braced for job cuts BAE Systems, maker of military machinery, is to slash more than 1,000 jobs, according to reports, with most roles affected at its Warton plant in Lancashire – the main factory that builds the Eurofighter Typhoon.…

By the end of 2018, says Realm, Kotlin will overtake Java for Android apps Java on Android is dying, and before long will be dominated by Kotlin, or so says a selective slice of developer data.…

Some might have to wait a bit longer... Updated Certain Royal Mail customers have not been able to pin down the location of their packages today.…

Devs seduced by the dark arts of data collection and product placement VB2017 Poor disclosure and intrusive advertising are becoming a bête noire for gamers who increasingly find themselves getting fragged by promos.…

Fivemiletown, Northern Ireland, ambles at a stately 1.2Mbps Superfast internet speeds are within reach of nearly 94 per cent of the country, according to figures compiled by Thinkbroadband.…

Hilary Mason on Cloudera acquisition, AI hype and getting enterprises to experiment Businesses' aversion to risk means they miss out on the potential rewards of machine-learning projects – but some still have impractical ideas about what artificial intelligence can really offer them.…

Hearings without complainant still A-OK though IPA The UK government is planning a number of “significant” changes to the rules governing spy oversight body the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.…

Why Redmond's CEO offloaded the business in an instant Steve Ballmer as Microsoft chief executive bought Finnish former smartphone giant Nokia in 2013. Satya Nadella, who took over from Ballmer in 2014, sold what Ballmer had bought just two years later.…

Getting serious before things get serious for self-driving vehicles Last year, a dark historical landmark was reached. Joshua Brown became the first confirmed person to die in a crash where the car was, at least in part, driving itself. On a Florida highway, his Tesla Model S ploughed underneath a white truck trailer that was straddling the road, devastating the top half of the car.…

Veep Pence calls for Luna to become stepping stone for farther missions, constant US presence in low-Earth orbit The United States' National Space Council Policy has met for the first time in 25 years and issued a new “Policy for Future American Leadership in Space”.…

Data capture tool that shares browser history will land in ~1% of browsers POLL Mozilla has decided to experiment on its German users by opting-in around one per cent of them to a search recommendations service that slurps their browsing histories.…

Project Loon gets its chance to beam relief broadband Alphabet's Project Loon broadband balloons will be allowed to attempt broadband services in Puerto Rico, as the unincorporated United States territory continues to recover from hurricane damage.…

Version 10 improves replication, simplifies partitioning With the release of PostgreSQL 10, the open source database's developers are farewelling the deprecated MD5 in their authentication mechanism.…

Bought in 2013, disposed of in 2017 due to misalignment with 'long-term focus' Four years after acquiring Composite Software and rebranding it as Cisco Data Virtualization, Switchzilla will sell the unit to Tibco.…

Get a piece of the Register' weekend storage pizza Thick crust, thin crust, who cares, it's storage pizza time, cooked in The Register's own wood-fired oven, with lots of bark and bite.…

If you fancy whipping up a bondage loop under a BSDM licence this is the language you've been gagging for Developers: bored with bracketing? Got a dose of “escaping ennui”? Why not write bad erotica instead?…

Larry's revolution is incremental change that DBAs need not fear OPENWORLD WRAP Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference is over. The streets of San Francisco are free of the hordes of execs, devs and analysts, and everyone has gone home to mull over what they've learned.…

PureVPN assisted investigation of man charged over 16-month harassment campaign Virtual private network provider PureVPN helped the FBI track down an Internet stalker, by combing its logs to reveal his IP address.…

Four fall ill after Fall's favorite artificial flavoring overwhelms A high school in Baltimore, USA, was evacuated this week after a pumpkin spice air freshener made four people ill and triggered a hazardous materials scare.…

Huge explosions belched foul gases, but enough about Y!... Our Moon had an atmosphere visible from space almost four billion years ago – thanks to volcanic eruptions on its surface spewing a concoction of gases at a rate faster than they could escape the heavenly body.…

Rigzone founder sentenced for data duplication scheme "Operation Resume Hoard" was going well. Initiated around April 1, 2015, it represented David W. Kent's plan to build the membership of his oil and gas industry networking site Oilpro.com.…

Put down the pint, a top news commenting app just got pwned Disqus, the developer of website comment systems used worldwide, is playing the old "bury bad news late on a Friday" card – as it just confessed one of its databases was swiped by hackers.…

'Augmented-reality' upstart is back with another vid Comment It's been nearly a year since augmented reality upstart MagicLeap was called out for the fact that its revolutionary technology didn't actually exist.…

AOL's instant chat app axed in time for Christmas Your old ISP is finally going to kill off your old messaging software.…

Versions in use by millions lag behind latest OS, leaving systems vulnerable to attack Microsoft is silently patching security bugs in Windows 10, and not immediately rolling out the same updates to Windows 7 and 8, potentially leaving hundreds of millions of computers at risk of attack.…

I fear big batts and I cannot lie. Y'all better duck and dive... Apple has said it is looking into claims that the batteries in its new iPhone 8 Plus phones are swelling and cracking their cases.…

Plus: How SEC's IT staff begged for more cash Roundup Another week draws to a close so it's time to review the security news you may have missed in between the big hitters: the NSA contractor who leaked more exploits, Apple's encryption password blunder, and so on. This week we've seen bugs, hacking, and government silliness – take a look...…

We want him! No, he's ours! Shut up! Russia doesn't want America taking one of its nationals accused of running a $4bn Bitcoin laundering ring – Moscow wants him more.…

Hey, but aren't you forgetting *cough* Azure? *cough* Amazon boasts that it is the "preferred" cloud provider for General Electric, but, in this multi-cloud world, that's not quite the case.…

Pre-Openreach split badness lands biz with five-figure fine BT has been fined £25,000 after being found guilty of carrying out unsafe roadworks in the UK capital, following a prosecution by Transport for London.…

Faces sentencing in December A teenager from Leicestershire, England, has admitted to trying to hack US government officials including the director of the CIA and Obama's Director of National Intelligence.…

Startup lugs $103m war chest on mission to switch up the industry Analysis Newcomer Vexata has dropped out of stealth with a $103mn funding war chest and aims to blow the fusty old storage array business to smithereens with its 7 million IOPS Active Data Fabric box. How so?…

Brothers at Unite have seen little progress since last demos Unionised workers at Fujitsu will again be tested on their appetite for fresh strike action over proposed jobs, silencing of company reps in the Works Council, pay and pensions, says Unite.…

Boost for data protection bods NetApp is reselling Veeam data protection software.…

Brexploitation: Buyers' horror stories that followed the vote Some "unscrupulous" tech suppliers used Brexflation in 2016 to overcharge customers with the most extreme example being a uni that coughed more than ten times the trade price for a cable.…

You know that even HMRC ditched this, right? The Disclosure and Barring Service, responsible for processing requests for criminal records checks, has taken the gamble of using the Government Digital Service's online ID system authentication portal.…

Let me tell you about my mother No spoilers Stepping into the cinema to watch Blade Runner 2049 was a nervous moment; after The Phantom Menace and Prometheus, was another studio about to take a steaming dump on a pivotal film of my youth?…

Total inability to support usual payments Updated Royal Bank of Scotland customers have been reporting an inability to log into digital banking services this morning.…

Still a chance to join us and your fellow boffins on Monday The speakers are on their way, the food and drink is ordered, and there are just a handful of tickets left for MCubed, our three-day delve into machine learning, AI and data science.…

It's not you, it's m- ... No, wait, it's totally you Ofcom has proposed forcing providers to disclose more accurate speed information at the point of sale and hand consumers the power to walk away if speeds fall below a guaranteed level, in a crackdown on service provision.…

No you are not. You've been lucky MORE than once Canalys Channels Forum Some metaphors do bear close examination. Just ask plucky, perennial underdog AMD, which this week compared itself to Buster Douglas, the short-lived heavyweight boxing champ who shocked the world when he dethroned Mike Tyson in the 1980s.…

Robocop? Star Trek? What's your favourite vision? Blade Runner 2049, the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott's immeasurably influential vision of tomorrow, was released this week.…

Back to the primitive! F*** all your politics! Something for the Weekend, Sir? The Dawn of Man. Picture a pastoral scene of prehistoric arcadian bliss as our troglodyte ancestors sit about calmly picking fleas off each other's backs.…

3 IT giants - just 1 on-prem/hybrid stack partner opening... Analysis An IT trio of giants will soon dominate the market - and there appears to be one on-premises/hybrid stack partner opening, Nutanix told us.…

Sticky tape refocused robotic tape library's lazy-eyed laser On-Call Hello, Friday. And hello, therefore, another instalment of On-Call, The Register's week-ending reader-contributed tales of support jobs that occasionally work out for the best.…