Top IT stories this week: And they looked from machine to man, man to machine, and it was no longer possible to tell which was which

Computing's top seven stories from the past seven days. Read all about it - or get a machine to do it for you

In case you missed them, here are the most popular stories on Computing from the past seven days.

7. 'Profoundly wrong' Investigatory Powers Bill slammed for ‘treating everyone as a suspect'
The government's Investigatory Powers Bill, as unveiled in the Queen's Speech, gives a lot of new powers to the security agencies to intercept and read our emails, text messages and phone calls. While the details of the Bill are still unclear, it seems that ISPs and telecoms providers will be required to store data on all subscribers, not just criminal suspects, for a year. This warrantless bulk collection of citizens' data drew short shrift from academics and technologists alike.

"The government wants to treat everyone as a suspect and make us pay for the privilege," said Professor Mike Jackson, IT and cyber security expert at Birmingham City University's Business School.

6. Is Microsoft planning IFS acquisition?
At any point in time, there is a rumour that Microsoft is about to buy someone. The most recent of these mooted takeovers has been Salesforce.com, but could the rumour-mongers be wide of the mark? Perhaps, some analysts think, ERP vendor IFS is a more likely recipient of Redmond's largesse.

"IFS could be a logical next target once it completes the integration of its solutions with the Azure cloud platform," says Christopher Wilder, an analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

5. What is DevOps anyway?
So, you drag spoiled arty-farty developers and surly utilitarian ops guys away from their comfort zones, shove them in a room and tell them to talk to each other and to take responsibility for their actions rather than blaming the other side...

How's that going to work then?

4. University of London Computer Centre hit by cyber attack
Computer Studies student? Think you're going to flunk your exams? Why not put your limited knowledge to good use and crash the system?

That's not necessarily what happened, but a four-hour stoppage certainly got George Anderson, director at Webroot, thinking. The attack was clearly implemented to have "maximum impact on a system that would have been at peak usage around exam-time", he said.

"Hopefully this case will serve as a warning to other organisations, encouraging them to ensure that they have an effective strategy in place to make sure user experience is impacted as little as possible."

3. AI could help solve humanity's biggest issues by taking over from scientists, says DeepMind CEO Artificial intelligence was the certainly the flavour of the week here at Computing. Our ongoing poll shows that readers are reasonably sanguine about the march of the machines believing that our robot overlords will take longer to perfect than some assume. That said, a sizable minority believe that our minds are already being controlled by lizards. Make of that what you will.

There is always fear of the new, of course, but Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis believes that machines with artificial intelligence could prove much better than our puny human minds in their short-lived soft-skinned shells at tackling long-term problems such as climate change, macro-economic problems and diseases.

"We might have to come to the sobering realisation that even with the smartest set of humans on the planet working on these problems, these systems may be so complex that it's difficult for individual humans and scientific experts to have the time they need in their lifetimes to even innovate and advance," he says.

2. Comparethemarket.com shifts to Node.js from Microsoft .NET as it migrates to the cloud
Those lovable/annoying meerkats and their pet humans have been getting busy with their back ends recently shifting from Microsoft SQL Server to MongoDB for one, and eyeing Amazon's cloud. Another change is a transition of development environment from .NET to Node.js. The developers found that they could build apps more quickly by swapping the Microsoft .NET IDE for a text editor and Node.js.

"We have historically been a Microsoft .NET shop. We had been through a trialling process and decided that Node.js is a viable alternative, and used it for a few, tentative services," says Matthew Collinge, a solutions architect at Comparethemarket.com.

1. Document search engines will be able to think and reason like people, argues AI expert
More inspiring/scary machines were the subject of our most-read story this week.

Professor Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto says that it's only a matter of time before machines based on neural networks, mimicking the way the brain works, will be able to look at the written word and deduce meaning, just as we do.

"If you can convert each sentence in a document into a vector, then you can take that sequence of vectors and [try to model] natural reasoning. And that was something that old fashioned AI could never do," he said, explaining that this means machines could potentially teach themselves to "think like people".

"If we can read every English document on the web, and turn each sentence into a thought vector, you've got plenty of data for training a system that can reason like people do."