Top IT stories this week: Yet another RBS glitch, Game of Thrones, and fear and loathing in the EU
Computing's top seven stories from the past seven days. Read all about it!
Here they are, our seven most read stories of the last seven days.
7. We must ensure AI doesn't overpower us, argues Oxford University professor
Professor Nick Bostrom is enthusiastic about AI but argues that the social, economic and political ramifications of machines developing intelligence must be thought through.
"We might very well see slow but very incremental progress that doesn't really raise any alarm bells until we're at the point where we're just one step away from something that is radically intelligent," he said, claiming that "the prospect of super intelligence raises unique challenges", especially if AI becomes so intelligent it can plan its own strategies.
6. RBS, Natwest, Ulster Bank customer payments are ‘missing' in new IT failure
With immaculate timing, just after the chancellor had announced it is to be put up for sale, more than 600,000 transactions went missing at Royal Bank of Scotland after yet another IT glitch at the error-prone bank.
One of the first NoSQL databases out of the blocks, MongoDB was immediately popular with developers, but some users ran into problems as their deployments scaled up. In this interview CEO Dev Ittycheria tells Sooraj Shah how the company has sought to remedy this problem and how it aims to grow in the future by focusing on the enterprise.
4. Game of Thrones season 5 finale breaks illegal download records
Medievalesque fantasy gore and sex fest Game of Thrones is unusually popular with teenage illegal downloaders. Nope. Beats us too. Andy Archibald, deputy director of the National Cybercrime Unit, has some ideas though.
"I think the practice [of illegal downloading] is more common than you might imagine in the youth of today," he said, going on to warn where that deviant practice could lead: "That's criminality. That's the first stages of a gateway into the dark side."
3. End of the line for Network Rail's surveyors as GIS techniques take over
Orbis really should be a character in Game of Thrones but instead it is an acronym for... wait for it ... Offering Rail Better Information Services, a £325m data-driven efficiency scheme at Network Rail. Part of this scheme involves constructing an intricate and accurate 3D model of the entire network and its assets using an aerial LiDAR survey. So if you habitually walk the line with a theodolite we're afraid you are not being paranoid. Those helicopters really are after you. Or at least your job.
2. New EU Data Protection Regulation will drive internet businesses 'out of Europe'
Here's the thing. Europe's data protection laws have historically been far stronger than those in the US and elsewhere. However, those laws pre-date the public internet and the EC has been negotiating for three years about what should replace them to strike a balance between privacy and business. A Belgian business grouping has taken a look at the drafts and decided it doesn't like what it sees.
IAB Europe, which represents online advertisers, says the regulation is likely to place "additional restrictions on companies' ability to process data, making the new rules more restrictive than those now in force".
The forthcoming EU data protection legislation also drew flack from US cloud companies and German software giant SAP, who told Reuters the new regulations will not only make it easier for citizens to sue internet companies and their partners, but that they make compliance unnecessarily complicated.
"It is important that consumers and businesses understand who ultimately is responsible for processing their data," said IBM's Liam Benham. "Now the EU's draft Data Protection Regulation risks blurring these lines of responsibility, setting the stage for lengthy and costly legal disputes, which will be perplexing for consumers and businesses alike."
The new regulations are obviously on the mind of Computing's readers too as they are the subject of our two most-read stories of the past week.