Top IT stories this week: Surface 3 review, Google being naughty again and police testing HoloLens
Computing's top seven stories from the past seven days. Read all about it!
Our seven most-read stories from the past seven days.
The creators of general artificial intelligence will need to be cautious about the instructions they code into intelligent machines because even a benign command such as 'prevent human suffering' could be translated as 'kill all humans', unless technical and philosophical boundaries are properly defined in coding, says Dr Stuart Armstrong
6. Has Microsoft u-turned on Windows 10 ‘free for everyone' promises?
Microsoft scrambles to put right "misconceptions" about how "free" Windows 10 will be - and manages to create more confusion in the process.
5. Cambridgeshire police to investigate the potential of Microsoft HoloLens
Cambridgeshire Constabulary may soon begin using Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality (AR) hardware as part of an ambitious push to harness cutting-edge technology.
Robert Hogg, founder and MD of custom development and consultancy firm Black Marble, which specialises in Microsoft platforms, explained that his firm "will be delivering HoloLens to [UK police forces] as soon as we can. We can do some amazing things with the technology".
4. SAP Hana riddled with encryption and SQL injection vulnerabilities, claims security company
SAP's in-memory database Hana is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks and contains encryption weaknesses, according to security company ERPScan.
Alexander Polyakov, founder and chief technology of ERPScan, said that many people do not think that SAP Hana stores sensitive data on hard disk but in reality, user names and passwords are stored, often protected only be a default password.
3. 'Google has been recording our voices without our consent,' say Chromium users
Users of Google's Chromium open-source browser project have complained that the search giant has placed code inside the project that listens covertly to conversations, records them, and sends them back to the company.
The code was officially included for download into Chromium - the codebase from which Google Chrome is drawn - in order to activate the "Okay, Google" voice function. However, the code also seems to have an 'eavesdropping' function that is fully equipped to record and send audio back to Google without consent - and, by default, users found that it was turned on.
2. Why would Google want to buy Dunnhumby?
Amid rumours that Google is interested in buying Tesco's customer loyalty company Dunnhumby, Sooraj Shah investigates why the search giant might want to do so and what customer data might be transferred to Google if such a deal were to go ahead.
1. Living with the Microsoft Surface 3
Peter Gothard is a strong advocate of Microsoft's "laptop replacement" the Surface Pro, so was interested to see how its younger brother, the Surface 3, would measure up. Moving away from RT, which would not run many traditional Windows applications, Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board and the Surface 3 has an Intel Atom processor at its core that runs Windows 8.1 and thus all the usual apps.
It may be more capable and versatile than the old RT model, but are the changes sufficient to justify the hefty asking price of £500?
The Surface 3 review was our top story this week.