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Source:  Stuart Clark , The Guardian.com The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race, Professor  Stephen Hawking  has said. The famous astrophysicist said he believed technology would eventually become self-aware and supersede humanity, as it developed faster than biological evolution. Hawking told the BBC: “The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have, have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Source:  Ben Goldacre , The Guardian.com An interesting side-effect of public data being indexed and searchable is that you only have to be sloppy once, for your privacy to be compromised.  The computer program Creepy  makes good fodder for panic. Put in someone’s username from Twitter, or Flickr, and Creepy will churn through every photo hosting service it knows, trying to find every picture they’ve ever posted. Cameras – especially phone cameras – often store the location where the picture was taken in the picture data. Creepy grabs all this geo-location data and puts pins on a map for you. Most of the time, you probably remember to get the privacy settings right. But if you get it wrong just once – maybe the first time you used a new app, maybe before your friend showed you how to change the settings – Creepy will find it, and your home is marked on a map. All because you tweeted a photo of something funny your cat did, in your kitchen. The Samaritans app, to...

Source: Tara Conlan, The Guardian.com Key paragraphs: When the BBC moved its newsroom as part of the £1bn hi-tech refurbishment of Broadcasting House in central London last year, everything was meant to be state of the art, including new  robot cameras . Problems soon emerged with incidents of the cameras moving in directions that were not wanted, prompting exasperation from news presenters and humour from viewers. There are concerns within the BBC that the glitches may become more frequent. BBC News is looking at replacing its computer system, called ENPS, with a new one within two years. ENPS communicates with the computer program that controls the cameras, called Mosart. Both ENPS and its replacement are due to run in parallel, to ensure a backup, but staff are looking at what might happen when both systems are trying to talk to Mosart. One source said: “They are due to run together for some time. But bearing in mind the problems that happen with cameras already no o...

By Peter Preston, The Guardian.com Key paragraphs: The most important dissenter, of course, was Mr Rupert Murdoch; which is perhaps why praise for this performance seems somewhat muted. Rupert, you may remember, was a leftover relic with acid and printers’ ink in his veins. He decreed – five years back, when the  Times  and the  Sunday Times  were billed as losing nearly £70m a year between them – that all his journalism must command a fair price. It couldn’t be given away free, dependent on ads for survival. It would be guarded by steep, non-porous paywalls. Stump up if you want to peer inside. That meant no clicking trails across an open net, no entry points via burgeoning social media, no mammoth totals of unique visitors round the world, no pulsating communities of comment and influence. It meant – almost everyone said – obscurity, disappointment, a barren future. And who knows? Everyone may be right in the end. But not just yet. Was the £70m loss ev...

Times Newspapers (TNL) has posted a £1.7m operating profit for the year ending 30 June 2014, its first profitable year since 2001. TNL, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, says the growth in total paid sales has meant that both titles are less dependent on advertising, with paid sales representing 51% of TNL’s revenue, compared to 44% coming from ads. The company believes the figures confirm that its paid-for strategy is helping to secure a sustainable future for the papers.  People who pay £6 a week for seven-day print or digital membership packages have been lured in part by News UK’s acquisition of sports rights to show clips of Premier League football, Premiership rugby and cricket highlights. More analysis on:  Is a profit worth the price of the Times’s paywall? Source: The Guardian.com