Call for debate on killer robots

A leading academic has said international debate is needed on the use of autonomous military robots, says the BBC.

Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield said a push toward more robotic technology used in warfare would put civilian life at grave risk.

Technology capable of distinguishing friend from foe reliably is at least 50 years away, he added.

IT vendor Fujitsu faces possible strike action from staff if a ballot of 2 000 members of trade union Unite vote in favour of the move, says Computing.co.uk.

Up to a third of the company's 12 000 UK employees could be hit by changes to its pension plan, according to Unite.

The union will conduct a consultative ballot on strike action over pay and pensions involving up to 2 000 members employed by the supplier, highlighting Fujitsu Services' "significant profits”.

Micro-blogging site Twitter has begun filtering links to known malware sites, reports The Register.

The tactic, noticed by security researchers on Monday, but yet to be officially announced by Twitter, is designed to prevent surfers straying onto sites packed with dangerous exploits.

Adoption of the approach follows the increased targeting of Twitter by worms, spam and account hijacking attacks over recent weeks. The widespread use of URL shortening in Twitter messages (which can be no longer than 140 characters) makes it easy to hide the true destination of links.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduced a new chipset yesterday with an integrated graphics core that provides a better high-definition video experience compared to earlier chipsets, reports PC World.

AMD's 785G chipset provides better raw graphics performance than its predecessor, the 780G, and has advanced HD video decoding features built into the integrated graphics controller. The graphics core is based on the ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics processor, an improvement over the Radeon HD 3200 in the 780G chipset.

The new graphics core provides clearer images and brighter colours, said Brent Barry, product marketing manager for desktops at AMD. The earlier chipsets mostly unloaded HD video decoding from the CPU to the graphics controller, while the new chipset does some of the post-processing to enhance video quality, Barry said.