Scientists worry machines may outsmart man

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society's workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone, reports CNet.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could be said to have reached a "cockroach" stage of machine intelligence.

Four minutes after the UK government's National Pandemic Flu Service Web site went live yesterday, the site crashed. Around 2 600 people a second tried to access the site, says Computing.co.uk.

The site was expected to have to handle up to 1 200 hits per second, but a surge of twice that traffic volume shut the service down, embarrassing both government and BT, which is hosting the site.

The problem appears to have been the result of an elementary capacity planning error rather than full-blown network, load balancing, server hardware or application failure.

Microsoft plans to issue two emergency patches next week that fix vulnerabilities in the Internet Explorer browser and Visual Studio developer suite that allow attackers to remotely execute malware, reports The Register.

The patches will be delivered on Tuesday, and it will be only the third time Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch in the past 25 months.

That suggests the updates are serious enough to warrant the extra fuss. Typically, the company issues patches on the second Tuesday of each month to allow administrators time to plan for and test the updates.

Internet service provider Karoo, based in Hull, has changed its policy of suspending the service of users suspected of copyright violations, says the BBC.

The about-face was made following a BBC story outlining the firm's practice.

Karoo issued a statement on Friday, saying it has been "exceeding the expectations of copyright owners".