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2001: A Space Odyssey's villain raised bar for killer robot trope

Canadian actor Douglas Rain has died at the age of 90.…

Data Protection Act isn't our only legal weapon, beams ICO

+Comment A UK car industry worker who abused his customer database access to send data to telephone scammers has been sentenced to six months in prison.…

S&P 500 executives are dropping blockchain buzzwords less on earnings calls and during presentations to analysts and investors. Analysts are also asking about it less. From a report: The hype was just that. The odds of a company turning blockchain "headlines into reality" are slim, as Forrester Research predicts. The prospect of incorporating blockchain technology or cryptocurrency into businesses excited investors and drove up share prices temporarily -- just look at Kodak, beverage company Long Blockchain, or Hooters franchisee Chanticleer Holdings -- so it's no wonder executives wanted shareholders to know that they too might get in on the new technologies. At the peak earlier this year, "blockchain" was mentioned 173 times, according to an analysis of company transcripts by Axios. The number has since fallen as much as 80%.

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Question: what is entertainment's highest-grossing weekend debut of all time? Hint: It only took place two weeks ago. From a report: It was claimed by a Western-themed video game called Red Dead Redemption 2 -- the second in a series dubbed 'Grand Theft Auto on horseback' -- which generated over $725m in just three days. The wording above ('highest-grossing weekend debut') has been carefully chosen. Because the highest-grossing entertainment launch of all time actually kicked off on a Tuesday, in September, 2013. That launch was Grand Theft Auto V, another video game, which grossed more than $1bn during its opening 72 hours on sale. Both Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto are made by Rockstar Games -- a New York-HQ'd interactive entertainment company famed for its ability to bring filmic sophistication to the world of PlayStations and Xboxes, and for its ability to generate billions upon billions of dollars by doing so. Ready for this? The Grand Theft Auto franchise, and the core team behind Rockstar's success, were, unbelievably, both once part of the music business. They were allowed to leave 20 years ago. For an absolute pittance. Let's rewind. Back in 1990, London-born Sam Houser, aged 19, landed a dream first job -- working in the post-room at BMG's UK HQ. Houser then supplemented his university studies by continuing to work at BMG for the next four years, focusing on pop music videos and VHS releases. By 1994, he'd graduated, and took a full-time role within BMG's new interactive entertainment division. Houser, it turned out, had a natural talent for 'A&R'ing' video games -- spotting titles that would sell big and signing them up as a label would an artist -- and, by 1996, he was named Head of Development at BMG Interactive in the UK. Got your palm located somewhere roughly near your forehead? Good. Prepare for the two to forcibly meet. Interactive released Grand Theft Auto, a 2D action-adventure game, which saw players fulfilling the objectives of criminal overlords across three cities. The title was a commercial smash in the US and Europe -- yet it emerged amid serious corporate turbulence. In March 1998, convinced that its foray into video games had been a waste of time and money, BMG -- under the instruction of owner Bertelsmann -- agreed to sell off BMG Interactive. According to Sam Houser, BMG let the company go, to New York-based Take Two Interactive, for a total consideration of $9m. (For those who can see where this narrative is going: Red Dead Redemption 2 generated that $9m back within an hour of going on sale last month.) The story doesn't end there.

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Rival AWS fluffs US govt cloud, pops up in Italy

Playing catch-up with AWS and Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud has pulled the EU dust covers off its cloud onboarding appliance.…

Optimised Office 365 performance also on cards

Cisco has claimed to be "bringing intent-based networking into every domain", the latest being branch offices which need software-defined WAN capabilities and security.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A recently discovered botnet has taken control of an eye-popping 100,000 home and small-office routers made from a range of manufacturers, mainly by exploiting a critical vulnerability that has remained unaddressed on infected devices more than five years after it came to light. Researchers from Netlab 360, who reported the mass infection late last week, have dubbed the botnet BCMUPnP_Hunter. The name is a reference to a buggy implementation of the Universal Plug and Play protocol built into Broadcom chipsets used in vulnerable devices. An advisory released in January 2013 warned that the critical flaw affected routers from a raft of manufacturers, including Broadcom, Asus, Cisco, TP-Link, Zyxel, D-Link, Netgear, and US Robotics. The finding from Netlab 360 suggests that many vulnerable devices were allowed to run without ever being patched or locked down through other means. Last week's report documents 116 different types of devices that make up the botnet from a diverse group of manufacturers. Once under the attackers' control, the routers connect to a variety of well-known email services. This is a strong indication that the infected devices are being used to send spam or other types of malicious mail.

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On yer bike, CJEU tells Dutch dairy dealer

The EU's highest court has rejected an attempt to use copyright law to protect the distinct taste of a food product.…

Relief is coming next year, CEO promises

Remote Aussies getting their broadband from nbn™'s SkyMuster satellites have been promised a bit of bandwidth relief, with the company deciding to bundle some 'net traffic for free.…

When an offer looks too good to be true, it always is

Chinese phone maker Xiaomi is in damage-control mode after an online promotion coinciding with its big UK launch somewhat backfired.…

Another way ISS 'nauts can send stuff home

Roundup This week Rocket Labs launched six satellites into the nether, the British team on ESA's ExoMars mission had a think about where to land their rover on the red planet in 2021, and Japan helped successfully scrap a load of space crap.…

schwit1 shares a report from The Hollywood Reporter: Douglas Rain, the veteran Canadian stage actor who provided the soft and gentle voice of the rogue HAL 9000 computer for Stanley Kubrick's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel, has died. He was 90. The first drafts of the 2001 script had HAL being voiced by a woman and was called Athena; afterward, it was decided that the computer should sound more like a man. Nigel Davenport, Martin Balsam and others were tried out -- and ruled out -- before and during filming of the 1968 sci-fi thriller. "Well, we had some difficulty deciding exactly what HAL should sound like, and Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American, whereas Rain had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part,' Kubrick told Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis in an interview for the 1970 book The Film Director as Superstar. Kubrick told Rain that he had made the computer "too emotional and too human." So, in late 1967, the actor flew to New York City and spent a day and a half -- about 9 1/2 hours in all -- to voice HAL. As reported on the blog 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Rain "did the recordings with his bare feet resting on a pillow, in order to maintain the required relaxed tone."

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Let's lift our eyes from the balance sheet and take a look around...

Arriving at a recent conference organised by one of the government's many regulatory bodies, I received my obligatory lanyard – and something else, credit-card-shaped, emblazoned with the branding for event. "What's this?" I asked.…

MariaDB boss says IPO is part of his 3-year plan

Interview Michael Howard, Berkley grad and alumnus of Oracle and EMC, took the helm at open-source biz MariaDB almost three years ago. Reflecting on how things have changed, he reckons the biggest shift is in how both investors and enterprise have embrace open-source. Now, he has an IPO on his mind.…

Blighty, Germany, Australia also missing from 'Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace'

America has aligned with China and Russia to scupper a France-led initiative to improve the internet's security. However, French president Emmanuel Macron has promised to battle on.…

The Washington Post is reporting that Amazon has picked New York's Long Island City and Arlington County's Crystal City neighborhoods as the company's second headquarters (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source). The two locations will split the duty and will reportedly bring the cities an infusion of jobs and tax revenue. From the report: Amazon will open major new outposts in Northern Virginia's Crystal City and New York City, splitting its much-sought investment of up to 50,000 jobs between the two East Coast sites. The choice of Crystal City in Arlington County as one of the winners would cement Northern Virginia's reputation as a magnet for business and potentially reshape the Washington region into an East Coast outpost of Silicon Valley over the next decade. It also represents a victory for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), who had joked that he would change his name to "Amazon Cuomo" if necessary to land the prize. Amazon's decision to split the project rather than open a second headquarters on par with its Seattle campus has angered some who said the company had ginned up competition among cities only to change the rules midstream. Some said it was unfair that the company seemed to be considering only sites in more affluent communities.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: 2030 seems like a long way off, but it's really just around the corner. And when the bell tolls at midnight on December 31, 2030, you may not be able to buy a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle in Israel. After that date, all passenger cars will be electric and all trucks will be powered by electricity or compressed natural gas, if a proposal currently under consideration gets approved by the government. A final decision is expected by the end of this year. Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz [told Reuters last month] the biggest challenge will be creating a "critical mass" of electric and CNG powered vehicles before the deadline arrives. "We are already encouraging [the transition] by funding ... more than 2,000 new charging stations around the country," he says. The plan was set in motion one day after the United Nations issued its latest climate assessment that finds nations must do far more than they are currently doing in order to stave off warmer global average temperatures that will put the environment at risk. In order to reach the goal, the Israeli government will "reduce taxation on electric cars to almost zero, so they are going to be much cheaper," Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz said. He expects there will be about 177,000 electric cars on Israeli roads around 2025. By 2030, the expectation is that there will be nearly 1.5 million EVs in the country. The country has a ways to go though, as there are less than 100 electric cars on the roads today.

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Chrome Web Summit finds web apps still struggling next to shiny native counterparts

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, Google's Chrome team might be a candidate for involuntary commitment.…

Clue's in the headline. And more importantly: Will anyone but Cupertino care?

It looks as though Apple's iThings may get 5G connectivity in 2020 – after Intel promised production of its 5G modem will start in the second half of 2019, and ship in the first half of the following year.…

Facebook and the French government are working together to look at the social media company's efforts to moderate content on its site. "At the start of 2019, French regulators will launch an informal investigation on algorithm-powered and human moderation," reports TechCrunch. "Facebook is willing to cooperate and give unprecedented access to its internal processes." From the report: Regulators will look at multiple steps: how flagging works, how Facebook identifies problematic content, how Facebook decides if it's problematic or not and what happens when Facebook takes down a post, a video or an image. This type of investigation is reminiscent of banking and nuclear regulation. It involves deep cooperation so that regulators can certify that a company is doing everything right. It's still unclear who's going to be in charge of this investigation. There could be regulators from France's telecom regulator (ARCEP), from the government's tech team (DINSIC), from the TV and radio regulator (CSA)... There's one thing for sure, the French government wants to focus on hate speech for now, so don't expect anyone from the privacy regulator (CNIL). The investigation isn't going to be limited to talking with the moderation teams and looking at their guidelines. The French government wants to find algorithmic bias and test data sets against Facebook's automated moderation tools.

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