The U.S. official said armed drone flights could begin as early as next week or at least by the end of December. The memorandum of understanding limits the drones to defensive missions, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity.

As IT evolves in the direction of more cloud adoption, more automation, and more artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and analytics, it's clear that the IT jobs landscape will change too. For example, tomorrow's CIO is likely to become more of a broker and orchestrator of cloud services, juggling the strategic concerns of the C-suite with more tactical demands from business units, and less of an overseer of enterprise applications in on-premises data centres. Meanwhile, IT staff are likely to spend more time in DevOps teams, integrating multiple cloud services and residual on-premises applications, and enforcing cyber-security, and less time tending racks of servers running siloed client-server apps, or deploying and supporting endpoint devices. ZDNet and TechRepublic looks at the dramatic effect of AI, big data, cloud computing, and automation on IT jobs, and how companies can adapt. Of course, some traditional IT jobs and tasks will remain, because revolutions don't happen overnight and there will be good reasons for keeping some workloads running in on-premises data centres. But there's no doubt which way the IT wind is blowing, across businesses of all sizes.

Politicians in New Zealand might want to watch their backs, as they could soon face stiff competition in the form of a virtual bot. 'Sam' is the world's first virtual politician that users can interact with through Facebook Messenger. The AI chatbot is'representing' New Zealand's constituents, and claims to consider everyone's position, without bias, when making decisions. And it may not be long before we see the AI bot in action, as Sam's creator claims that it will be ready to run for office in 2020. 'Sam' is the world's first virtual politician that users can interact with through Facebook Messenger.

A considerable number of articles cover machine learning and its ability to protect us from cyberattacks. Still, it's important to separate the hype from the reality and see what exactly machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can do right now in cybersecurity. First of all, I have to disappoint you. Unfortunately, machine learning will never be a silver bullet for cybersecurity compared to image recognition or natural language processing, two areas where machine learning is thriving. There will always be a person who tries to find issues in our systems and bypass them.

The conversation about artificial intelligence is downright mythological. In mythology and fairy tales, we encounter all kinds of strange mixed-up beasts: griffins that are part lion and part eagle; Pegasus, the horse with wings; and centaurs, noble creatures with the torso of a man and the body of a horse. These figures combined the strengths of their constituents and consequently became more than the sum of their parts. Fearsome and sometimes misunderstood, these chimera were a way of making sense of a changing and often troubling world. But what does this have to do with artificial intelligence?

A former Scotland Yard detective has told BBC News he was "shocked" by the amount of pornography viewed on a parliamentary computer seized from the office of Damian Green. Neil Lewis said "thousands" of thumbnail images containing legal pornographic material had been found nine years ago on a desktop device in the Westminster office of Mr Green - who is now first secretary of state (Theresa May's deputy). Mr Lewis examined the computer during a 2008 inquiry into government leaks and has not spoken publicly before. Mr Green, Conservative MP for Ashford, Kent, has denied the allegations, saying he never watched or downloaded such material on the computer. What will happen to the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic after Brexit?

There's a weird way in which a hedge fund is a confluence of everything. There's the money of course--Two Sigma, located in lower Manhattan, manages over $50 billion, an amount that has grown 600 percent in 6 years and is roughly the size of the economy of Bulgaria. Then there are the people--financiers, philosophers, engineers--all applying themselves to unearthing inscrutable patterns that separate fortune from failure. And there is the science and engineering, much of it resting on a towering stack of data. In principle, almost any information about the real world can be relevant to a hedge fund. Employees, so the stories go, have camped out next to harbors noting down tanker waterlines, and in retail parking lots counting cars. This data then has to be standardized, synthesized, and made accessible to the people who place bets on the market.

A United Nations meeting in Geneva earlier this month on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) was derailed when Russia said they would not adhere to any prohibitions on killer robots, according to Defense One. The U.N. meeting appeared to be undermined both by Russia's disinterest in it and the framework of the meeting itself. Member nations attempted to come in and define what LAWS' systems would be, and what restrictions could be developed around autonomous war machines, but no progress was made. In a statement, Russia said that the lack of already developed war machines makes coming up with prohibitions on such machines difficult. "According to the Russian Federation, the lack of working samples of such weapons systems remains the main problem in the discussion on LAWS…this can hardly be considered as an argument for taking preventive prohibitive or restrictive measures against LAWS being a by far more complex and wide class of weapons of which the current understanding of humankind is rather approximate," read the statement.

What began as a small U.S. training operation has expanded to an 800-strong force that accompanies the Nigeriens on intelligence gathering and other missions. It includes a $100 million drone base in the central Nigerien city of Agadez which at present only deploys surveillance drones.

A memo from the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau (ICE) has been making the rounds and it states some pretty bold claims about drone-maker DJI. The memo, which was apparently issued in August, says that the officials assess "with moderate confidence that Chinese-based company DJI Science and Technology is providing US critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government." The LA ICE office also says that the information is based on, "open source reporting and a reliable source within the unmanned aerial systems industry with first and secondhand access." Part of the memo focuses on targets that the LA ICE office believes to be of interest to DJI. "DJI's criteria for selecting accounts to target appears to focus on the account holder's ability to disrupt critical infrastructure," it said. The memo goes on to say that DJI is particularly interested in infrastructure like railroads and utilities, companies that provide drinking water as well as weapon storage facilities.