Most of the Government's online public services were knocked out by a "technical error" on Wednesday, the Cabinet Office has confirmed. The entire GOV.UK website, a flagship project of the Government Digital Service (GDS) went down, taking all government department websites and most services with it. GOV.UK was launched to fanfare 2012 and aims to consolidate all government department websites into a single service – meaning its failure interrupted services ranging from tax self assessment to driving licence applications. Initial speculative fears that the half-hour outage was caused by a cyber attack appear to be unfounded. The outage started at around 3.30pm when users were presented with a so-called "NXDOMAIN" error.

WhatsApp users are receiving messages that look far too good to be true – and are just that. People are being hit by a sinister new hack that sees them offered free money and then actually leads them to have their data stolen. The messages arriving on people's phones look innocent, and appear to come from friends and family. They offer £100 of gift cards for shops like Sainsbury's or Topshop, and usually claim that the sender has already claimed their £100. But the messages are in fact a scam that could see people's phone's hijacked, their personal information stolen and their money being put at risk.

Microsoft has launched a new PC, hoping that it can bring back the dying category. The company's new desktop computer, named the Surface Studio, looks something like the iMac. And like Apple's computer, it is meant as an all-in-one solution for people looking for a PC – a big screen that is attached to all the computing parts. Unlike the iMac, the screen itself is touchscreen despite having a keyboard and a mouse. And that display is also the thinnest desktop monitor ever created, the company said.

The threats to the streaming TV company might not be Amazon or other streaming services, but instead "pharmacological" ways of entertaining people, Reed Hastings has said. And just as films and TV shows are a supposedly improved version of other entertainments, those same things might eventually become defunct, he said. In the same way that the cinema and TV screen made "the opera and the novel" much smaller, something else might be on the way to do the same thing, the Netflix boss said at a Wall Street Journal event. Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va.

Microsoft has staked its future on a new version of Paint, everyone's favourite drawing application. The company has released an entirely redesigned of the app, named Paint 3D. And as the name suggests, it is built around three dimensional worlds – allowing people to draw things that take up virtual space. It works by letting take a picture of an object and then having their device construct that as a 3D image, for instance. Or it will let people doodle in 2D and then have that automatically changed into a 3D image.

As creepy clowns dominate the headlines and my email inbox fills up with pumpkins and ghouls it can only mean one thing -- this is Halloween. It seems like every retailer out there is trying to jump on the Halloween ghost train, and it's no wonder, with the NRF annual survey predicting spend in 2016 will hit $8.4bn, the highest in the survey's history. Even in the UK, where Halloween has always played second fiddle to the more traditional Bonfire Night, Halloween is the new holiday to back for retailers, now the second biggest party night after New Years Eve (Guardian, October 2015).

Sales teams use many systems and applications to run their operations. There are CRM, SFA, order management and billing applications to help capture customer and account information and manage various customer processes. These applications help sales to manage their day-to-day tasks, but are these tools helping them sell more? Why is it that even today, sales teams feel they don't have enough actionable, timely and contextual information to offer the right solution to a prospect and close the deal? Why is it that selling remains more of an art form than a repeatable scientific method?

Streaming analytics, machine learning and advanced analytics were among the most talked-about themes at this year s Strata and Hadoop World conference in New York.

There are two types of chatbots, one functions based on a set of rules, and the other more advanced version uses machine learning. Bots are created with a purpose. A store will likely want to create a bot that helps you purchase something, where someone like Comcast might create a bot that can answer customer support questions. You start to interact with a chatbot by sending it a message. Click here to try sending a message to the CNN chatbot on Facebook.

The latest AI project from the MIT Media Lab is demonstrating just how terrifying the prospects of deep learning can go. IBM Watson creates the first AI-made film trailer – and it's incredibly creepy Welcome to the Nightmare Machine: an algorithm that has been trained to generate horrifying images. It is attempting to find the scariest faces and locations possible, and gets humans to tell it which are the worst. The first aspect of the project, Haunted Faces, is truly terrifying. The team behind the project, led by Iyad Rahwan, associate professor at MIT Media Lab, used deep learning to generate new faces, before dropping "a hint of scariness" onto the generated faces in the spirit of Halloween.