Stories by Peter Sayer

To speed up in-flight internet access don't stick a rocket on it, but a xenon-ion propulsion system (XIPS).

A major British Airways crash has highlighted the importance for businesses of testing backup systems and disaster recovery procedures to ensure that they work as planned.

Artificial intelligence is where the competition is in IT, with Microsoft and Google both parading powerful, always-available AI tools for the enterprise at their respective developer conferences, Build and I/O, in May.

Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java.

Steve Ballmer's latest hobby, USAfacts.org, cast a spotlight on the effectiveness of local, state and federal governments when it launched in April. Its easy-to-read dashboards allow ordinary citizens to compare government's performance of its core missions with spending at all levels.

Facebook must pay a €110 million (US$123 million) for misleading the European Commission during an investigation of its takeover of WhatsApp.

IBM has some new options for businesses wanting to experiment with quantum computing.

SAP wants to speed up how analytics adapt to change. It's doing that by embedding SAP Predictive Analytics' machine learning capabilities in S/4Hana.

SAP has added machine-learning to its Leonardo IoT software suite to help businesses handle data gathered from smart devices more intelligently.

The French data protection watchdog has imposed its harshest penalty on Facebook for six breaches of French privacy law.

Add Germany to the list of places where businesses can test their self-driving cars on the open road -- as long as they have a driver sitting at the wheel ready to take control at any time.

On May 11, 1997, a computer showed that it could outclass a human in that most human of pursuits: playing a game. The human was World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, and the computer was IBM's Deep Blue. Murray Campbell, one of Deep Blue's creators, talks about the other things computers have learned to do as well as, or better than, humans, and what that means for our future.

Uber operates a transport service, not a software service, and so can be subject to taxi licensing regulations, the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union has advised.

E-commerce businesses may face further antitrust investigations, the European Union's top competition watchdog has warned. The European Commission hopes these investigations will lead to more choice and lower prices for consumers, online and off.

German news publishers suing Google for copyright dues under a 2013 law may get more than they bargained for.