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A murder investigation has been launched and a man has been arrested after the death of a woman in Colchester.

Also: Departures from Redmond, going big with Surface Hub, and celebrating third place

In brief  Build 21292 of Windows 10 arrived for Dev Channel Windows Insiders last week and while there was little of interest, the team was delighted to note that it had continued to work on the x64 emulation in the Arm edition of the operating system.…

Health Secretary Matt Hancock will lead a Downing Street press conference this evening after the Government said vaccines will be offered to millions of over 70s and the clinically extremely vulnerable from this week.

The woman was rushed to hospital after having to be cut free from the car

Here's some news from CNN for the 30 million tourists visiting Venice, Italy each year: They're watching you, wherever you walk. They know exactly where you pause, when you slow down and speed up, and they count you in and out of the city. What's more, they're tracking your phone, so they can tell exactly how many people from your country or region are in which area, at which time. And they're doing it in a bid to change tourism for the better. Welcome to Venice in a post-Covid world.... Before Covid-19 struck, tourists were arriving in often unmanageable numbers, choking the main streets and filling up the waterbuses... Enter the Venice Control Room. On the island of Tronchetto, next to the two-mile bridge separating Venice from the Italian mainland, the Control Room opened in September 2020. A former warehouse that had been abandoned since the 1960s, it's part of a new headquarters for the city's police and government — a self-described "control tower" for the city. The building has offices for the mayor, other dignitaries, and a large CCTV room, with cameras feeding in images from around the city, watched over by the police. So far so normal. But then, across the corridor, there's the Smart Control Room — another bank of screens with images and information coming live from around the lagoon. They're not being monitored for crime, though; they're feeding information to the authorities that will create a profile of the hordes of people visiting Venice. The hope is that gathering the information will not only track footfall now, enabling the authorities to activate turnstiles and start charging for entrance on busy days. Eventually, they hope that the data will help create a more sustainable tourism plan for the future.... At 10am, the arrivals reached a peak of 2,411: most likely the daytrippers. The authorities can see where these new arrivals are from by analyzing their phone data (the information is all aggregated automatically, so no personal details can be gleaned).... The system took three years to build, at a cost of €3m ($3.5m). And although some might baulk at the privacy implications (although no personal data is recorded, you and your provenance is essentially being logged as you move around the city), the authorities are very proud.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Boris Johnson announced a lockdown earlier this month and confirmed it would be reviewed in February

Zoom is great for status update meetings, says big cheese, but as for inspiring a workforce...

To some of us, the work-from-home revolution provides a welcome opportunity to spend time with family members, even though working and studying shoulder-to-shoulder might not be a frictionless process.…

WE'RE heading out to the coast for today's round of pub nostalgia.

STAFF from more than 100 organisations in north Essex are being administered coronavirus vaccinations.

A DOCTORS surgery has had to temporarily close its doors after a number of staff members tested positive for coronavirus.

Plus: Google trains 1.6-trillion-parameter AI model, popular software used for job screenings scraps facial-recognition feature

In brief  Just days before President Trump is due to leave office, the White House created its National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, which will sit under the Office of Science and Technology Policy.…

Essex is likely to see more flooding this week

She is expecting with boyfriend Charles Dury

Here is a run down of the latest coronavirus infection rate figures for Colchester, Tendring and mid Essex.

Police fined a woman who flouted coronavirus rules by driving from Colchester to Norwich to deliver a birthday present.

Met police fined nearly 50 people at the illegal car meet

Pat Gelsinger returning to Chipzilla as CEO is another extraordinary stroke of luck for the company

Column  Intel has been many things. It has been a struggling startup, surfing the sudden successes and near-death experiences of 1970s Silicon Valley. It's been a relentless powerhouse, ruthlessly exploiting its dominance as personal computing rode Moore's Law to commercial and social revolution. Now it's in danger of seeing its supremacy crumble as rivals grab markets and mindshare with better manufacturing and marketing as Moore's Law itself turns to sand.…

The building erupted into flames yesterday afternoon

"I increasingly suspect that the days of large-scale public distribution of unmoderated user generated content on the Internet may shortly begin drawing to a close in significant ways..." writes long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein. And then he shares "a bit of history": Back in 1985 when I launched my "Stargate" experiment to broadcast Usenet Netnews over the broadcast television vertical blanking interval of national "Superstation WTBS," I decided that the project would only carry moderated Usenet newsgroups. Even more than 35 years ago, I was concerned about some of the behavior and content already beginning to become common on Usenet... My determination for Stargate to only carry moderated groups triggered cries of "censorship," but I did not feel that responsible moderation equated with censorship — and that is still my view today. And now, all these many years later, it's clear that we've made no real progress in these regards... But as it stands now, Weinstein believes were probably headed to "a combination of steps taken independently by social media firms and future legislative mandates." [M]y extremely strong preference is that we deal with these issues together as firms, organizations, customers, and users — rather than depend on government actions that, if history is any guide, will likely do enormous negative collateral damage. Time is of the essence. Weinstein suggests one possibility: that moderation at scale "may follow the model of AI-based first-level filtering, followed by layers of human moderators." But what's the alternative? Throngs of human moderators? Leaving it all to individual users? Limiting the amount of user-generated content? No moderation whatsoever? Share your own thoughts and ideas in the comments. How should user-generated content be moderated?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NATIONAL lockdown restrictions are unlikely to start to be eased before early March, the vaccines Minister has said.