In the Irish Sea off Wales this week, a new kind of robot is taking to the waves. For once, this is not a military kill-droid, nor a securo-pork powered surveillance machine. Instead, we are seeing the debut of the fully-autonomous sailboat, which uses its own software to navigate out at sea. For now the uninhabited windjammers will stay relatively close to home but, next year, their successors will race across the Atlantic.

Skype has blamed last week's prolonged outage on the effects of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday.