Top IT stories this week: Apple Pay, zero-days and Barclays

Our seven most-read stories from the past seven days.

7. Barclays to pay out £250 each to 2,000 customers after losing personal data

Barclays is to fork out half a million pounds in compensation after losing a USB stick containing personal data of about 2,000 of its customers in 2008.

6. Murky trade in zero-day malware uncovered as leaks show Hacking Team bought MS Office exploit from security firm Netragard

When hackers dumped the contents of Italian firm Hacking Team's servers on the internet it shone a light on the murky trade in zero-day exploits. One supplier of malware to Hacking Team, whose software has been used by governments to spy on journalists, lawyers and activists, is pen test company Netragard, whose CEO bizarrely argued that the trade should be better regulated.

5. Chief digital officer - Who, what, why, when, where, how?

The number of chief digital officers (CDO) across the globe is soaring, but the scope of the role has led to much debate. Sooraj Shah interviews a number of CEOs, CIOs and CDOs to find out what all the fuss is about.

4. DevOps Summit: Are you a digital unicorn, or still held back by 'hysterically-grown' legacy systems?

Speaking at Computing's DevOps Summit 2015, senior director of pre-sales for application delivery EMEA at CA Technologies, Georg von Sperling was pulling no punches when advising companies on how to become more agile.

"When you look at it, the digital unicorns are the Ubers, the Amazons, or little startups," he said.

"The original enterprise is actually encumbered by lazy or hysterically-grown systems and processes - so you have your mainframe systems, various backend systems, supply chain, SAP - all those things that Uber doesn't have."

3. Top 10 fictional AIs and supercomputers: from Holly to Hal 9000

With artificial intelligence very much the topic du jour, Danny Palmer looks at how film-makers have thought about the subject over the years, selecting the 10 most iconic examples of apparently sentient, self-regenerating and often rather menacing machines. If your favourite has been missed off the list be sure to tell us in the comments section, but remember folks, robots and AI are not the same thing.

2. Apple Pay goes live in the UK - but HSBC customers will have to wait

If you've noticed people waving their phones around in the supermarket checkout line here's why. Apple Pay has gone live. Many credit card companies now allow customers to use their iPhones, iPads or Apple Watches to make payments at more than 250,000 shops - provided they don't spend more than £20.

1. Computing Vendor Excellence Awards 2015: and the winners are...

Last week's Vendor Excellence Awards were entered by an impressive variety of top technology companies. But who took away the prizes in categories such as Enterprise Mobility, Big Data and Analytics and Converged infrastructure.

Plenty of people wanted to find out, making this our top story this week..