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"Scientists say they can deduce the lifestyle of an individual, down to the kind of grooming products they use, food they eat and medications they take, from chemicals found on the surface of their mobile phone."

"These are the early days of the data revolution in personal decision-making. I am not claiming that we can completely outsource our lifestyle choices to algorithms, though we might get to that point in the future. I am claiming instead that we can all dramatically improve our decision-making by consulting evidence mined from thousands or millions of people who faced dilemmas similar to ours. And we can do that now."

"Cathy Hackl: I think it's important to state that there is really no agreed-upon definition right now. Every morning-it's become a bit of a ritual-I go to the Merriam-Webster dictionary and type in the word metaverse. And every day it says this word is not in the dictionary. But if we needed to define it, I tend to have a pretty expansive view of what the metaverse is. I believe it's a convergence of our physical and digital lives. It's our digital lifestyles, which we've been living on phones or computers, slowly catching up to our physical lives in some way, so that full convergence. It is enabled by many different technologies, like AR [augmented reality] and VR [virtual reality], which are the ones that most people tend to think about. But they're not the only entry points. There's also blockchain, which is a big component, there's 5G, there's edge computing, and many, many other technologies. To me, the metaverse is also about our identity and digital ownership. It's about a new extension of human creativity in some ways. But it's not going to be like one day we're going to wake up and exclaim, "The metaverse is here!" It's going to be an evolution."

"A man appears to have deleted his entire company with one mistaken piece of code. By accidentally telling his computer to delete everything in his servers, hosting provider Marco Marsala has seemingly removed all trace of his company and the websites that he looks after for his customers."

"Two decades on, the institute has decided to terminate the licensing programme for some MP3-related patents which effectively halts industry support. Although users can still listen to their MP3 files, inventors of new technologies will probably not include the file format in their blueprints as they turn to more advanced alternatives."

"This all presents big questions for which we don't yet have answers. "At what point should kids know better?" asked David Dockterman, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When should a person's 'permanent digital record' start recording, if ever? To what extent should social media be a space for trial-and-error exploration around identity and social behavior?" "These are fantastically difficult moral dilemmas for teenagers who act impulsively, using tools that are not fully under their control, leading to consequences that perhaps none of us can anticipate," said Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "This is the first time we've had a society in which almost by default, everything is recorded and shared and aggregated in ways that create a lifelong profile. Children should have the right to make mistakes.""

"Pornbots create fake accounts that are designed to mimic real people. They steal photos from public social media accounts, and follow the real profile's friends. They tack on suggestive captions and post links to external paid adult sites. The fake accounts choose @usernames that are deceptively similar to those they impersonate. And for good measure, the fake accounts block the person they're copying, making it difficult for the victim to see or interact with them."