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There's no doubting the cloud invasion. But the research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement on Monday. "Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

Facebook's pending initial public offering gives credence to the argument that personal data is the oil of the digital age. The company was built on a formula common to the technology industry: offer people a service, collect information about them as they use that service and use that information to sell advertising.

Proposed Q&A site for operators of 3D printers, heads of hacker spaces, hardware hackers, service bureau owners, MakerBot tinkerers, product entrepreneurs, MAKE magazine subscribers, and all others who want to make physical things with computers.

Did you know everything important about your personality, morality and worldview can be defined into one of nine categories? It's true… at least if you're a Dungeons & Dragons character from the first to third editions. Not every tabletop role-player has been a a fan of D&D's Alignment system, which help players define their characters' behavior, but now that Wizards of the Coast is hard at work on D&D's fifth edition, I'd like to make an earnest plea for them to bring it back in its original, nine-aspect glory by showcasing the Alignments from best to worst.

""MY, WHAT a big mouth you have, Grandma," says Little Red Riding Hood, with just a hint of suspicion. The wolf sneezes. "Bless you," says the little girl. Sound odd? That's because this snippet of Little Red Riding Hood was written not by a person but by a piece of software called Xapagy. It may not seem like much, but it demonstrates a first step towards computers that can invent stories. It also signals a new approach to designing a more human-like artificial intelligence."

Last week as part of its glitzy annual conference in Long Beach, California, TED awarded its $1 million prize to Sugata Mitra to support his wish to build a "School in the Cloud," a self-organized learning environment based on his "Hole in the Wall" and "Granny Cloud" research. Next week Pearson, the largest and most powerful education company in the world, will publish Dale Stephens' book Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will, a personal experience narrative and guide about dropping out of college and making it in Silicon Valley.

"Big Data is watching you. And it's big business. Credit card companies, for instance, are selling the data about what you're consuming. So why is it that you, as the person manufacturing the data, has no say over who's using it or what they're doing with it? "That's got to change," argues Rick Smolan who co-authored the book The Human Face of Big Data (available for download as a tab let app here) an ambitious project that aims to capture the "men, women, and children whose lives are being transformed by this data revolution.""

"It's got to be one of the coolest names ever for a group: The Kansas Anti Zombie Militia. But the group is real and its members are pretty serious about it. Once the Zombie Apocalypse hits, they'll be ready for it and they want you to be too. "Can a natural person change into this monster that many fear?" Alfredo Carbajal, the militia's main spokesman, said in an interview. "The possibilities are yes, it can happen. We have seen incidents that are very close to it, and we are thinking it is more possible than people think.""

"Passwords control your life. From accessing work email and stock prices on the go to checking a grocery store shopping list, passwords have become the primary source of identifying who you are. They are arguably more important than your driver's license. But with that ubiquity comes risk - this tiny, yet powerful device contains enough information to expose your financial or health records and other personal details. From an enterprise perspective, the risks are just as great, if not greater."

A real-world demonstration of a thought experiment conducted at the University of Vienna, has produced a result that is somewhat befuddling to people with what the lead researcher calls a "naïve classical world view." Two pairs of particles are either quantum-entangled or not. One person makes the decision as to whether to entangle them or not, and another pair of people measure the particles to see whether they're entangled or not.

Unthinkable as it may be, humanity, every last person, could someday be wiped from the face of the Earth. We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.

A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity.  The document, part of a program called "Communities Against Terrorism", lists the use of "anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address" as a sign that a person could be engaged in or supporting terrorist activity.  The use of encryption is also listed as a suspicious activity along with steganography, the practice of using "software to hide encrypted data in digital photos" or other media.  In fact, the flyer recommends that anyone "overly concerned about privacy" or attempting to "shield the screen from view of others" should be considered suspicious and potentially engaged in terrorist activities.

After reading your recent post, I thought you might find this interesting - especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It's an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading - with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later - he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike.

Facebook and Google are two of technology's great data projects. Love them or hate them, they spend all day mining their users' activity. They harvest a few dozen bits of usable personal information per user per day. All in the interest of serving you ads.

A privacyscore estimates the privacy risk of using a website based on how they handle your personal and tracking data.

Our personal data is among today's most valuable information currency. It's often hard to determine what part companies own, what part the government owns, and what part, if any, is entirely our own - provided a third party hasn't already sold it to someone else.

It's impossible to grasp the consequences or outcomes of new technology, especially when that technology is developed by a twenty-something hacker. That much was already clear in January 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington that Facebook isn't just a place to connect with your friends. It was a place to be more public than ever before. "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time," he said. "But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."