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""Self-drive cars will probably work through internet connectivity and, just as large volumes of electronic traffic can be routed to overwhelm websites, the opportunity for self-drive traffic being routed to create 'spam jams' or disruption is a very real prospect.""

"A newly released set of slides from the Snowden leaks reveals that the NSA is harvesting millions of facial images from the Web for use in facial recognition algorithms through a program called "Identity Intelligence." James Risen and Laura Poitras's NYT piece shows that the NSA is linking these facial images with other biometrics, identity data, and "behavioral" data including "travel, financial, behaviors, social network." "

"In 2012, a contest for US schools to win a gig by Taylor Swift was hijacked by members of the 4chan website, who piled ​on its online vote in an attempt to send the pop star to a school for deaf children. Now, imagine a similar stunt being pulled for a general election, if voting could be done online. Far-fetched? Not according to Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden's Pirate ​party. "Voting over the internet? Would you really want 4chan to decide your next government?" he said, during a debate about democracy and technology in London, organised by the BBC as part of its Democracy Day event."

"Rutgers University's new program also uses a "behavior observation tool," which monitors student browser activity throughout an active session. While this feature is intended to prevent students from using the Internet to cheat on exams, the power that this grants instructors is extremely invasive. If a student accidentally leaves a personal or embarrassing website in their browser during an online course, a ProctorTrack instructor might stumble upon their activity."

"America's National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of "targeted" individuals who've done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you've been targeted."

""When the intelligence services are gathering data about every one of us but failing to act on intelligence about individuals, they need to get back to basics, and look at the way they conduct targeted investigations. "The committee is particularly misleading when it implies that US companies do not co-operate, and it is quite extraordinary to demand that companies pro-actively monitor email content for suspicious material. Internet companies cannot and must not become an arm of the surveillance state."

"HTTP/2 is a more modern protocol that essentially speeds web browsing up using new ways of transporting data between the browser and server across the internet. It is backwards compatible with HTTP1.1 and uses most of the same technologies, but it is more efficient and allows servers to respond with more content than was originally requested, removing the need for the user's computer to continually send requests for more information until a website is fully loaded."

"The company behind Whisper, the social media app that promises users anonymity and claims to be "the safest place on the internet", is tracking the location of its users, including some who have specifically asked not to be followed. The practice of monitoring the whereabouts of Whisper users - including those who have expressly opted out of geolocation services - will alarm users, who are encouraged to disclose intimate details about their private and professional lives."

"This is what's about to happen with twitpic, for years the go-to service for posting photos to Twitter, and the people in charge appear to be doing what they can to prevent the Internet Archive preserving the database and to deny users functional archive access to their own uploads. "

"Researchers at Incapsula have discovered a botnet that runs on compromised CCTV cameras. There are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of these in the field, and like many Internet of Things devices, their security is an afterthought and not fit for purpose. "

""The Supreme Court's decision shows that we have a copyright law that is behind the times and insufficient faced with the digital reality we all live in," it said in a statement. It noted that tourists who take selfies of themselves at famous landmarks and spread them on the Internet could be deemed in violation of copyright laws."