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"Here's how the program, which has been developed in partnership with SWGfL, a UK-based non-profit behind the Revenge Porn Helpline, works. If you've shared an intimate image with someone and are worried that that person might do something nefarious with it, you can send the images to content moderators at Facebook to be "hashed"- essentially the image is assigned a digital fingerprint. If someone then tries to upload that image to Facebook it can be quickly identified and blocked. It's obviously not a silver bullet for stopping revenge porn, and it requires putting a lot of trust in Facebook and accepting that a random content moderator is going to be looking at your naked photos, but it gives people a little bit of control over their images."

"It would be a bit glib-and more than a little clichéd-to call this some kind of technological dystopia. Actually, dystopia wouldn't be right, exactly: Dystopian fiction is generally speculative, whereas all of these items and services are real. At the end of September, Amazon announced a suite of tech products in its move toward "ambient intelligence," which Amazon's hardware chief, Dave Limp, described as technology and devices that slip into the background but are "always there," collecting information and taking action against it. This intense devotion to tracking and quantifying all aspects of our waking and non-waking hours is nothing new-see the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, social media writ large, and the smartphone in your pocket-but Amazon has been unusually explicit about its plans. The Everything Store is becoming an Everything Tracker, collecting and leveraging large amounts of personal data related to entertainment, fitness, health, and, it claims, security. It's surveillance that millions of customers are opting in to."

"Carolan, who is 18 and has just completed an art foundation course in Cardiff, decided architecture would be a safer path to follow. "It feels like it will be a more secure degree. Lots of psychology goes into architecture," he says. "You need to understand the core of what you're doing." He is doubtful that images made by artificial intelligence will replace the art exhibited in galleries, but he worries that commercial projects previously requiring a team of artists may in the future need only one to work with AI and neaten up the final product. "The options will probably get limited as time goes on. Personally, I'd find it a bit depressing if there wasn't a human element, but whether or not we'd notice I'm not sure. I always thought things like art would be one of the last things robots would be able to do.""

"But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don't have to be a tech wizard to do it. In mid-January this year, Kashmir Hill, a talented American tech reporter, used three bits of everyday consumer electronics - Apple AirTags, Tiles and a GPS tracker - to track her husband's every move. He agreed to this in principle, but didn't realise just how many devices she had planted on him. He found only two of the trackers: a Tile he felt in the breast pocket of his coat and an AirTag in his backpack when he was looking for something else. "It is impossible to find a device that makes no noise and gives no warning," he said when she showed him the ones he missed."

"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."

"First, the authors expect that 80% of the US workforce could see at least 10% of their tasks affected by GPT. In other words, most Americans could benefit at least a bit from these LLMs."

"Some might scoff at this, and point out that news organisations make their own mistakes all the time - more consequential than my physicist/physician howler, if less humiliating. But cases of bad journalism are almost always warped representations of the real world, rather than missives from an imaginary one. Crucially, if an outlet gets big things wrong a lot, its reputation will suffer, and its audience are likely to vote with their feet, or other people will publish stories that air the mistake. And all of it will be out in the open. You may also note that journalists are increasingly likely to use AI in the production of stories - and there is no doubt that it is a phenomenally powerful tool, allowing investigative reporters to find patterns in vast financial datasets that reveal corruption, or analyse satellite imagery for evidence of bombing attacks in areas designated safe for civilians. There is a legitimate debate over the extent of disclosure required in such cases: on the one hand, if the inputs and outputs are being properly vetted, it might be a bit like flagging the use of Excel; on the other, AI is still new enough that readers may expect you to err on the side of caution. Still, the fundamental difference is not in what you're telling your audience, but what degree of supervision you're exercising over the machine."

"That's because Facebook cracks down on my son, the Bach lover, but seems to allow rampant copyright violations on their reels. These endlessly scrolling videos earn billions of dollars for Silicon Valley-because of their addictive interface. But the apps need an equally endless source of video clips. This forces them to recycle copyrighted material. I'm referring to movie clips, extracts from old TV series, sports highlights, comedy routines, bits of talk show interviews, filmed music performances, and other snippets culled from various entertainment sources."

The BBC has defended its plan to supply a million schoolchildren with free micro:bit computers after it was criticised for delaying the launch until at least 2016.

Hmm you will not believe how good these are...

Its a tad bit scary.

"Luckily for the kid, it was only a single tweet. Had several students gotten together to form a study group, they might have been prosecuted for felony interference with a business model and gotten the death penalty. Do you suppose Pearson has hidden microphones set up around the schools so they can also listen in and see if students discuss the tests during lunch? I ask because that is basically the offline version of the student's infraction."

Sounds a bit extreme just to make sure no one can log on to your laptop or smartphone, but a team of researchers from Stanford and Northwestern universities as well as SRI International is nonetheless experimenting at the computer-, cognitive- and neuroscience intersection to combat identity theft and shore up cyber security-by taking advantage of the human brain's innate abilities to learn and recognize patterns.