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"Staying on the subject of "we live in a dystopian digital hellscape": a Gizmodo investigation identified 32 data brokers selling access to the unique mobile IDs of people pegged as "actively pregnant" or "shopping for maternity products". At least one company was also offering access to a catalogue of people using the same sorts of emergency contraceptives that some Republican's want to outlaw or restrict."

"Nor are car owners the only consumers learning that software can be tricksy in a way hardware cannot. In 2017, Apple admitted that its software was slowing down the performance of older iPhones. It said that the design was aimed at saving battery life, but critics said it was an example of "planned obsolescence" - artificially shortening the life of a device to make buyers upgrade sooner. In 2009, Amazon provided a perfect metaphor for the potentially dystopian implications of the subscription economy when, without warning, it revoked copies of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four from all its Kindle e-readers."

""Western partners trusted me to distribute stuff, give them actionable feedback and then adapt the product to Ukrainian conditions," he explains during a trip back to San Francisco to harness help from local software engineers. He still spends part of his time in the fragments of the Donbas region that remain under Ukrainian control, so that he can observe his "customers" - Ukrainian soldiers - in action, in order to develop products they can use. "I like to say this is the world's first open-source war," says Oleg Rogynskyy, 35, another Ukrainian who runs a Silicon Valley start-up. He is also helping the Ukrainian cause and exchanging ideas with other computing engineers on social media sites, message groups such as Signal, and GitHub, the platform where coders exchange ideas."

"Senior executives at Uber ordered the use of a "kill switch" to prevent police and regulators from accessing sensitive data during raids on its offices in at least six countries, leaked files reveal. The instructions to block authorities from accessing its IT systems were part of a sophisticated global operation by the Silicon Valley company to thwart law enforcement."

"TOKYO/GUANGZHOU -- From shopping to banking to boarding airplanes, an economy based on facial recognition is taking root in Japan, enabling consumers to live a cashless, bag-free life. "

"Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as "much more than an electric car company." On Thursday's Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with "deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level" that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including a humanoid robot that Tesla is apparently building."

"The combination of software and IP in every device is a sea-change for the organization of our society. As firms have become increasingly concentrated - as monopolies have emerged in every sector - they have also figured out how to infuse their products with just enough software that they can invoke IP to control their competitors, critics, and customers. These are market power monopolies backstopped by creators' monopolies, which create IP rights that supercharge their market power."

"These exploits are based on chip engineering flaws, not on software flaws. Apple, Google, Abode, Microsoft, and other software companies didn't write poor software or bad Operating Systems to cause these problems to occur. Rather, the chip manufacturers - Intel, AMD and ARM - designed and then engineered computer chips with flaws built into them. Once discovered, those flaws allow the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to be run. Worse, these chips have been sold with consumer computers, servers and mobile devices since 1995. so the impact is, potentially, both personal and global in scope."

""The problem," Leveson wrote in a book, "is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.""

"The algorithm, called Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), is used throughout the US to weigh up whether defendants awaiting trial or sentencing are at too much risk of reoffending to be released on bail. Since being developed in 1998, the tool is reported to have been used to assess more than one million defendants. But a new paper has cast doubt on whether the software's predictions are sufficiently accurate to justify its use in potentially life-changing decisions."

"It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack"

"Toyota's Lexus rolled out an update for some of its cars, including RX350, which broke the vehicles' navigation and entertainment systems leaving them stuck in a boot loop. Lexus confirmed that the software updates are routinely pushed out via satellite to cars and that a faulty application may be to blame."

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

"re than a thousand British schools are monitoring pupils' online communication for bullying and self-harm using software that analyses and translates slang for teachers. The software uses a constantly updated dictionary which includes words that most adults would not understand. These include acronyms such as "gnoc" (get naked on camera) and "dirl" (die in real life) and words such as Bio-Oil, a commercial product which can be used by children who self-harm to reduce the appearance of scarring."

"Facebook and Twitter reported to have been blocked in run-up to protests, with people turning to VPNs to broadcast content"