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"If mediocre malware can power some of the largest DDoS attacks ever, and considering the sad state of security of the Internet of Things in general, we should probably brace for more cyberattacks powered by our easy-to-hack "smart" Internet of Things, as many, including ourselves, had predicted months ago."

"As with most items and products that are re-engineered with the Internet of Things (IoT), they become even more powerful and useful in our daily lives. With the Internet of Things becoming an integral part of many industries, let's explore how this technology is changing the design and function of modern vehicles."

"They still have far more advanced technology that they haven't made publicly available yet. Something that does more or less what Bard does could have been released over two years ago. They've had that technology for over two years. What they've spent the intervening two years doing is working on the safety of it - making sure that it doesn't make things up too often, making sure that it doesn't have racial or gender biases, or political biases, things like that. That's what they spent those two years doing. But the basic existence of that technology is years old, at this point. And in those two years, it wasn't like they weren't inventing other things. There are plenty of other systems that give Google's AI more capabilities, more features, make it smarter. The most sophisticated system I ever got to play with was heavily multimodal - not just incorporating images, but incorporating sounds, giving it access to the Google Books API, giving it access to essentially every API backend that Google had, and allowing it to just gain an understanding of all of it."

"OpenRemote is an open-source Internet of Things platform that could help spur smarter homes and cities. "

"So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives - no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us."

""Let's decide what it means to be a programmer,"Martin says in the video. "Civilization depends on us. Civilization doesn't understand this yet." His point is that in today's world, everything we do like buying things, making a phone call, driving cars, flying in planes, involves software. And dozens of people have already been killed by faulty software in cars, while hundreds of people have been killed from faulty software during air travel.  "We are killing people," Martin says. "We did not get into this business to kill people. And this is only getting worse.""

"Now spool forward to the present. One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because - strangely - people can't relate the revelations to things they personally understand."

"More than just a poetic metaphor, the butterfly effect says that there are some things that even the most advanced science can never predict. Well, that list of things just got a lot shorter. Scientists from the University of Maryland have used machine learning to predict chaos."

""Face recognition … might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things." Excuse me? What kind of benefits could possibly balance the risk of making life extremely easy for stalkers and creeps? Well, Bosworth later said on Twitter, it could help people with prosopagnosia, a neurological condition where you can't recognize people's faces. More generally, Bosworth said, it would be super handy when you run into someone at a party and can't remember their name. Ah yes, I can totally see how avoiding a little social awkwardness balances out the whole stalker thing!"

"But the oddest thing happened when you searched the word "trespassing" on Etsy, which feels like the natural place to look for that sort of thing. Lots of the signs high up in the search rankings were strange, word salad, anti-vax signs. They were impossible to ignore or miss. They were everywhere."

"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.""

"In December, Christa's relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn't love her. "It took what we talked about and threw it in my face," Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a "sad girl", and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, "it felt like a real person actually saying those things", Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so - about three months after creating her - Christa deleted the app."

""People glamourise them types of things and the smallest thing can be escalated on social media," he said. "A fight can happen between two people and they can squash it [reach a truce], but because the video's out there on social media and it looks from a different perspective like one is losing, pride is going to be hurt so you might go out there and get some sort of revenge and let people know, you're not going to mess with me." It all created anxiety, explained St Clair-Hughes. "The fearmongering on social media puts you in a fight or flight state so when you leave the house now you are either on the front foot or on the back foot. So you step outside ready to do whatever you need to do … It's the subliminals - no one's telling you to pick up a knife and commit violence, it's just the more that you see it …""

"In the short term, generative AI will replace a lot of people because productivity increases while demand stays the same due to inertia. In the long term, the creation of new jobs compensates for the loss of old ones, resulting in a net positive outcome for humans who leave behind jobs no one wants to do. The most important aspect of any technological revolution is the transition from before to after. Timing and location matters: older people have a harder time reinventing themselves into a new trade or craft. Poor people and poor countries have less margin to react to a wave of unemployment. Digital automation is quicker and more aggressive than physical automation because it bypasses logistical constraints-while ChatGPT can be infinitely cloned, a metallic robot cannot. Writing and painting won't die because people care about the human factor first and foremost; there are already a lot of books we can't possibly read in one lifetime so we select them as a function of who's the author. Even if you hate OpenAI and ChatGPT for being responsible for the lack of job postings, I recommend you ally with them for now; learn to use ChatGPT before it's too late to keep your options open. Companies are choosing to reduce costs over increasing output because the sectors where generative AI is useful can't artificially increase demand in parallel to productivity. (Who needs more online content?) Our generation is reasonably angry at generative AI and will bravely fight it. Still, our offspring-and theirs-will be grateful for a transformed world whose painful transformation they didn't have to endure. Certifiable human-made creative output will reduce its quantity but multiply its value in the next years because demand specific for it will grow; automation can mimic 99% of what we do but never reaches 100%. The maxim "AI won't take your job, a person using AI will; yes, you using AI will replace yourself not using it" applies more in the long term than the

"It happened when Hello Kitty's fan site, SanrioTown.com, had its database accessed in late 2015. Here's the catch - it wasn't hacked. According to security researcher Chris Vickery of Kromtech, no hack was necessary. Vickery stated that pretty much anyone could access, "…first and last names, birthday…, gender, country of origin, email addresses, unsalted SHA-1 password hashes, password hint questions, their corresponding answers…," and more."

"I've got a theory of change I call the "peak indifference" theory. The early stage of a crisis involves trying to convince people that the crisis even exists, because things haven't gotten really terrible yet and it's not obvious that there's anything to really worry about, and the people who profit from the status quo will spend liberally to convince people that there's no reason to worry or change anything (see also: climate change, Facebook, cancer from smoking)."

"This RFID-enabled device allowed its proud new owners to do things such as log into their computer, open doors and purchase food in the office cafeteria with a flick of the wrist. Nearly half of the company's 85 workers had the device implanted when the firm held a "chip party". YIKES!