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"Five thousand bees will be fitted with the tiny 2.5 mm square RFID chips, which will allow the scientists to track their movements much like a toll tag on your car lets the roadway authority know when you drive past a certain point. Bees tend to fly in regular repeatable patterns, so any changes in their activity will be easy to spot. To tag the bees, they are placed in a refrigerator to make them immobile, then the tags are simply attached with adhesive. The researchers say that the tag has no effect on a bee's behavior, but how would you like to have a big square chip glued to the back of your neck?"

"My personal coding projects have presented similarly thorny ethical questions. Should I write a computer program that will download the communications of thousands of teenagers suffering from eating disorders posted on an anorexia advice website? Write a program to post anonymous, suicidal messages on hundreds of college forums to see which colleges offer the most support? My answer to these questions, incidentally, was "no". But I considered it. And the glory and peril of computers is that they magnify the impact of your whims: an impulse becomes a program that can hurt thousands of people."

"It sounds complicated, but the upside is how robust this write-once storage medium is. Microsoft claims the glass can be boiled in water, baked at 500 degrees in an oven, blasted in a microwave, and demagnetized, but the data it contains will survive. The lifetime is also incredibly long and measured in thousands of years."

"Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams.8 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators).On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process.9 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/.Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don't moderate).10 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 ("Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable."); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley's Self-Regulating Days "Probably Should Be" Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https:/

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically-now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred.1 1. Zachary Laub, Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons, Council on Foreign Rel. (Jun. 7, 2019), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons.Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints.2 2. Tony Romm, Republicans Accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of Bias. Democrats Called the Hearing 'Dumb.', Wash. Post (Jul. 17, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/17/republicans-accused-facebook-google-twitter-bias-democrats-called-hearing-dumb/?utm_term=.895b34499816.And that's not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect."

"Artists say AI image generators are copying their style to make thousands of new images - and it's completely out of their control"

"Researchers at the University of California-Santa Barbara recently discovered a Waze vulnerability that allowed them to create thousands of "ghost drivers" that can monitor the drivers around them-an exploit that could be used to track Waze users in real-time. They proved it to me by tracking my own movements around San Francisco and Las Vegas over a three-day period."

"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."

"The handheld Zebedee scanner, developed by the CSIRO, uses a powerful laser to sweep an environment and create a 3D map accurate to the centimetre. The scanner had already been used and was saving police "many thousands of hours in investigation", Queensland police commissioner Ian Stewart said at the device's official launch on Friday."

"There's just one problem: the liking was fake, done by a team of low-paid workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose boss demanded just $15 per thousand "likes" at his "click farm". Workers punching the keys might be on a three-shift system, and be paid as little as $120 a year."

"It might not sound like much, but the success of the Minwa supercomputer, which can sort a million images into a thousand predefined categories with an error rate less than the typical human, makes it the latest secret weapon of the company known as "China's Google", Baidu."

"One of the most widely used tools for monitoring and restricting pupils' internet use in UK schools has a serious security flaw which could leave hundreds of thousands of children's personal information exposed to hackers, a researcher has warned."

The plight of Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar was thrust into the spotlight last month after thousands of migrants were left stranded at sea - but not all the images being shared online are what they seem to be.

"While a full move to driverless cars would be Uber's dream scenario, letting it cut the cost of a ride to little more than fuel plus wear and tear, it could very well be a nightmare for car manufacturers. Self-driving cars could prove the death-knell for private car ownership, with services like Uber offering a cheap substitution while avoiding the wastefulness of leaving an asset worth thousands of pounds sit unused on the side of the road."

"Transistors use grooves etched in silicon to guide electrons around the chip. The channels do a similar job to that of wires, but on a much smaller scale. Making these grooves just 7nm wide means you can fit more transistors on the chips. For comparison a strand of human hair, at 100,000nm thick, is about 10,000 times wider than the channel. A red blood cell is a thousand times bigger, at 7,500nm in diameter. A strand of DNA is in the same order of magnitude, but slightly smaller at just 2.5nm wide."

"More specifically: delivery robots. What you see here is DRU (Domino's Robotic Unit), an autonomous delivery vehicle built in collaboration with Australian technology startup Marathon Targets that Domino's says is the first of its kind. It's filled with thousands of dollars worth of military robotics tech, but its covert mission has been to deliver fresh pizza to the residents of Queensland."

"About two years ago the retail team lost another key task: negotiating with major brands and manufacturers the terms of popular sales on the site called "Lightning Deals." Common during the holidays as well as Mother's Day and Father's Day, they help move lots of inventory in a short period. Now, instead of calling their vendor manager at Amazon, the makers of handbags, smartphone accessories and other products simply logged into an Amazon portal that would determine if Amazon liked the deal being offered and the quantity it was willing to buy. No small talk. No give and take. Thousands of Amazon man hours spent forecasting demand, planning marketing strategies and negotiating deals was now handled by software, a major leap in efficiency."

"The social network, which did not oppose the application, has until mid-January to comply. The parody accounts, @Wetherspoon__UK and @SpoonsTom, have tens of thousands of followers each on the social network, and tweet a mixture of fake updates about Wetherspoon's pubs and replies to users who mistakenly believe they are contacting the real company."

"The Facebook data, which captured the engagement metrics on thousands of posts by the six major party leaders in the two months leading up to the election, was collected by academics at the University of Pisa's MediaLab. It reveals all of the 25 most shared Facebook posts in the two months leading up to the election were videos, live broadcasts or photos from either Salvini, who runs the far-right League, or Di Maio, the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S)."

"When Vancouver tech retailer NCIX went bankrupt, it stopped paying its bills, including the bills for the storage where its servers were being kept; that led to the servers being auctioned off without being wiped first, containing sensitive data -- addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, passwords, etc -- for thousands of customers. Also on the servers: tax and payroll information for the company's employees."

"In a world of cloud computing, everything we do is governed by tens of thousands of words of legal fine-print (including the fine print that warned Mr da Silva that his movies might stop working if he changed the region associated with his Itunes account) that no one (including Mr da Silva, and you, and me) has ever, ever read (famously so!)."