"In fact the $60bn multinational has just been scooped by Nutonomy, a small MIT spin-out whose electric self-driving cabs have already started picking up real customers in a Singapore business park. Initially, riders will use Nutonomy's own app to summon hail a Mitsubishi i-Miev or a Renault Zoe, ramping up to a dozen vehicles in the coming months."

"Ingram, a 60-year-old Uber driver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had just learned that Uber would be deploying autonomous cars to accept fares in her city within weeks. The announcement on Thursday morning sent shockwaves through the community of about 4,000 drivers that serve Pennsylvania's second largest city. "

"Instead password strength meters measure entropy - the amount of time or energy needed to crack a password using brute force methods. The longer and more complex the password, the longer it will take to crack by simply iterating through a list of all possible passwords. According to Stockley, however, brute force is a password cracker's last resort."

""The satellite's two-year mission will be to develop 'hack-proof' quantum communications, allowing users to send messages securely and at speeds faster than light," Xinhua reported."

"London-born Stanford student Joshua Browder created DoNotPay initially to help people appeal against fines for unpaid parking tickets. Dubbed "the world's first robot lawyer", Browder later programmed it to deal with a wider range of legal issues, such as claiming for delayed flights and trains and payment protection insurance (PPI)."

"Imagine if it would have more of an impact for Palestine to be recognised as a sovereign country by Google than by the UN. It's a suggestion that's caught fire - a five-month-old online petition demanding Palestine be labeled and bordered in Google Maps has gained more than 250,000 signatures just over the past few days."

"Security experts who looked at the app, known as ByLock, at the request of Reuters said it appeared to be the work of amateur software developers and had left important information about its users unencrypted."

"There's an increasingly popular solution to this problem: why not let an intelligent algorithm make hiring decisions for you? Surely, the thinking goes, a computer is more able to be impartial than a person, and can simply look at the relevant data vectors to select the most qualified people from a heap of applications, removing human bias and making the process more efficient to boot."

""Equal access does imply equal opportunities," says the report, which goes on to point out that while anyone can use the internet to learn about the world, improve their skills or apply for a well-paid job, disadvantaged students are less likely to be aware of the opportunities that digital technology offers. "They may not have the knowledge or skills required to turn online opportunities into real opportunities," the report says."

"Bruce Schneier makes the point that if the Russian state is behind the DNC hacks, there's no reason to expect that its attacks on the US political system will end there. Voting machines are so notoriously terrible that they'd be a very tempting target for Russia or other states that want to influence the outcome in 2016 (or merely destabilize the US by calling into question the outcome in an election). "

"It's been less than a year since Philips pushed out a firmware update that gave its light fixtures the ability to detect and reject non-Philips lightbulbs -- and thanks to laws like the DMCA, which have metastasized in the IoT era, it's a potential felony to alter your light fixture to override this behavior and force it to work with non-Philips bulbs."

"In response, the architects of the internet developed a kind of digital Esperanto: a common language that enabled data to travel across any network. In 1974, two Arpa researchers named Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf published an early blueprint. Drawing on conversations happening throughout the international networking community, they sketched a design for "a simple but very flexible protocol": a universal set of rules for how computers should communicate."

"Researchers have demonstrated how garbled speech commands hidden in radio or video broadcasts could be used to control a smartphone. The clips, which sound like the Daleks from Doctor Who, can be difficult for humans to understand but still trigger a phone's voice control functionality. The commands could make a smartphone share its location data, make calls and access compromised websites."

"Up to 10 million Android smartphones have been infected by malware that generates fake clicks for adverts, say security researchers. The software is also surreptitiously installing apps and spying on the browsing habits of victims. The malware is currently making about $300,000 (£232,000) a month for its creators, suggests research."

"With all the personal data it collects, your wrist-mounted wearable computer is almost definitely going to betray you at some point, whether that's a reminder to get up and do another 5,000 steps this afternoon or accidentally giving away your ATM PIN. According to a new paper, ominously titled "Friend or Foe?: Your Wearable Devices Reveal Your Personal PIN" it is surprisingly simple to determine your PIN or password by reverse-engineering motion sensor data from a smartwatch or fitness tracker."

"The government's scheme to store patients' medical information in a single database, which ran into massive problems over confidentiality, is to be scrapped, NHS England has said. The decision to axe the scheme, care.data, follows the publication of two reports that support far greater transparency over what happens to the information, and opt-outs for patients who want their data seen only by those directly caring for them."

"A strain of of Android malware has infected 85 million victims across the globe, generating at least $300,000 every month for the gang behind it, thanks to millions of pop-up adverts and app downloads."

"There aren't many exit nodes out there. Many people fear that running an exit node will put them in police crosshairs if it gets used in the commission of a crime. For the record, Boing Boing runs a very high-capacity exit node, and though we've received multiple contacts from US law enforcement, we've just explained that this is a Tor node that runs with logging switched off, and thus we have no information that'll be relevant to any investigations, and the officers involved have thanked us and gone away without further trouble. "

"The first known death caused by a self-driving car was disclosed by Tesla Motors on Thursday evening, a development that is sure to cause consumers to second-guess the trust they put in the booming autonomous vehicle industry. "

"A financial crime database used by banks has been "leaked" on to the net. World-Check Risk Screening contains details about people and organisations suspected of being involved in terrorism, organised crime and money laundering, among other offences. Access is supposed to be restricted under European privacy law"