"Sure, it's a cool display of human-tracked motion into a robotic mechanism, but if you aren't seeing the scary place this samurai robot demo is going, you're probably just being really optimistic."

"The ability to understand an individual's unique anatomic configuration from skin to bone can be a significant benefit to a surgeon, especially prior to a complex operation. Immersive VR will enable surgeons to explore their patient's virtual body-reconstructed from their CT or MRI data-and plan or even practice difficult surgeries prior to the actual procedure. "

"Ddos attacks have been used to cause both financial and reputational damage to businesses and services from Sony to government websites. The attacks can last from hours to days, and typically use computers or internet routers infected with viruses to make innocent users unwitting parties to the attack. The Lizard Stresser tool was used effectively by Lizard Squad during cyber attacks on Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network online gaming services in December last year."

"The initial project will pursue a new, open royalty-free video codec specification and open-source implementation based on the contributions of members, along with binding specifications for media format, content encryption and adaptive streaming, thereby creating opportunities for next-generation media experiences."

"What you may not realize, though, is that machine learning is already all around you, and it can exert a surprising degree of influence over your life. Don't believe me? You might be surprised."

"While it's still a popular choice to allege that technology is putting human beings out of work, a study by Deloitte based on 140 years of data seems to prove otherwise. Automation, robotics and the simple fact that IT is faster, better connected and capable of massive amounts of analytics and storage means technology has often been held responsible for replacing the roles of people, but census data stretching back to 1871 begs to differ."

"Human beings have been replaced with robot arms, which have been busily crafting parts for mobile phones, with production per employee increased from 8,000 to 21,000 pieces at the same time. This amounts to a 162.5 per cent productivity improvement, and there is further bad news for the outdated meatsacks clutching their Chinese equivalent of P45s - the previous defect rate average of 25 per cent has now been reduced to just five per cent."

"Now, by my estimates, the half-life of a career is about 10 years. I expect that it will decrease, within a decade, to five years. Advancing technologies will cause so much disruption to almost every industry that entire professions will disappear. And then, in about 15-20 years from now, we will be facing a jobless future, in which most jobs are done by machines and the cost of basic necessities such as food, energy and health care is negligible - just as the costs of cellphone communications and information are today. "

"In case you're wondering what could be wrong with entrusting secret keys to the government for use "in exceptional circumstances", just ponder this: a few months ago, hackers (suspected to be Chinese) stole the personnel records of 21.5 million US federal employees, including the records of every person given a government background check for the last 15 years."

"On the surface of it, the incident is entirely trivial: in a thoughtless moment, a police officer on a surveillance helicopter decides to tweet a photo of a celebrity he's spotted (in this case Michael McIntyre), briefly adding the Metropolitan police to the ranks of London paparazzi. The Met's snap had a few features a standard press photo lacks, though, including an exact timestamp, location data, and a vantage point from an expensive and taxpayer-funded aerial spot. Online reaction to the photograph was predictably bad - why are police invading the privacy of someone who's doing nothing wrong? - and was followed by questioning whether the photo breached the Data Protection Act, which it may well have done."

"Three Google employees have been injured in a crash involving one of the company's self-driving cars. Google revealed the accident happened on 1 July when its car was rear-ended while stationary on a public road in Mountain View, California. It is the first accident involving one of Google's fleet of self-driving vehicles to have resulted in injury."

"Freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com, which automates FOI requests and publishes responses, says it has recorded 154 accidental data leaks made by councils, government departments, police, the NHS and other public bodies since 2009. This amounts to confidential data being wrongly released on average once every fortnight."

"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."

"Last month, Parsley presented Depict, a crowd-sourced image description tool that could change the experience of the browsing the web for the blind and visually impaired. The tool works in two parts-a browser extension for blind users that provides user-created descriptions of images around the Internet, and a website for sighted users to provide those requested descriptions."

"Many hope to reach the economically stable countries in northern Europe, and use WhatsApp's messaging system as a virtual road map to help them navigate their journey. They stick to groups of their countrymen, connecting through friends of friends. Unlike some other ways of communicating, WhatsApp is free, and only requires that the user have access to the internet."

"XKEYSCORE is a secret NSA program that indexes data slurped up from covert fiber-taps, hacked systems, and smartphones, including "full take" data and metadata. "

"They are a modest correction against failures in algorithmic prioritisation on the indelible web. Before the requests go to the BBC, individuals must prove to Google - which has every interest in rejecting their claim - that the links contain personal information that is inaccurate, irrelevant or out of date, and holds no public interest."

""We have absolutely nothing against bricklayers," Pivac says. "The problem is the average age of bricklayers is going up and it's difficult to attract new young people to the trade." There's a debate on about the future of automation-what it means that machines may be able to match humans at virtually any task. For now, robots are nowhere near that advanced."