"EFF has released its mobile app to help people join in important, timely struggles, but you can't get it for your Iphone or Ipad, because Apple insists that EFF use DRM, and this is contrary to everything it stands for. In a petition, EFF calls out Apple's incredibly abusive, one-sided developer "agreement" and calls on developers and Apple users to join a campaign to get Apple to give developers the freedom to release their creations on more liberal terms."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"In his full first interview as surveillance commissioner, Tony Porter - a former senior counter-terrorism officer - said the public was complacent about encroaching surveillance and urged public bodies, including the police, to be more transparent about how they are increasingly using smart cameras to monitor people."

"Researchers in China claimed to have developed a kit that can match faces with up to 99.15 percent accuracy"

"Sterio.me sends homework lessons and quizzes to basic phones that have limited access to data. Phones of this type have more than 86% penetration in Lesotho. The programme is undergoing trials in local schools, supported by the Vodacom Foundation, the ministry of education and the local teachers' union, before being rolled out across the country. "

"Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest association of hackers, claims it can reproduce your fingerprints from a couple of photos that show your fingers. At the 31st annual Chaos Computer Club convention in Hamburg, Germany, Jan Krissler, also known by his alias "Starbug," explained how he copied the thumbprint of German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen"

"Microsoft showcased a line of new autonomous robots, called K5, as security guards for one of its campuses. And though the robots looked nothing like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the machine - developed by Knightscope - is impressive and intimidating. Standing 5 feet tall, weighing 300 pounds, and equipped with HD cameras, sensors, alarms, artificial intelligence, and WiFi, it's one incredible piece of technology."

"Google has accused Hollywood of attempting to "secretly censor the internet" by reviving the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) to enable wholesale site-blocking."

"A leaked MPAA document discloses the studios' lobbyists' plan to force ISPs to give it control over DNS (one of the key goals in SOPA), by using the arguments raised in the decade-old Brand X case, where the ISPs said that they were more than a "telecommunications service" and were, instead, an "information service" because they provided DNS (among other things)."

"Hackers breached the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that coordinates unique web addresses all across the world, but luckily didn't hit the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, an important leg that keeps the Internet running smoothly. Attackers used "spear fishing" to break into the system in late November, according to a post on ICANN's website this week. Staffers received email messages that appeared to be coming from ICANN's own domain; several ICANN staffers' emails were compromised."

"Like China's Great Firewall, the UK firewall is a patchwork of rules and filters that are opaque to users and regulators. Every ISP uses its own censorship supplier to spy on its customers and decide what they're allowed to see, and they change what is and is not allowed from moment to moment, with no transparency into how, when or why those decisions are being made. "

"Creepy grabs all this geo-location data and puts pins on a map for you. Most of the time, you probably remember to get the privacy settings right. But if you get it wrong just once - maybe the first time you used a new app, maybe before your friend showed you how to change the settings - Creepy will find it, and your home is marked on a map"

"The NSA's AURORAGOLD program -- revealed in newly released Snowden docs -- used plundered internal emails to compromise nearly every mobile carrier in the world, and show that the agency had planned to introduce vulnerabilities into future improvements into mobile security. "

"Major Wall Street institutions were cracked wide open by a phishing scam from FIN4, a hacker group that, unlike its competition, can write convincingly and employs some basic smarts about why people open attachments."

"Re/code, a technology news website, was the first to float the North Korea theory last Friday. Citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, it said: "Sony Pictures Entertainment is exploring the possibility that hackers working on behalf of North Korea, possibly operating out of China, may be behind a devastating attack that brought the studio's network to a screeching halt earlier this week … The sources stress that a link to North Korea hasn't been confirmed, but has not been ruled out, either.""

"Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence. He told the BBC:"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.""

"There's a Cambrian explosion in robotics, with species of all sizes, shapes and modes of mobility crawling out of the muck of the lab and onto the terra firma of the marketplace, about to enter your home and your shopping experience."

"No arguments there, but the term, which stands for "artificial intelligence", has a more storied history than Spielberg and Kubrick's 2001 film. The concept of artificial intelligence goes back to the birth of computing: in 1950, just 14 years after defining the concept of a general-purpose computer, Alan Turing asked "Can machines think?""

"Apocalypsarians who are equally convinced that a super-intelligent AI will have no interest in curing cancer or old age, or ending poverty, but will - malevolently or maybe just accidentally - bring about the end of human civilisation as we know it."

""Parties who wish to process device fingerprints which are generated through the gaining of access to, or the storing of, information on the user's terminal device must first obtain the valid consent of the user (unless an exemption applies)," the Article 29 Working Party wrote. It means that some websites, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, that have used alternative technical processes to try to bypass the need for a "cookie policy notice" will have to show a notification after all."