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"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."

"Geofence warrants, or reverse-location warrants, are a fairly new concept. With permission from a judge, they allow law enforcement to obtain anonymized data from Google from almost any device that was in a certain geographic area at a specific time. Police can then go back to Google for more specific user information on anyone they deem a suspect."

"That ties their hands in how they can treat content related to the killings, they say, and forces them to leave up some content they believe ought to be removed. "It's been a month since the massacre and mass graves in Bucha, but this event hasn't been even designated a 'violating event', let alone a hate crime," said one moderator, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. "On that same day there was a shooting in the US, with one fatality and two casualties, and this was declared a violating event within three hours.""

"The campaign's most organized form involves a database set up by anonymous activists that lists targets in the military, their photos, their locations, and how they have offended. Offenders are ranked by "traitor level," from "elite" to "low." Individuals have also taken social punishment into their own hands by creating Facebook groups and viral posts that share the identities of military family members or supporters. For the anti-coup population living abroad, the main objective is to get generals' family members living outside the country deported and their assets frozen. Within Myanmar, the goal is social and economic pressure, with boycotts on businesses and brands, and hopes that social shaming will convince military affiliates to work against their families and support the Civil Disobedience Movement."

"Twitter stands a 50% chance of a major outage that could take the site offline during the World Cup, according to a recently departed employee with knowledge of how the company responds to large-scale events. The former employee, who was granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of what was discussed, has knowledge of the workings of Twitter Command Centre, the platform's team of troubleshooters who monitor the site for issues such as traffic spikes and data centre outages."

"Such bans are possible because school policies allow for the blocking of traffic to certain websites on campus wifi networks, measures that are typically reserved for harmful content and pornography. But those policies can also extend to specific apps, which has been done in the past with platforms like anonymous social media account Yik Yak."

"Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store. "Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch."

"Sounds lovely. But a few (mostly worried) thoughts come instantly to mind. First, our fingerprints are unique whether or not they're attached to our hand. That sounds like a dangerous incentive to chop off a few fingers, no?"

"Journalists discovered that two companies had posted the personal data of 170,000 customers online. The leak, which exposed the victims to identity theft and fraud, was reportedly so bad that social security numbers, passport scans, financial data and home addresses were indexed by search engines. Rather than merely address the problem, however, TerraCom and YourTel threatened the reporters, referring to them as "hackers" and accusing them of "numerous violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act"

"Past scandals, bad photos, critical comments: the internet has a long memory. As the EU considers the 'right to be forgotten', we investigate the growing business of online reputation management - and learn how you can airbrush your own past"

"Facebook and Twitter reported to have been blocked in run-up to protests, with people turning to VPNs to broadcast content"