Ford CEO Jim Hackett -- formerly head of the company's autonomous vehicle division -- publicly announced that the company had "overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles" and that the vehicles, when they did arrive, their "applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex." Read the rest

The ever-useful Gartner Hype Cycle identified an inflection point in the life of any new technology: the "Peak of Inflated Expectations," attained just before the sharp dropoff into the "Trough of Disillusionment"; I've lived through the hype-cycles of several kinds of technology and one iron-clad correlate of the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" is the "Peak of Huckster Snakeoil Salesmen": the moment at which con-artists just add a tech buzzword to some crooked scam and head out into the market to net a fortune before everyone gets wise to the idea that the shiny new hypefodder isn't a magic bullet. Read the rest

The @internetofshit account posts sardonic observations about the Internet of Things, which is filled with the most depressing array of useless, dangerously insecure, exploitative junk imaginable. Read the rest