Bruce Sterling republishes the acronyms in a recent Daimler white-paper on self-driving cars: Read the rest

Facebook wants to "deepen user engagement" with Messenger, and to that end, it's been pitching America's giant banks on joint enterprises where Facebook will get to see all your financial info (especially info on where you're shopping and what you're buying) to help it suck you into using Messenger for longer. Read the rest

California's gun control laws were jumpstarted by rifle-carrying Black Panthers who attended government meetings and went out "copwatching" (shadowing abusive white cops); white conservatives who'd been staunch ammosexuals, opposed to any limits on gun ownership and carrying, suddenly changed their tune and started hollering for gun control. Read the rest

If you're the kind of parent who wants to spy on everything your kids do, you can force them to install an app like Teensafe, which only works if your kid doesn't use two-factor authentication; you have to give it your kid's device ID and password, so if that data leaks, it would allow anyone to break into your kid's cloud and plunder all their private data. Read the rest

Securus is the widely abused location-tracking tool that exploits a loophole in privacy law to allow police to extract realtime and historical cellphone location data without a warrant or any accountability. Read the rest

This week, Southwest flight 1380 lost an engine in midair when one of its fan-blades cracked; it was the second time in recent years that this happened to one of Southwest's Boeing 737s. Read the rest