At birth, your data trail began. You were given a name, your height and weight were recorded, and probably a few pictures were taken. A few years later, you were enrolled in day care, you received your first birthday party invitation, and you were recorded in a census. Today, you have a Social Security or national ID number, bank accounts and credit cards, and a smart phone that always knows where you are. Perhaps you post family pictures on Facebook; tweet about politics; and reveal your changing interests, worries, and desires in thousands of Google searches. Sometimes you share data intentionally, with friends, strangers, companies, and governments. But vast amounts of information about you are collected with only perfunctory consent—or none at all. Soon, your entire genome may be sequenced and shared by researchers around the world along with your medical records, flying cameras may hover over your neighborhood, and sophisticated software may recognize your face as you enter a store or an airport.

Whether they're looking for nearby restaurants, wondering what to wear, or finding the fastest route, most people allow their smart phones to send their GPS locations to Yelp, AccuWeather, or Google Maps without a second thought. But these data can be shared with advertisers and other third parties that profile users' movement patterns, often without their knowledge.
Even anonymizing people's location data doesn't necessarily protect their privacy. W

Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won't—at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.
Catapulting the California-based company beyond other corporate players in the field, Facebook's DeepFace system is now as accurate as a human being at a few constrained facial recognition tasks. The intention is not to invade the privacy of Facebook's more than 1.3 billion active users, insists Yann LeCun, a computer scientist at New York University in New York City who directs Facebook's artificial intelligence research, but rather to protect it. Once DeepFace identifies your face in one of the 400 million new photos that users upload every day, “you will get an alert from Facebook telling you that you appear in the picture,” he explains. “You can then choose to blur out your face from the picture to protect your privacy.” Many people, however, are troubled by the prospect of being identified at all—especially in strangers' photographs. Facebook is already using the system, although its face-tagging system only reveals to you the identities of your “friends.”

You know the old saying, "School's out, school's out, teacher's let the fools out?" Well, this just may be the case in Paris, France. Seems a student got "summer brain" a little too early and mommy-dearest stepped in to "help."
Just as Indiaa has standardized testing, France requires students to pass the three-hour English Baccalaureat exam. Of course, French educators strongly emphasize the importance of not cheating as almost unbearable pressure and stress is put on students to pass this exam.

Conventional wisdom has firmly established the notion that the customer is always right. That may be true, but dealers who want to make the most of their resources—and ensure a customer base that will build a strong business—may end up facing a different question: Is the customer right for you?
In an ideal world, dealers would have customers who all pay on time, require a minimum of unnecessary guidance and are loyal advocates for the company's products and services, since word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful advertising tools available. Ideally, these "dream customers" are willing to listen to ideas about ways to improve their existing service and new offerings that are constantly being made available by emerging technology. They may not buy right away, but they're always receptive to the possibilities.

For the past four years a group of sophisticated hackers has compromised the networks of luxury hotels to launch malware attacks against corporate executives and entrepreneurs traveling on business in the Asia-Pacific region.
The cyber-espionage group, which researchers from Kaspersky Lab dubbed Dark-hotel, operates by injecting malicious code into the Web portals used by hotel guests to log in to the local network and access the Internet, typically by inputting their last name and room number.
The infections are typically brief and are meant to target only specific guests by prompting them to download trojanized updates for popular software applications. The rogue software updates deploy malware implants that then download and install digitally signed information-stealing programs.

According to an article from TIME, Colorado now has the first-ever marijuana vending machine approved for use without the interaction of an employee. Intended for medical use, the vending machine—called ZaZZZ—will be installed inside Herbal Elements, an Avon medical marijuana dispensary in Eagle Veil, CO.
Certain marijuana dispensaries currently use vending machines, though the machines sit behind the counter and are intended for employee use only. This device, as The Cannabist reports, will allow customers to make their purchase without interacting with any employees. But how? Through biometrics. The Cannabist held an interview with the COO of the company that created the machine, American Green, who stated that the machine uses biometrics to confirm the identity of the purchaser. The system does not take medical cards because those in the medical dispensary will have already been authorized for entry before reaching the machine.

While Apple's new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have drawn attention for their new form factors and flashy Retina HD displays, the handsets boast substantial under-the-hood advancements, including support for the highly efficient H.265 video codec.
As seen on Apple's iPhone tech specs webpage, both the iPhone 6 and its larger iPhone 6 Plus sibling leverage next-generation H.265 technology, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), for encoding and decoding Face Time video calls over cellular. The phones also support the older H.264 standard first championed by Apple with legacy devices like the Apple TV and third-generation iPad.

Imagine you have just celebrated your birthday with your wife, children and other family members and friends at your house with a big dinner party. Everyone has left, and while you are in the kitchen cleaning up and doing the dishes, you hear a creepy male voice radiate expletives through your 2-year-old daughter’s camera-equipped, baby monitor that can access the Internet.
This is exactly what happened to Houston, Texas couple Marc and Lauren Gilbert. Marc and Lauren immediately rushed into their daughter’s room, only to be met with a barrage of lewd comments. Realizing that their daughter Allyson’s baby monitor had been hacked, Marc immediately yanked the device out of the wall, disconnecting it as he tried to figure out what happened.