“Innovation has become a defining ideology of our time. Be disruptive, move fast, break things! And everyone knows – right? – what innovation looks like. Just Google the word. You’ll see lots of lightbulbs. Lightbulbs represent a sudden flash of inventiveness experienced by Thomas Edison or other mythic geniuses. Innovation,

“In that context, a national survey of 1,520 adults conducted March 7-April 4, 2016, finds that Facebook continues to be America’s most popular social networking platform by a substantial margin: Nearly eight-in-ten online Americans 1 (79%) now use Facebook, more than double the share that uses Twitter (24%), Pinterest (31%), Instagram

“In another age, the paper trail may have taken the form of notes stuffed into a box in a forgotten archive. But this being the 21st century, some of the breadcrumbs were submitted to an online wiki. According to the Times, intelligence officers in various agencies rushed to complete analyses

“Facebook has a new plan to get more of Africa online: Fiber optic cables. The social giant on Monday announced plans to lay nearly 500 miles of fiber cable in Uganda by the end of the year, infrastructure that Facebook believes will provide internet access for more than three million

“The duo successfully stored 214 petabytes of data per gram of DNA, encoding a total number of six files, which include: A full computer operating system An 1895 French movie ‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat’ A $50 Amazon gift card A computer virus A Pioneer plaque A 1948

“The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities such as Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China, Italy and South Korea. Greyball

“But the practical applications for blockchain technology go way beyond financial assets. Essentially, any type of digital asset can be tracked and traded through a blockchain. Information about the provenance of goods, identity, credentials, and digital rights can be securely stored with a distributed ledger. Experiments in this space tend to

“The US and Chinese militaries are starting to test swarming drones – distributed collaborative systems made up of many small, cheap, unmanned aircraft. This new subset of independently operating or ‘autonomous’ weapons is giving rise to new strategic, ethical, and legal questions. Swarming drones could offer real advantages, including reducing

“At JPMorgan Chase & Co., a learning machine is parsing financial deals that once kept legal teams busy for thousands of hours. The program, called COIN, for Contract Intelligence, does the mind-numbing job of interpreting commercial-loan agreements that, until the project went online in June, consumed 360,000 hours of work

“Militaries could face a new threat: swarms of cheap enemy drones, according to the Pentagon’s counter-terrorism chief. ‘It is conceivable that some day soon we will see someone’s otherwise capable military security force penetrated, defeated or even overrun by such technologies,’ Lt. Gen. Michael Nagata, director of the National Counterterrorism Center,