There’s been a bit going on from a tech standpoint in  the news of late, so first this week, take a look at strategy+business’s 2016 Global Innovation 1000 Study.  In it they capture not only who the top innovators and spenders are, but also trends in that spending as well.  For example, Healthcare is expected to pass Computing and Electronics to become the largest overall industry in R&D spend by 2018. Speaking of Healthcare, there’s a coming $1.5 Trillion shift in the industry according to the same people.

To follow on to that is a piece from Techonomy of the Corporation as technology.  They believe that technology is redefining business and society (duh), but they go one to discuss how the corporation is a technology for organizing labor, resources and capital towards the creation of economic and social value.

Next this week is an article from Techcrunch on the darker side of machine learning.  As we opt-in to machine learning technologies through the platforms we use, we need to be wary of their invasiveness of user privacy.  For example, blurring and pixelation are common techniques used to preserve privacy in images and video. They’re practices that have proven their effectiveness in obscuring faces, license plates and writings from the human eye, but it seems that machine learning can see through the pixels.

Researchers at University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech recently succeeded in training an image recognition machine learning algorithm that can undermine the privacy benefits of content-masking techniques such as pixelation and blurring. What’s worrying, the researchers underlined, is that the feat was accomplished with mainstream machine learning techniques that are widely known and available, and could be put to nefarious use by bad actors. Paired with that is this piece about when algorithms work against us.

Since Virtual Reality continues to be a hot topic in the news these days, I thought we might take a look at the top 25 innovators in VR, courtesy of Polygon.

Well, it seems like Detroit has a little less to worry about from Silicon Valley, as the big players out west have decided that it is just too hard to build a car.  There’s more to the story than that, and I don’t necessarily think that means that the auto industry will remain undisrupted.  It does point, in my mind, to how challenged Google and Apple are these days to be as innovative as they once were.

Eighty billion dollars … it sounds like it should be a punch line from a b movie where the bad actor demands it in exchange for NOT releasing a badly ginned up neurotoxin into the atmosphere over a major city, but no, it’s what the AOL/Time Warner deal was originally announced at by the media.  That linky link points to a great summary by and collection of articles around the merger, and while I won’t say whether I think it will or won’t go through, this post from Wikipedia might be of interest for context.  That’s not to say I don’t care about the deal though.

While the current administration has been touting a marked decrease in commercial cyberattacks, the real story behind that is a bit different.  Technology Review explores the reasons why in this piece.  Who is defending us from those attacks?  Here’s the oddest 15 under 15 list I’ve seen of late, and it answers just that.  Paired with that, however, was the coordinated distributed denial-of-service attacks which took place last week.  These are attacks that are designed to keep legitimate users from accessing a site.  There’s more going on than just that, however: a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks.  Hackers are testing the ability to manipulate Internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services.  The access point, in this case, were a slew of hijacked internet-connected devices.  That’s right, we were responsible for your favorite website being taken down because we’ve gotten lazy about the security protocols built into our favorite internet-connected devices.  The Internet Society warned last year: “The interconnected nature of IoT [internet of things] devices means that every poorly secured device that is connected online potentially affects the security and resilience of the internet globally.”

Despite what we’re hearing in the news, start-ups are not, in fact, getting cheaper to launch today.  In fact, if anything, the opposite is true.

There were several articles out this last week about years of research done by Google about the key to good teamwork.   What was that key, you ask?  Being nice.  Did I mention that this was based on years of research?

One of my favorite reads this week was on an Aussie bank’s 7000 mile blockchain experiment and the impact that it could have on trade.  It involved shipping 88 bales of cotton around the world, but how they did it is what is fascinating, and it could point to how the shipping industry could be disrupted.

How can I not mention, though, the news this week that Uber delivered a truckload of beer with a driverless truck?  Well, not entirely driverless, but Bob and Doug McKenzie would be floored.  Then there’s this interview with the head of machine learning for Uber on how pattern-finding computing fuels Uber’s success.

So let’s start with this guy who says that Macs, long term, are three times cheaper than PCs for companies to maintain.  Sounds crazy, right?  Must be some yahoo from some small, boutique start-up that’s catering to a bunch of millennials, no?  Nope, he works for IBM, and he’s replaced thousands of PCs with Macs for that company over the past few years and has the data to back up the claim.  Next, both Microsoft and Apple had a few announcements this week, Microsoft’s top eight are summarized here, while Apple’s top seven here.  For Apple, most people are swooning over their new touch bar.  For Microsoft, it the Surface Studio. Check them both out for yourself.

What could a future driverless world look like?  In this Ted Talk, transportation geek Wanis Kabbaj broaches that topic and thinks we can find inspiration in the genius of our biology to design the transit systems of the future.