After one is deceased, their Facebook accounts can become an active memorial for friends, family and loved ones to collectively reminisce. Before a person passes, there is an option in the settings to effectively “immortalize” the account by assigning someone as a legacy contact – an individual who manages the page postmortem.

Their writing was often a vehicle to discuss ethics in politics, societal morals, or human’s idiosyncratic nature. Most literary laureates are given great praise over their ability to use language as an artist would use a paintbrush – masterfully coloring in the world with their gifted narration abilities, one pen stroke at a time.

Some say that the bay area culture is going to “hell in a handbag” as the city becomes more and more inundated with technocrats and plutocrats. Others, like a bay area local who I recently had the pleasure to engage in a lengthy conversation with outside one of the only affordable consignment shops left in San Francisco, said the culture in this area had packed up and left long over a decade ago.

We are living in a world that allow many companies and services who participate in some form of data collection to get more “bang for their buck”. In most of history, consent was imperative due to the very blatant fact that companies had to hire or notify their informants either directly, in person or through surveys.

Password cracking has become somewhat of a modern day past time, given the advancements that have been made in technology. Specifically, in the past five years there have been more privacy and password breaches than in the previous handful of decades combined. That is an exponential increase that makes us all exponentially at risk.

Whether it is an attempt to strictly protect against patent trolls or the less altruistic pursuit of acquiring more leverage against their competitors, Google has initiated a new, experimental program to review patents from sellers, in order to prevent them from ending up in the wrong hands. There has been friction in the past where patents have been sold to non-practicing entities, calling into question the validity of software patents altogether.

It has become mandatory to own a cell phone this day-and-age. With that being said, some of us activists out there cringe at the morals we compromise when using a cellphone. Environmental and health factors run the gamut of depleting numerous natural resources alongside of using an excessive supply of energy and water, contributing directly to byproducts that cause an unreasonable amount of pollution and waste.

In an announcement made over the weekend, Facebook claims to want to extend internet services to reach the hundreds of struggling refugees abroad. While some might be applauding the efforts made by the multi-billion dollar corporation for putting the smallest morsel of their time, energy, not to mention insurmountably large vat of expendable resources, into a charitable cause, the initiative seems to have an ulterior motive.

There are approximately over 7 billion people walking the global, almost half of which – 320 billion – are internet users. Just over 270 million of them are within the United States. IoT is essentially a gigantic network of connected “things” (gadgets, cars, engines, computers, pens, glasses, cities, etc).

The “Selfie” – the cultural activity, icon, and dare I say relic or sorts, that has been auspiciously practiced throughout many people’s daily lives – has established a robust selfie-zealot practice globally. It has been venerated on Facebook and esteemed on twitter. The popularity of such a dutiful practice baffles me, particularly because it seems little attention has been given to it’s origin, like so many practices of this type.

When we go to an internet cafe, sign into a free network and access our accounts, we generally assume that most people in the building are there using the internet for similar reasons. Although this may often be the case, it is not true all the time. Internet cafes and places that offer free internet access to paying customers are seen as lucrative havens for the unethical hacker.

As students graduate from college with heavy-weighted degrees in the “Liberal Arts”, what they are finding is that in order to make a six figure income, what is becoming increasingly essential, outside of degrees and life experience, is the ability to code. The discouraging factor is that to acquire enough knowledge and experience in coding to land a well paying job, the time commitment and cost are both far less than a four-year degree.

At their inception, drones were considered dangerous and violating. Albeit still controversial, today, drones are becoming much more acceptable, even commonplace. What was once front page, headline news, readers can now find a few pages in, buried between articles about the latest start-up and what the Apple disciples are crafting next.

There has been a growing amount of RFID (radio frequency identification) chips used in the past decade, specifically in healthcare, academic institutions, and domestic animals. The push for these tiny glass grain-sized chips has been to, in theory, add to the ever growing era of convenience. They are advertised as providing efficiency, track-ability, along with practicality to peoples lives.

Just the other day, on NPR I was listening to some local business owners in North Carolina’s rural area complain about their internet connection. They discussed the prolonged amount of time it takes to upload a small video and how this disconnect directly effects their business’s sales. The community, bringing this issue to the attention of their local phone company, requested for more cell towers to be built.

It is a bit of a “he-said she-said game” in the Ellen Pao case against Venture Capital Firm Kleiner – Silicon Valley’s most recent gender discrimination case. Silicon Valley, over the past decade, has become notorious for it’s patriarchal corporate culture, a place where women are constantly at odds with it’s male dominance.