Having glued on a GoPro I try and fail to fly my new drone.

New Scientist hypes DeepCoder:

"Software called DeepCoder could allow non-coders to simply describe and idea for a program and let the system build it"

Coding is nothing but simply describing an idea for a program. As simply as possible but no simpler. Won't be really useful without an AI product manager.

The World Economic Forum has published a risk/reward matrix for 12 key "emerging" technologies. You'd think this would be pretty good, because:

"The report’s conclusions on risk are heavily based on its Global Risks Perception Survey, which gathers the opinions of the World Economic Forum’s multi-stakeholder communities of leaders from business, government, academia and nongovernmental and international organizations. Members of the Institute of Risk Management are also consulted."

For some reason IoT devices are the second highest risk. Ahead of biotechnology (we're all dead from an engineered virus), nanomaterials (we're all dead because we're now gray goo) and space technologies (we're all dead because we provoked a violent alien civilization).

The least benefit comes from Geoengineering. Because with Trump in power I'm sure we're going to solve Global Warming via emission cuts. There is apparently more benefit in Virtual Reality and even more in 3D Printing.

(Image from World Economic Forum)

If you give a browser a cookie, it’s going to ask for local storage.

When you give it the local storage, it’ll probably ask you for a list of system fonts. When it’s finished, it’ll ask you for your screen resolution.

Then it’ll want to look to see if Flash cookies are supported. It’ll probably create a local shared object.

When it’s finished with the local shared object it’ll want more things to hash. It will hash your timezone and language. It might get carried away and hash every supported plugin. It may even end up hashing the platform and user agent.

When it’s done it’ll probably want to check out your WebGL. You’ll have to tell it your WebGL vendor and renderer. It’ll probably ask you to open a HTML5 canvas.

When it looks at the HTML5 canvas, it’ll get so excited it’ll want to draw it’s own hidden image. Then it’ll want to hash the image as well.

Looking at the image will remind it that it should store the hash somewhere. So it’ll ask for local storage.

And chances are if it asks you for local storage, it’s going to want a cookie to go with it.

(With apologies to Laura Numeroff, and you may be a snowflake yourself. Learn more about browser fingerprinting.)

I think I'd be more likely to subscribe if you'd take a charger away. Most right thinking gadget vendors don't even include them anymore.

Even better than threatening to send me e-waste: skip the news bit (it's already stale) and send my Kindle a monthly compendium of analysis.

Is it just me or is the weather radar smiling at San Francisco right now?

This stupidly placed light switch has been niggling around near the bottom of my list for nearly three years. It's probably sat there with its wires exposed for closer to thirteen, since the kitchen was remodeled by the previous owners.

I could have hunted down a plate and tried to saw a bit off I guess but we got a 3D printer for Christmas and I finally fixed it:

This was easier than I thought once I discovered that this sort of switch is a Decora Duplex. I grabbed this model from user KHF on 3D Warehouse (thanks!), chopped the edge off in FlashPrint, two failed prints (glue, then hairspray, then figuring out the temperature was wrong) and only slightly sliced open my thumb removing the supports. Welcome to the future!

A few months ago I wrote about my cunning plan to stop Internet of Things botnets: stop them at the router.

It's just possible that these were in the works before that post but Symantec, BitDefender and Intel unveiled router level IoT security at CES this year. Not as hard core as my plan, but looks like a useful start.

(Image from Norton Core website).

I haven't checked Klout for a long time - while I was away they've decided I'm a expert in Indian politics. Explains a lot...