Exploring the world of do-it-yourself gene therapy.

I think people should be free to make and try untested genetic modifications on themselves. But the risk scares me; I would never do it except as a last resort.

UK law particularly favors companies against journalists that publish about leaks. And the Tories plan to make it even worse.

Privacy needs more protection, but data brokers, data thieves, and repressive states will not be deterred by laws about the use of personal data. (The data brokers are experts at achieving want they want through loopholes in data protection laws.) The effective way to protect privacy is to limit the accumulation of data.

Russians have met to nominate Alexei Navalny to run for president. They will have to overcome the criminal convictions that Putin has engineered as an excuse to stop him from running.

In a previous election, Putin arranged to prevent the nomination process for Garry Kasparov by making all the large rooms in Moscow unavailable.

Putin would probably win a free and fair election, and surely knows this, but he still won't allow one in Russia.

Will AI dolls for young children interfere with their understanding of the difference between people and things?

I am not convinced, a priori, that this will do harm. Perhaps it will have a subtle effect that is only statistically detectable.

However, the crucial question is not whether AI dolls, inherently, are likely confuse children. It is, rather, whether AI dolls could be designed to manipulate children in a particular way: to make them more susceptible to addictive technology.

Because, if there is a way to do that, companies will find it.

Companies such as Facebook are searching madly for ways to make their technology more addictive. They have lots of money to invest in research. If a certain kind of robot doll could predispose people to be more addicted to Facebook, Facebook is likely to discover that. Then it might push those dolls on children under some pretext — perhaps "They are educational", perhaps, or "They make up for the lack of teachers in our austerity-hit schools". Facebook-funded research could substantiate these claims.

Perhaps some other kind of AI doll might be entirely harmless, or even beneficial, but that's not the direction that Facebook et al. would find profitable to promote.

Offshoring as shown in the "paradise" papers encourages corruption of public officials, as well as tax-dodging and corruption.

Investments in companies which exercise power, such as Twitter and Facebook, have the potential to influence their use of that power.

Maybe this was just an investment for profit. But then why hide it?

Even if Twitter and Facebook didn't know that they had Russian state institutions as investors, those investors had ways to push for developments that suited them, without revealing who they were.