As grocery shoppers work to digest Amazon’s massive acquisition of Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, the digital storefront recently scored a victory that aims to reinforce the company’s growing investments in brick-and-mortar retail.Amazon was awarded a patent May 30 that could help it choke off a common issue faced by many physical stores: Customers’ use of smartphones to compare prices even as they walk around a shop. The phenomenon, often known as mobile “window shopping,” has contributed to a worrisome decline for traditional retailers.But Amazon now has the technology to prevent that type of behavior when customers enter any of its physical stores and log onto the WiFi networks there. Titled “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” Amazon’s patent describes a system that can identify a customer’s Internet traffic and sense when the smartphone user is trying to access a competitor’s website. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is also the owner of The Washington Post.)

Jobs are disappearing, incomes retreating, the precariat growing. Thousands of people risk their lives in stormy seas to flee wars, moribund economies and climate change on a daily basis. Traditional politicians continue to avoid publicly addressing the tsunami of unemployment, apparently baffled as to how to react to a historic transition: the automation of critical masses of labour once performed by humans.PEOPLE AND POWER: The Tech Threat (25:00)Five acronyms – AI, AR, VR, BC and UBI – promise to shape the developed world’s future and solve the problems of the present. In the process, however, these innovations risk transforming the world around us, and upsetting humanity’s very definition of itself.Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a series of algorithms designed to improve the performance of robots by making it possible for them to learn from their surroundings. As AI increasingly autonomises formerly human-managed objects like cars and factory assembly lines, it displaces not only millions of workers employed in repetitive jobs like driving and assembling products, but white-collar employees, too. With the Internet of Things expanding into the physical realm, you’ll find yourself encountering AI-enhanced objects more often, especially in service industries.

Tallinn, Estonia – Things are bad on the small island nation of Berylia after a diplomatic row with Crimsonia, its bigger neighbour and rival. There are street protests by the Crimsonian minority in Berylia, whoch then suffers a wave of cyber-attacks that make it lose control of its drones and its only international airbase.Crimsonia is blamed for the cyberoffensive even though there’s no hard proof. Crippled by the attacks, Berylia, a new member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), weighs its options. One of them is to invoke Article 5 and take the military alliance to war against Crimsonia.Berylia and Crimsonia are fictional and so is this scenario, whoch is part of Locked Shields, a cyberwar game. But the fact that the situation doesn’t sound that far-fetched is one of the reasons why Locked Shields is so relevant today.Locked Shields is ”the world’s largest and most advanced international technical live-fire cyber defence exercise”, as described by the NATO-affiliated Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE), whoch has been organising it since 2010 in Tallinn, Estonia.