The "importance" of the US television drama Outlander to the political atmosphere of last year's Independence Referendum was highlighted by key TV executives before a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron.

President Obama said he would support measures opening backdoors in communications and social media technologies last January. Such measures would force companies like Apple and Google to create holes in their programming that would let the government track suspected criminals or terrorists. “Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said in a Jan. 16 press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron on cybersecurity.

Emails published this week by WikiLeaks reveal that a senior State Dept. official asked the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment for help in countering the narratives of the Russian Federation and the so-called Islamic State.

Now with RadarOnline reporting Friday that he took six private jet flights in just six weeks last year, it may prove hard for the actor to justify the need to avail himself of more than $200,000 worth of private travel between LA and New York in such a short period of time.

Secret exchanges between the US State Department and Sony have also included a bizarre plan to recruit hip-hop artists to produce a Muslim We Are the World video to support the fight against Islamic State (IS). US diplomats are looking for "the Muslim Bob Geldof" to lead the campaign.

La vie privée[1] est nécessaire pour une société ouverte dans l’ère électronique. La vie privée n’est pas un secret. Une affaire privée est ce qu’un individu ne veut que le monde entier sache, mais une affaire secrète est ce qu’un individu ne veut que quiconque sache. La vie privée est le pouvoir de se révéler sélectivement au monde.

Inspiré par le blockbuster Américain « Terminator », Joseph DeSimone a inventé un procédé d’impression 3D « ultra rapide » (au regard des techniques actuelles) qui pourrait à terme révolutionner (ou renverser) l’industrie plastique, médicale ou encore aéronautique.

They’re not Terminators, but they sure resemble those iconic killer robots from the big screen. Think C-3PO, not T-1000. That’s the more appropriate pop-culture reference, according to Brian Lattimer, another Virginia Tech researcher working on a bipedal humanoid robot with funding from DARPA. "If I could sit down with Google people, I would want them to make a public pledge to not become involved with autonomous killer robots". DARPA, Boston Dynamics, and Google all declined interviews for this story.

After getting a patent for giving robots personalities last month, Google now wants to unleash an army of Rodney Dangerfield bots on the world. In a patent awarded today, the company outlines a system for “allocating tasks to a plurality of robotic devices The patent suggests that the robots could be controlled by a smartphone—Google’s mobile operating system is called Android, after all—with tasks doled out based on each robot’s ability to complete them. Someone could theoretically control the botswarm from anywhere in the world. As the patent puts it: “The plurality of robotic devices of the system may be configured to receive information from the computing component via the network associated with instructions for performing one or more tasks.”

Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton is on the board of trustees of RAND Corporation, an organisation specialising in research and development for the United States military and intelligence sector. The Sony Archives show the flow of contacts and information between these two major US industries, whether it is RAND wanting to invite George Clooney and Kevin Spacey to events, or Lynton offering contact to Valerie Jarrett (a close advisor to Obama) or RAND desiring a partnership with IMAX for digital archiving. With this close tie to the military-industrial complex it is no surprise that Sony reached out to RAND for advice regarding its North Korea film The Interview. RAND provided an analyst specialised in North Korea and suggested Sony reach out to the State Department and the NSA regarding North Korea's complaints about the upcoming film. The Sony documents also show Sony being in possession of a brochure for an NSA-evaluated online cloud security set-up called INTEGRITY.