Quentin Hardy

As increasing focus is being paid to the wealth and jobs created by tech companies outside Silicon Valley, Google’s arrival in small-town Pryor (OK) serves as a complex example of what happens when a modern internet company builds one of its data centers in a community. While they do bring in some work, these mostly automated facilities will never provide the thousands of good-paying blue-collar jobs that come with a new auto plant. What they do bring, however, is some stability to local tax revenues, and — at least in the case of Google — a cash-rich megacompany looking to make nice with the locals.

Big City is watching you. It will do it with camera-equipped drones that inspect municipal power lines and robotic cars that know where people go. Sensor-laden streetlights will change brightness based on danger levels. Technologists and urban planners are working on a major transformation of urban landscapes over the next few decades. Much of it involves the close monitoring of things and people, thanks to digital technology.

To the extent that this makes people’s lives easier, the planners say, they will probably like it. But troubling and knotty questions of privacy and control remain. A White House report published in February identified advances in transportation, energy and manufacturing, among other developments, that will bring on what it termed “a new era of change.” Much of the change will also come from the private sector, which is moving faster to reach city dwellers, and is more skilled in collecting and responding to data. That is leading cities everywhere to work more closely than ever with private companies, which may have different priorities than the government.

In some ways, the Internet has become a game of “type and be typed.” Now you can play it at home, too. Companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter look at the queries, observations, updates and enthusiasms we write on their services, then they try to figure out what ads might have the most persuasive effect on us.

A start-up called Five posted a tool that gives a sense of what the big web companies might see when they look at us. Using a link to Facebook posts, Five analyzes the language in which we write, and determines our relative affiliation to five personality attributes: openness, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and neuroticism. It then shows comparisons with famous people (based on their public writings and statements), as well as your Facebook friends.

Broadcom announced the guts for a new kind of home router that is says will zip information around the house at up to 3.2 gigabits per second, about twice what a current, high-end home Wi-Fi device can do.

It is meant to handle all kinds of video, to and from phones, tablets, computers and connected televisions. Under good circumstances, a speed like that could send a high-definition movie in significantly less than 30 seconds. In other words, it won’t matter much where the video came from, and it can go anywhere. That is likely to lead to preferences for lower-cost providers, who supply video that can be well displayed among a lot of different sources.

When the Heartbleed bug was disclosed, the attention focused on the fallout for major Internet companies like Yahoo and Amazon. But security experts said the potential for harm could extend much further, to the guts of the Internet and the many devices that connect to it.

Some of the companies that make those devices began revealing whether they had been affected. Cisco Systems, the dominant provider of gear to move traffic through the Internet, said its big routers and servers, as well as its online servers -- a big business -- were not affected. If they had been, that would have had a significant impact on virtually every major company that connects to the Internet.

Certain products the company makes were affected, it said -- some kinds of phones that connect to the Internet, a kind of server that helps people conduct online meetings, and another kind of device used for office communications. Cisco also posted a list of products it had examined for the vulnerability, which it was updating as it continued inspecting its equipment.

How should we think about balancing civil liberties and national security? It may depend on what a speech later this year tells us about how a modern war really ends.

At the end of 2014, most of the United States military forces should be out of Afghanistan (some may remain, depending on a number of Afghan and American factors). When they do, according to a former American diplomat, President Barack Obama is likely to make a speech that marks the closing of a military conflict that began soon after the Sept 11 attacks in 2001. What he says may set a future context for what propelled both the Afghanistan conflict and the legal justifications for widespread data-gathering.

“In the legislative framework, are we still a nation at war? Is that conflict temporary or permanent? What tools do we want the government to have?” said Philip Crowley, the former United States assistant secretary of state for public affairs, and currently a professor at George Washington University. “If the Authorization to Use Military Force does still hold, you’re in permanent conflict. If it doesn’t, you go to an old or a new ‘normal.’”