The speed of commerce continues to accelerate, with Amazon setting the pace. The Tracy fulfillment center, about an hour east of San Francisco, opened last year as part of Amazon’s strategy to locate more inventory closer to population hubs.

IBM officials said both new supercomputers will have peak performances of more than 100 petaflops; Tianhe-2 currently has a peak performance of just under 55 petaflops.

The lander Philae was confirmed to touch down on the surface of the comet more than 300 million miles away at 11:05 a.m. Eastern. Now, scientists expect it to send a panoramic image home and begin analyzing the comet for scientists back on Earth.

“Their brand, their technology and their choices in security made it compelling to us,” said James Anderson, senior vice president of emerging payments at MasterCard, who also pointed to Apple’s fingerprint identification system . . . an impressive additional way to fight credit card fraud.

Nearly three quarters of a billion credit cards are in use in the United States, [and recent computer theft of millions of credit card names and numbers have made consumers worried about identity theft].

Merchants are not as enthusiastic as consumers about the development because there is little incentive for them to pay for new terminals to receive the "Near Field Communication" payments. However, Apple's timing is excellent because American merchants face a deadline next fall to upgrade their equipment to accept E.M.V.-- Europay, MasterCard and Visa technology. Those new terminals will probably be equipped to handle Near Field transactions.

Shellshock is newly discovered vulnerability in software that's in computer systems we use everyday. It's kind of like Heartbleed, the Open/SSL bug . . . Shellshock could be way worse, and it's been around for decades.

Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science. Rather than offering you cellphone service, the towers appear to be . . . either tapping calls or reading texts.

The microchip called "Neurogrid" could open up windows into understanding the human brain and developing new forms of computing patterned after brain circuits.

"We're growing more optimistic that we're heading toward an achievable goal — a vehicle that operates fully without human intervention," project director Chris Urmson wrote.

The intercepted information, now being called "heartbleed," may reveal Internet addresses, passwords and other information that can be used to steal the identities of users. The problem is widespread, and even affects some hardware, but can not be fixed by doing anything to the users' computers. Experts say that it will take time to replace the software and equipment in all the affected servers.

The articles listed below give some idea of the seriousness of the problem for all of us and what can be done to try to protect ourselves in the meanwhile.

"But broadly, I think Zuckerberg has his head in the right place by thinking beyond the current Facebook platform and trying to move where he thinks the market is headed instead."

So, we are left with a central challenge: will the Internet of 2025 be – a network of freedom and opportunity or the infrastructure of social control?

Also discouraged by the slow process, and on-hand for Monday's announcement was the family of Megan Boken, a college student who was shot to death 18 months ago in St. Louis for her cellphone.

And they say the project could provide unrestricted Internet access to countries where their web access is censored, including China and North Korea.