The UK's Investigatory Powers Act is now in effect, placing Britain under some of the widest-ranging spying powers ever seen. The law – passed last month but going into effect on 30 December – is intended as an update to Britain's often unwieldy surveillance legislation. But it also includes a large set of new powers – including the ability to collect the browsing records of everyone in the country and have them read by authorities as diverse as the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions. Most of the central parts of the act are now in force. That includes new powers to gather and retain data on citizens, and new ways to force technology companies and others to hand over the data that they have about people to intelligence agencies.

The time of year when crystal balls get a viewing and many pundits put out their annual predictions for the coming year. Rather than thinking up my own, I figured I'd regurgitate what many others are expecting to happen. Chris Preimesberger (@editingwhiz), who does a monthly #eweekchat on twitter, covers many of the worries facing organizations. People focus so much on the'things' themselves rather than the risk of an internet connection. This list discusses how IoT will grow up in 2017, how having a service component will be key, the complete mess of standards and simply, 'just because you can connect something to the Internet doesn't mean that you should.' NW talks about how cyber attacks will get worse due to IoT and gives some ideas on how to protect your data in 2017.

Gandhi and Schumacher talked about

And it was a particularly painful year for the likes of Samsung. It wasn't all bad, of course, but Chris Velazco explains that when your biggest headlines of 2016 are about flaming phones, you can't wait to flip the calendar to 2017. Similarly, Jess Conditt recounted Yahoo's series of catastrophes that was the past twelve months. An attack compromising 500 million accounts was only the company's second-biggest hack revealed this year. Nathan Ingraham was disappointed by Apple.

Historically, more than half of the sales through eBay Inc.'s online auction site are made overseas. There was a problem, though: Users on the site saw only listings posted in their preferred language. People could change their settings and browse the site in different languages, one at a time. But they had little visibility into products and goods listed in languages other than the selected one. With different sellers posting the same items in a variety of languages, this meant that individual users were only seeing a segment of all the listings for a given product.

And thanks to the newly released "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story", public sentiment towards droids is off the charts. It's unlikely the CNET team will stumble across anything as endearing new Star Wars droid K-2SO as it scours the halls in Las Vegas. Robots have primarily been used as marketing gimmicks or demonstration props at previous shows. That, says IHS analyst Dinesh Kithany, is set to change. "What we will see is more from the application point of view," Kithany said.

The following is the text of a talk I gave in San Francisco on December 1st, 2016. The audience was readers of my newsletter, Exponential View. You can sign up here. This is a long (7,500 word) transcript of the talk. You can scan it to see the slides and accompanying exhibits if that is easier. Or even read it in more than one sitting…. Exponential View has a purpose. In between all the emojis and all the spelling mistakes, this is what it's about: This is me on my first day at school back when I was in Zambia in sub-Saharan Africa. On the right is my friend Rehan, who I reconnected recently through Facebook. He is now known as Dr. Freeze and he does non-invasive body sculpting in Orange County. So I can get you a good rate. But I think it's important, this starting point is important. We often are inspired from where we come from and what the hell was I doing in Zambia? My dad was trained as economist and accountant, well he is retired now, but then he was an economist and was down in Zambia building the kind of institutions that we take for granted in countries like the U.S. and the U.K. to make the country function. Zambia had just got independence from the U.K. It needed a deeper civil service, it was having to build its legal system, create its system of distribution and so on. So I got an early exposure to the importance of economic institutions for making societies wealthier and making them work. While I was down in Zambia, which is a land-locked country and doesn't have great access to the sea and this is the 1970s, so we didn't have a vast range of toys.

LG and Samsung have really taken advantage of the calm before the CES storm by teasing out their product announcements, one by one. LG's certainly ahead in terms of sheer strangeness here, having already announced a floating speaker and a wearable speaker collar. The Seoul-based electronics giant will also apparently be showing off a bunch of robots at the show. It's not the company's first robotic rodeo, of course, having already released some robotic vacuum cleaners and, at the very least, shown off some…interesting takes on the space, including the Rolling Bot that debuted at MWC last year (below). A trio of "non-cleaning" robots teased by the company, include what sounds like a lawn mowing model, a commercial model designed to offer up travel info to humans at airports and hotels and the Hub Robot – which, from the sound of things, is a bit like a mobile Amazon Echo.

Then consider this month's winners of the 2016 Siemens Competition, which honors math, science and technology projects from high school students around the country. These are some smart kids with plans to revolutionize fields such as medicine. Identical twin sisters from Texas won the $100,000 prize in the team event with their project that delivers an earlier diagnosis for schizophrenia. The $100,000 scholarship winner of the individual competition is from Oregon and he developed a biodegradable battery to power medical devices that you swallow. The sisters, Adhya and Shriya Beesam, are juniors (yes, juniors) at Plano East Senior High School in Plano, Texas, north of Dallas.

Gravity Rush 2 is my most-anticipated game of January 2016. January is almost upon us, and with it comes a bunch of new games. There's nothing really earth-shattering releasing in the first month of 2017, but there's at least a few good games you should keep an eye on. Following is the full list of releases. After that, we'll take a look at the ones that are on my radar.