If the University of Hairy Nipples' Fighting Areolas want to play on blue turf, then by cracky, go to town: It had all come a long, long, long way from 1993, when EA launched a college football series minus the rights to school names and logos (Michigan vs. BYU could be simulated as'Ann Arbor' vs. 'Provo') to mirror its successful Madden franchise, even slapping the name of another iconic Bay Area coach, Bill Walsh -- then about to wrap up his second tenure at Stanford University -- on the title. Within a few years, the series had dropped the Walsh name but added collegiate licensing, exploding in the summer of 1995 with 108 schools, conference logos and real bowl names (Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar). It's dead -- technically on a hiatus -- now, a run of more than 20 summers slammed shut in 2013 not by consumer disinterest but legal entanglement. Because even if EA couldn't use players' names, as it violated the NCAA's rules regarding amateurism, programmers were inclined to approximate with every school the real-life attributes, from both a skill and physique standpoint, of its star players in any given season: You knew who they were. They knew who they were. If even if you didn't, the game eventually featured a customizer with sliders that accounted for the most precise of details and free downloadable fan-generated rosters that did all of the naming work for you. A lot of folks got rich off NCAA Football, of course, save for the players whom the game wasn't really (wink) trying (wink) to (wink) emulate (wink). Enter Ed O'Bannon and his legal team, and ne'er the twain; rather than wrestle with how to compensate its student-athletes going forward, the SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences, three of the so-called Power 5 leagues, forbade the use of their trademarks after the summer of 2013, and EA pulled the plug. And that's the Catch-22: Even thought we know it was wrong, we still miss it.

There's always one game at E3 that proves, counter to the general theme of the show, bigger isn't always better. This year, a tiny studio named Compulsion found itself thrust into the limelight after its project We Happy Few caused a considerable splash at Microsoft's press conference. But as a black comedy set in a dystopian Britain being destroyed by a vast group hallucination, it may now take on more profound and pressing connotations following last night's result. For some, this strange combination of 1984, A Clockwork Orange and Bioshock feels very much the game of the moment. The opening of the E3 demo, which momentarily silenced the usual energetic whooping, evoked the spirit of another wonderful introductory sequence, from Terry Gilliam's seminal 1985 film Brazil.

Dave Addey doesn't just watch movies. Addey is the creator of Typeset In The Future, a website devoted entirely to fonts in science fiction. Why yes, it is a bastion of gloriously esoteric nerdery. It all began when Addey, a developer publications engineer at Apple and lifelong science fiction fan, started noticing the same font in every movie he watched: Eurostile Bold Extended. Designed in 1960, the font is geometric, functional, and looks good on the side of a spaceship (Star Trek).

The Amazon Echo is an unlikely hit. After all, the world's largest online retailer hasn't always won its bets on hardware. And a gadget that relies solely on voice? Yet Amazon has by one estimate sold some 3 million of the squat cylinders since the Echo launched in November, 2014. The company doesn't share sales data, but it did say Alexa, the voice-activated software that powers Echo, is active in millions of places, including smartphone apps and other Amazon gadgets.

In an unassuming building on the outskirts of Budapest engineers working for small Hungarian security firm BalaBit have spent the last three years working on technology its makers are convinced can contain one of cybersecurity's most intractable woes. In 2014 the relatively unknown firm launched a system called Blindspotter which, as its name suggests, gives its customers mostly in finance and telco sector buyers the ability to see things most networks barely acknowledge as existing let alone attempt to look for. Blindspotter is designed to watch what network users are doing in a lot of detail, a boon for organisations that worry about user credentials being abused, either deliberately from within by attackers who've somehow pilfered them. When used in conjunction with the firm's network proxy appliance, Shell Control Box (SCB), organisations suddenly have the ability to monitor their whole infrastructure using measurements of user behaviour rather than packets, ports and protocols. The system's real intrigue isn't what it does – cybersecurity is already chock full of network monitoring in different forms – so much as how it does it.

If there's one thing software company Ebsta understands, it's customer relationship management. The San Diego- and London-based company sells a 10 per month per user Chrome browser extension that syncs customers' email accounts to the Salesforce database to streamline the onerous task of updating a CRM system. But finding new prospects for Ebsta is difficult and, as vice president of sales Bernhard Peters points out, expensive -- especially for a company with roughly 1 million in annual revenue. "We're still a tiny company," Peters says. "We have to be careful who we chase; we don't have a lot of money or manpower to spare. Buying lists never works; they're out of date. And data-mining companies charge at least 25,000 upfront, with no guarantee of ROI." Peters was in a San Diego restaurant when he overheard Olin Hyde, co-founder and CEO of Englue, explaining how his artificial intelligence product LeadCrunch could mine the web to uncover leads based on names of a company's best customers.

Like it or not (although we can't imagine why you wouldn't), driverless cars are on their way, with some reports suggesting 10 million could be on the road by 2020. But with their adoption comes a few problems to be ironed out, and perhaps none are more controversial than the so-called "greater good" scenario. The issue is this: In a few very rare scenarios, a driverless car may have to make a choice between protecting its occupants and protecting pedestrians. For example, if it's driving down a road at speed and someone runs out into the road, should it swerve into other traffic to avoid them, potentially injuring or killing the driver and passengers? Or should it make every attempt to stop, even though it knows it won't be able to, killing the pedestrian?

NEW YORK – Here in the United States, the horrific shooting at a night club in Orlando, Florida, that killed 49 people has intensified the debate once again over the extent leaders must go to fight terrorism and gun violence. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the contrasting responses of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their attacks on one another suggest that a mud-slinging showdown between the two would-be national leaders is on track. And a world away, in the Philippines, the rhetoric surrounding the battle against terrorists and criminals is equally sensational. The one-time student of U.S. democracy has recently elected a leader of its own in political incorrectness. Who would have thought a man who vowed to kill criminals and grant himself a presidential pardon, who boasts of being a womanizer, has joked about wanting to rape a missionary and talked of the killing of journalists, would win a popular election and become head of state. Such is the dramatic turn of events in the Philippines, a nation shaped by centuries of Spanish and then by decades of American colonial rule.

Kai Brunner is principal designer for continuous delivery enterprise software at Electric Cloud. Murphy's Law decrees: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." For any of us whose livelihood depends on our labor, things going wrong could mean: "Anything that can be automated, will be automated." Our labor or skill in exchange for pay has undoubtedly caused us to seek security in the notion that we'll be forever needed. And yet time has shown that our ingenuity for efficiency orchestrates our removal from all forms of repetitive tasks.

The Restore-L mission could change the way the government and private space corporations build and operate satellites. It has the potential to extend the lifespan of spacefaring vehicles and could prevent their untimely death. Further, once the project is operational, companies could choose to deploy spacecraft with half-empty fuel tanks so that they could fit more instruments on board. "With robotic servicing on the table, satellite owners can extend the lifespan of satellites that are running low on fuel, reaping additional years of service – and revenue – from their initial investment. If a solar array or a communications antenna fails to deploy, a servicer with inspection cameras and the right repair tools could help recover the asset that otherwise would have been lost. The loss of an anticipated revenue or data stream can be devastating."