Federal accident investigators want to bring robotics to the next new car you buy. The National Transportation Safety Board says all cars, not just fancy ones should come equipped with technology that warns of accidents ahead, slows you down if the car in front of you hits the breaks, or helps you stay in your lane when you start weaving.

Get to know this phrase: Cyber Ops. President Obama has reportedly signed a secret directive that sets out rules for how the military might get aggressive in the face of a cyber attack. The order acknowledges that the military response to a computer attack isn’t just battening down the hatches on government computers to stop hackers or malicious software. Washington Post national security correspondent Ellen Nakashima found out about the directive and says it spells out what’s considered defensive versus offensive.  

Did you see how former CIA director David Petraeus communicated electronically with his biographer and paramour? It is an email technique supposedly favored by terrorists to cover their tracks. Open an email account using, for instance, Google’s Gmail.  Write a message, don’t send it. Instead, save it as a draft then give your email password to the recipient. She then logs in and reads the message in the draft email folder. The message seems tougher to trace because it’s never been sent, like leaving a message in an envelope on your desk and giving the recipient a key to your office.

It’s got to be like a bath of endorphins: A $5 or $10 million check to get your big idea for a YouTube channel off the ground. Google sent out a hundred million dollars of these check in January. But imagine the stress hormones when word comes that people aren’t watching enough and the money is getting cut off? Advertising Age is now reporting that more than half the channels are about to get dropped.

Here’s a conversion worthy of a Transformers movie: Take buttoned-down, MBA-toting business professionals, and turn them into video game designers. That’s the goal of a new book about Gamification, changing behavior of employees and customers by appealing to their sense of fun and their competitive instinct, video game style. Here’s another big idea: The interplanetary Internet. The experimental technology has just been used by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station to control a robot in Germany. Beyond the obvious utility for a mega villain, the technology might lead to better communications with robots exploring other planets.

To help tap financial donors and to get out the vote, we knew the Obama campaign was crunching big data. But, until now, it wasn’t very clear how big. Michael Scherer, White House correspondent for Time got an inside-look at the math wizards, behavioral scientists and other data specialists helping to drive the campaign. His access was given on condition: He not publish anything until it was all over. 

Microsoft has filed a patent for the Xbox gaming Kinect controller, and it has nothing to do with how well you dance Gangam style. It appears to be designed for figuring out if too many people are watching something on Xbox — a DVD, a Blue Ray disc, etc. If it detects a couple of people watching, fine. But what if it’s a dozen? That might constitute a real audience, and you’d have to pay more for a lisence to show it like you’re a theater.

It is Obama 2.0. The current president of the United States is set to stay in the job until January 20th, 2017. In “tech-years” that is an enormous amount of time, so forecasts are tough. But what are the technology issues that will dominate over the next four years of the new Obama Administration?

On this election day, we’ll be looking at a map — not of swing states that could go red or blue, but a map measuring states’ voting technology, and which have the best and the worst chances of messing up the count. For instance, Wisconsin: Good. Georgia: Not so good at making sure votes are recorded in a way that can be audited or recounted if needed. It’s a lot easier to modify electronic records than to modify paper records which is why banking and a lot of other critical activities still rely on paper when there’s an ultimate disaster and electronic records are lost or corrupted.