THE Netflix film, The Great Hack, relates Cambridge Analytica’s role in Trump’s 2016 elections to a much larger issue – the threat to our democracy from global tech giants.  It is not the Facebook data that Cambridge “hacked”, but the election itself.  And what is at stake is not just an election, but the very future of democracy. If elections can be hacked, so can our democracy. The film poses a fundamental question for our times: are more elections in more places going to be won by the best data “team” that money can buy?

INDIA’S on-going space exploration programme takes its next step with the launch on July 15, 2019 of Chandrayaan-2, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) second venture to the moon. The first mission was mainly conducted by the orbiting spacecraft while a probe with the Indian flag was sent to crash on the moon’s surface, symbolically “planting” the Indian tricolour on the moon.

MERGER fever seems to be spreading, this time in aerospace which has witnessed continuous merger and acquisitions (M&A) activity for over several decades as technologies have advanced, R&D and production costs have gone through the roof and even large firms have found it difficult to compete with the bigger players, especially if their main work is in broadly the same market segment.

THE New York Times recent report that the US Cyber Command has planted “malware” – read cyber bombs – deep into the Russian grid, should worry not just the Russian people, but all of us.  Taking down a country’s grid leads to blackouts, and disrupts a country’s vital infrastructure: communication networks such as metros, railways, airports, hospitals, telecommunications including cell phones; it can lead to failure of hydroelectric plants and dams causing devastating floods, nuclear plants outages and possible meltdown.

THE US sanctions on Huawei has transformed what started as a trade war between the US and China into a full blown tech war. The US has followed the additional tariffs of 10-25 per cent on $250 billion Chinese goods by putting Huawei, the Chinese telecom and mobile manufacturing giant, on the “entities list”, effectively a sanctions list. This forbids all companies having US content from selling to it.