Technology will transform how we meet our needs for peace, dignity and community. This will shatter the global political equilibrium, and shift power away from governments towards individuals. States, ideas and industries will go out of business. Inequality could grow. [...] For the first time, technology gives the prospect of the world’s population having an instant, global and unfiltered means of communicating, of consuming information, of forming opinions, preferences and communities.

Cultural and social norms are one of the most significant, yet largely ignored, barriers preventing women and girls accessing mobile phones and the internet. In some cases they have even resulted in death and rape. However, current efforts to bridge the digital gender divide are failing to prioritize initiatives which seek to understand, and ultimately, challenge these powerful norms, 

China has employed tens of thousands of scholars to write an internet version of its national encyclopaedia, which will go online next year to compete against Wikipedia. [...] Designed to be the nation’s first digital book of “everything”, it will feature more than 300,000 entries, each about 1,000 words long, making it twice as large as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and about the same size as the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia.

Is an alien mollusk species choking your shoreline? Don’t despair. China’s ravenous, inventive internet users have an answer to unwelcome shellfish.They’re ready to devour them. The Danish Embassy in Beijing has been absorbing that lesson since it shared a report online this week about a plague of Pacific oysters, a stubborn, gray intruder that has spread explosively along parts of the Scandinavian coast.

The anonymity of the internet, he added, makes it difficult to distinguish between ordinary people voicing their genuine opinions and state-sponsored trolls. “There is no smoking gun, only lots of smoke,” Mr. de Jong acknowledged.

The Geneva Convention, signed by war-weary nations in August 1949, now binds 196 countries to protect civilians in war zones. Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, argues that the U.S. and other countries now need to draw up a digital equivalent to protect civilians and companies caught in the crossfire of constant cyberwar.