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technology
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Google Announces ‘Google Play,’ Cloud-Based Media Hub
07 Mar 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Another alternative to Apple’s iCloud popped up this week, with Google has announcing that it will be combining the Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore into a new cloud-based service called Google Play, allowing users to access all of their media across all of their Android devices.
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iPad 3 Specifications Spotted In The Wild
05 Mar 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
It’s less than a week to go until the iPad 3 is unveiled, so everybody and their grandma is throwing out thoughts about what the new toy can do. Concrete stats are emerging though – Apple employees have been browsing the web with their personal iPad 3’s, turning up details about the new tablet on website server logs.
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25 Arrested In Global “Anonymous” Crackdown
29 Feb 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
25 people have been arrested for alleged ties to hacktivist movement Anonymous in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain in the joint ‘Operation Unmask,’ which I’m sure has nothing to do with the INTERPOL website being taken down yesterday and everything to do with attacks against websites in Columbia and Chile dating from the middle of 2011.
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Google to Release “Heads-Up Display” Glasses By End Of Year
22 Feb 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Those of you who have been wanting Terminator-vision since the films first came out won’t have long to wait. The New York Times reports that Google is not only working on, but will be releasing “smart glasses” fitted with Android-based augmented reality software by the year’s end.
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Face-Recognizing Billboard Only Displays Ad To Women
22 Feb 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
An intelligent billboard set up in London has facial recognition tech built in that lets it scan passersby for gender – if a woman stops to take a look, it plays a 40-second video clip. Dudes only get a link to the advertiser’s website. It’s like they’re trying to send a message or something.
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Nevada Legalizes Self-Driving Cars
20 Feb 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Hello, future! Nevada has become the first state to legalize self-driving cars, which are apparently pretty easy to get hold of in Nevada. Granted, the cars must have two humans inside, and be insured for around $1 million, but let’s focus on the part where people are allowed to have self-driving cars now.
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NASA Unveils Stunning Future Aircraft Designs [PHOTOS]
15 Feb 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Nobody has any idea where they’re planning on getting funding from – but like a kid with an extended birthday wish list, NASA has unveiled some amazing concepts of future, eco-friendly aircraft, which they’re calling “greener flying machines for the year 2025.” Assuming they’re still here then.
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SpaceX Test-Fires ‘Super’ Rocket Engines [VIDEO]
03 Feb 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Spaceflight start-up, SpaceX – those guys who want to put a person on Mars in the next decade or two – has been demonstrating the potency of its SuperDraco rockets at their test facility in Texas. Take a look at the fancily-named rockets in action after the jump.
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NASA’s Recording The Dark Side Of The Moon [VIDEO]
02 Feb 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
People who like Pink Floyd references, rejoice, because NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has beamed back its first video of the dark side of the moon. Click through to see what that astronaut that everybody forgets about saw while Armstrong and Aldrin were hogging all the glory.
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Google’s New ‘Emergency Alerts’ Feature
26 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Google has been saving up a tonne of creepy private information about you lately, which is unfortunate, but the company’s philanthropic arm just launched a new crisis response project to win back our hearts and personal data: emergency alerts on Google Maps.
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Posh Gauteng School To Make iPads Mandatory
26 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 4 Comments
With the news that Apple looks set to revolutionise school learning with its textbook initiative, comes another report that a Johannesburg private school is going to make iPads compulsory this year, at parents’ cost. How long until other schools follow suit?
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‘Apple In Education’ Launches New Digital Educational Tools
20 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
As part of their ‘reinvention of the textbook,’ Apple yesterday unveiled three new applications for use in the digital educational under their Apple in Education program: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The tools are designed to allow for interactive textbooks, digital textbook creation, and open-access educational resources from top universities, respectively.
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Brazilian Police Equipped With Facial Recognition Glasses For 2014
19 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
This is sort of like Robocop! Brazilian police forces are testing out glasses fitted out with cameras linked to a central computer network that stores a database of criminal suspects’ faces, so that they’ll be able to arrest people during the 2014 World Cup without having to ask them their names.
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Mbeki Questions Twitter’s Social Usefulness, Twitter Flips Out A Little
17 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
Following his opening address for the International Knowledge Conference at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, former president, Thabo Mbeki voiced some concerns about Twitter as “a great conveyor of reliable knowledge,” pointing to Gaddafi’s overthrow as a consequence of “false knowledge,” rather than the social media. Mbeki immediately started trending on Twitter.
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Samsung’s New “Smart Window” [VIDEO]
16 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
There have been plenty of tech announcements over the past few days, what with the Consumer Electronics Show going on in Las Vegas, each one claiming to be more exciting than the last – which gets tedious. So I mean it when I say that, Samsung’s new “Smart Window” is the most exciting thing to come out of CES 2012.
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UK Student Faces Extradition To USA For Copyright Infringement
16 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
A UK judge ruled this week that Richard O’Dwyer, an English university student, can be extradited to the United States to face charges of copyright infringement – O’Dwyer being the former administrator of TVShack, a website that linked to pirated content. This sets a dangerous legal precedent for anybody who does anything fun on the internet.
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How Much Facebook Is Worth And Other Interesting Facts [INFOGRAPHIC]
13 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
This year Facebook will go public and start to sell shares on the stock exchange. Thanks to all of us, the social network is now worth $100 billion – more than giants such as Google, Disney, Amazon, and McDonald’s. But who is going to pocket all this money? Check out this infographic, detailing which Facebook friends will be getting pieces of the pie, as well as some other interesting facts:
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Pentagon Scientists Created A “Time Cloak” To Make Events Disappear
05 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Five days into 2012 and we’ve already got fancy new technology. A team from Cornell University have developed a light-distortion device that can mask events as if they hadn’t happened; they managed to use light distortion to hide an event for 40 picoseconds. Which, granted, is 40 trillionths of a second, but the research is groundbreaking in the extreme.
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Upcoming Apple Event To Revamp iBooks
03 Jan 2012 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Apple is holding a product event later this month in New York – and since the Christmas buy-a-palooza is just past, it’s looking unlikely that they’re going to be announcing any new hardware just yet. Instead, Apple seems set to refurbish iBooks, their eBook retail platform, with a couple of new publishing options.
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Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2011
29 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
It’s the 29th of December, which means we are all now sick of Top 10 lists. There are Top 10 lists of Top 10 list. Except this particular Top 10 list is actually pretty informative, collating the year’s illegal torrent data to tell us which films people wanted to see but weren’t willing to pay for. #1 is really awful.
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Your MP3 Player May Be Deafening You: Study
28 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Peace and quiet can come at a premium, especially if you live and work in a busy urban environment. However, a new study shows that the biggest actual threat to our hearing is one we deliberately expose ourselves to every day.
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Voice Synthesizer Resurrects Dead Singers’ Voices
21 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Score one for creepy technology. Vocaloid, a voice-synthesis brand owned by Yamaha, has come up with a process by which to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs, without requiring the vocalist to build up a painstaking voice library first – so they could be doing that Kurt Cobain/Michael Jackson duet album pretty soon.
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IBM Releases Predictions For Technology In 2017 [VIDEO]
20 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
IBM have released their annual predictions for the future of technology, via the IBM “5 in 5” project, which looks at five innovations which they figure will transform modern life within the next five years; these include mind-reading computers, human-generated electricity, and biometric scanning replacing passwords.
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SETI Resumes Hunt For Aliens After Six Month Hiatus
07 Dec 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was put on hold for six months due to lack of funds – but, following donations from the public and the US Airforce, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in northern California is operational again. So man, we’re going to feel pretty stupid if aliens called at some point during those six months.
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Secret Software Is Probably Tracking Everything You Do On Your Phone
30 Nov 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 4 Comments
The Carrier IQ software, installed on most modern Android, Blackberry and Nokia phones, is supposed to record some of the things phones do so manufacturers can do quality control. Except it’s also been logging everybody’s text messages, web searches, and phone calls. Which is pretty bad.
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Now Google Wants To Map Your Floor Plan Too
30 Nov 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Last month, Google Maps’ Street View functionality started displaying photos of retail spaces’ interiors; now Google Maps itself is headed indoors, too, with a proposed Google Maps Floor Plans feature. This would mean Google maps of airports, shopping malls, and other buildings that you might somehow be able to get lost in.
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American Universities Purchasing ‘.XXX’ Porn Domain Names
14 Nov 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The .xxx domain, set to launch by the end of the year, is meant to be the domain of choice for porn sites. Which is dandy, but means that opportunists could register ‘google.xxx,’ for instance, and capitalize on Google’s popularity – so American universities are purchasing .xxx domains to keep people from making porn sites with their names in them.
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Nokia’s New Flexible Phone [VIDEO]
11 Nov 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
Nokia has released a concept video for their new HumanForm phone – which isn’t so much human-shaped as it is oblong. What’s interesting about it is that the casing is meant to be flexible, and the entire surface is meant to run off of touch recognition, which is fairly rad.
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RIM Offers Free Apps To Apologize For That Whole BlackBerry Crash Thing
17 Oct 2011 by Jasmine Stone / 1 Comment
While Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, has already publicly apologized for last week’s three-day BlackBerry outage, the PR guys figured that that probably wasn’t enough. Which is why they’ve announced that they’re offering BlackBerry customers a bunch of free “premium apps,” in the hopes of winning back some love. Check the app list after the jump.
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China Space Shuttle Prepped For Launch For Tonight
29 Sep 2011 by Jasmine Stone / No Comments
The unmanned spacecraft, Tiangong-1, which translates awesomely to Heavenly Palace, is set to blast off tonight from China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gansu province, marking the start of China’s first rendezvous and docking mission. That guy is set to take off between 13h16 and 13h31 GMT.
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