The cyber-war on cyber-terror now has innocent bystanders, apparently. In a hunt for LulzSec, the hacking group claiming responsibility for the compromise of huge amounts of Sony user accounts and for briefly taking the CIA website offline, the FBI raided DigitalOne’s data – finding nothing, but causing a bunch of unrelated websites to go offline.
Google announced on Tuesday that they’d been they target of a phishing scam originating in Jinan, China, aimed at the accounts of Chinese activists and senior officials in the U.S. Victims were sent fake emails with links to a fake Gmail site, which harvested the usernames and passwords of anyone trying to log in.
Cisco have just come out with their annual Visual Networking Index, which is a pretty reliable source of internet traffic reporting. Global traffic will quadruple, by 2015, with Asia’s traffic generation overtaking North America. Which is cool, but less cool than the stuff they say about traffic in South Africa, which is after the jump.
So Joshua Kaufman had his MacBook stolen in March. Which sucks – he reported the crime to the police, but they couldn’t help, due to lack of resources. Except Kaufman has the Hidden app on his MacBook, which lets him remotely stalk and photograph the thief – and put them online. Thanks, Internet.
The concept for a Marlboro cigarrette-swapping smartphone app has been making the rounds – the idea being that social smokers would be able to trade digital cigarettes for real ones using bump technology, and ‘hardcore smokers’ would be able to redeem the digital smokes for real ones once they’d accumulated enough.
It’s called iPlayboy because, well hell, what else were they going to call it? The appeal here is not so much that you get to see tastefully nude photographs in glorious iPad detail as the fact that the application offers full access tothe Playboy archives – you would own every Playboy issue ever. Welcome to the future.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, the commercial spaceflight vehicle, recently had its seventh test flight, dropped from a height of 15km to see if it could adjust speed and bearing with various wing configurations. Which sounds technically fancy, but really just looks insanely cool.
Surprise! Security firm Symantec yesterday reported that a hole in the Facebook security system allowed third-parties like advertisers access to user accounts and private data – and that this hole has been in place for the past four years, since Facebook first started offering apps to its users.
Yay, future. If you’ve had a digital camera stolen, you can upload a photo taken with the missing camera to StolenCameraFinder.com and it’ll use the serial number embedded in the image to search for matching photos online – meaning you can find the douche who took your stuff.
Hemingway drank cocktails. I’m just saying that now so that any concerns about masculinity and ‘girly drinks’ are shelved from the get-go. Multimedia artist Marcos Lutyens has set up an installation that projects arsty scans from EEG headsets worn by people drinking Absolut vodka, and if boozey brain-waves isn’t art then I don’t know what is.
And you thought it was just Apple and Google! Gosh. TomTom has admitted that its satellite navigation devices can track users and report to third parties about how fast they’re going – like the police, for instance. Your TomTom is a speed camera now.Yay future.
The opening of Burberry’s flagship Beijing store was marked by a holographic runway show. Holographic models walked through the virtual images of one another, flickering up and down the catwalk, and disappearing in pyrotechnic bursts. Also, Edie Campbell turned into Jourdan Dunn mid-stride – no spice.
A life-sized, functional, AT-AT Walker. From The Empire Strikes Back. You know – those big walking four-legged suckers. If you’re still reading this I assume you know what I’m talking about, so click through to read about a giant nerd’s awesome plan to crowdsource building this thing.
Google has set up the first of its startup-funding offices in Cape Town, under the ‘Umbuno’ flagship. “Umbono” is isiZulu for ‘vision’ or ‘idea’. Google also showed that it knows how to make a girl feel special, saying it chose Cape Town because the city is in “the process of positioning itself as a hub for innovation and technology”.
This has been generating some online discussion – a video of a dude hijacking billboards in Times Square using an iPhone 4, a transmitter, a balloon and some tape, like a geeky MacGyver. The feeling at the moment is that this is a publicity stunt, but if so it’s an awesome-looking stunt.
I mean don’t get me wrong, I’d want a robot clone too, it’s just not totally clear why Henrik Scharfe, professor at Aalborg University, actually got one assembled by the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Japan. It’s ostensibly the first android with a beard, though, so yay science.
They can do that now. By ‘they’ I mean ‘those with money and de facto power,’ obviously, not specifically the heads of the PRC – but I mean government scrutiny of human movement is being implemented on a huge, huge scale. It’s called the Information Platform of Real-time Citizen Movement – which sounds like a good and reasonable platform.
Well, I’m pretty proud of that headline. Cornell University and the French Culinary Institute have developed a food printer that runs off puree and spits out sculptures – like rocketships made of gouda and scallions. And now we can have coconut sans awful coconut texture.
German research facility BrainDriver has put together a kit that lets people make rudimentary driving commands with their brains – you know, without using their hands. I have serious concerns about how this system deals with those brief suicidal thoughts that tend to pop up when knee-deep in traffic on the 9/5 commute.
I guess this is the future’s MacBook photobooth? Using a 3-D printer and a Microsoft Kinect, folks can get small, low-resolution 3-D sculptures of themselves printed, as displayed at the snappily titled Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference last week.
The Clap-Off Bra from Randy Sarafan on Vimeo.
This is special. I mean, I would talk a little bit more about the basic premise of the thing, but it does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin: you clap, bra comes off. It’s not quite the snip-snap process of seduction I’d hoped for as a tiny-man child, but it’s close.
I mean, yes, making dominos that trip each other without touching is probably a useless application of technology, but I figure this puts us one step closer to that weird hologram game from Star Wars, and I am for it.
I’m not sure if this beats prosthetic tentacles, but it’s close. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are building snake-like robots that can reach delicate organs that don’t generally respond well to getting cut open. Because the prospect of surgery wasn’t frightening enough before.
I tweeted about this the other day and people lost their minds. Especially when they saw the attached images I took, of the dashboard in the new MINI Countryman. It shows my Twitter stream coming through LIVE – and even shows each person’s Twitter icon, in full colour. And don’t get me started on the […]
Proverbial Wallets from John Kestner on Vimeo.
Paying things with cards is weird for me. I mean obviously the convenience of having a plastic card that gets me stuff is great – I got to take advantage of the Threadless sale, for instance – but without that tangible sense of loss at having to fork over a wad of cash, there is the risk of going overboard is substantial. Folks at MIT have some ideas about that.
Last week’s Antimov competition challenged amateur engineers to build robots that broke one of the Three Laws or Robotics – which you’d know if you’d read I, Robot (nerd) or saw that movie where Will Smith had the robot arm. No, the robot arm was not called Eva Mendez.