Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Facebook Claims ‘A Bug’ Made it Track Nonusers
April 11th, 2015Mmm hmm. Via: The Hill: Facebook researchers have found “a bug” that caused it to track people, even if they had never visited its website, the social media giant acknowledged this week. The bug caused the company to place cookies — a common way to track people’s browsing habits on the Web — on “some” […]
Baltimore Police Used Stingray Systems to Track Cellphones in Thousands of Cases
April 9th, 2015Via: Baltimore Sun: The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone tracking device thousands of times in recent years while following instructions from the FBI to withhold information about it from prosecutors and judges, a detective revealed in court testimony Wednesday. The testimony shows for the first time how frequently city police […]
Indian Police to Use Pepper-Spraying Drones on Unruly Protesters
April 9th, 2015Via: AFP: Police in a northern Indian city said Tuesday they have a new weapon for controlling unruly protesters in the world’s largest democracy: pepper-spraying drones. Yashasvi Yadav, police chief of Lucknow, said his officers have successfully test-flown the newly purchased drones with a view to better crowd control. “The results were brilliant. We have […]
Battery Prices Dropping Faster Than Predicted
April 9th, 2015Via: Bloomberg: The most important piece of news on the energy front isn’t the plunge in oil prices, but the progress that is being made in battery technology. A new study in Nature Climate Change, by Bjorn Nykvist and Mans Nilsson of the Stockholm Environment Institute, shows that electric vehicle batteries have been getting cheaper […]
Michigan Micro Mote: The World’s Smallest Computer
April 9th, 2015Via: University of Michigan: The Michigan Micro Mote constitutes the first complete, operational computer system measuring as small as two millimeters across. “To be “complete,” a computer system must have an input of data, the ability to process that data – meaning process and store it, make decisions about what to do next – and […]
U.S. Aerospace Command Moving Comms Gear Back to Cold War Bunker
April 8th, 2015Via: AFP: The US military command that scans North America’s skies for enemy missiles and aircraft plans to move its communications gear to a Cold War-era mountain bunker, officers said. The shift to the Cheyenne Mountain base in Colorado is designed to safeguard the command’s sensitive sensors and servers from a potential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) […]
Human Rights Watch Sues DEA Over Bulk Collection of Americans’ Telephone Records
April 8th, 2015Via: EFF: Human Rights Watch, a nonpartisan organization that fights human rights abuses across the globe, filed suit against the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration late Tuesday for illegally collecting records of its telephone calls to certain foreign countries as part of yet another government bulk surveillance program. The group is represented by the Electronic Frontier […]
Robotic Co-Pilots
April 7th, 2015Via: New York Times: This summer, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon research organization, will take the next step in plane automation with the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System, or Alias. Sometime this year, the agency will begin flight testing a robot that can be quickly installed in the right seat of military […]
‘BMW’s New Sensors Do the Braking for You’
April 7th, 2015Via: Bloomberg: More than 90 percent of auto-related crashes are due to human error: a distraction, a mistake. With its new “Active Assist” technology, BMW is trying to do everything it can to take those errors out of the equation. Using laser sensors, the system effectively keeps a 360-degree vigil and will automatically and gently […]
Stanford: New Aluminum-Ion Battery, “7,500 Cycles Without Any Loss of Capacity”
April 7th, 2015Non toxic. Very safe. Does it scale? Hope so. It’s nowhere near market ready, but exciting anyway. Via: Stanford University: Stanford University scientists have invented the first high-performance aluminum battery that’s fast-charging, long-lasting and inexpensive. Researchers say the new technology offers a safe alternative to many commercial batteries in wide use today. “We have developed […]
