Archive for the 'Technology' Category
FAA for the First Time OKs Commercial Drone Flights Over Land
June 11th, 2014Via: Los Angeles Times: Marking a milestone for the industry, Monrovia drone maker AeroVironment Inc. has announced a contract to use an unmanned aircraft to perform routine commercial services over land in compliance with Federal Aviation Administration regulations. The company’s small drone, called Puma AE, is now scouring BP Exploration Inc.’s Prudhoe Bay oil field […]
Feds Snatch Mobile Phone Tracking Records Away from ACLU
June 10th, 2014Via: Naked Security: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a run-of-the-mill public records request about cell phone surveillance with a local police department in Florida. The US Marshals Service last week reacted by swooping in and snatching those records out from under the ACLU’s nose just hours before they were supposed to review them. […]
Watch This Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry Evaporate Overnight
June 9th, 2014Via: Linkedin: Imagine an industry where a few companies make billions of dollars by exerting strict control over valuable information — while paying the people who produce that information nothing at all. That’s the state of academic, scientific publishing today. And it’s about to be blown wide open by much more open, Internet-based publishers. This […]
How FBI Informant Sabu Helped Anonymous Hack Brazil
June 9th, 2014Via: Vice: In early 2012, members of the hacking collective Anonymous carried out a series of cyber attacks on government and corporate websites in Brazil. They did so under the direction of a hacker who, unbeknownst to them, was wearing another hat: helping the Federal Bureau of Investigation carry out one of its biggest cybercrime […]
Chatbot Passes Turing Test for First Time
June 9th, 2014Via: ZDNet: A computer program that pretends to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy called Eugene Goostman passed a Turing test at the Royal Society in London yesterday (Saturday 6 June) by convincing 33 percent of the judges that it was human during a five-minute typed conversation. The test was suggested by computer scientist Alan Turing […]
SJR (Super Joule Ringer) Looper LED Flashlight Circuit V3
June 8th, 2014Via: LaserHacker:
A New Way to Make Laser-Like Beams Using 250x Less Power
June 7th, 2014Via: University of Michigan: With precarious particles called polaritons that straddle the worlds of light and matter, University of Michigan researchers have demonstrated a new, practical and potentially more efficient way to make a coherent laser-like beam. They have made what’s believed to be the first polariton laser that is fueled by electrical current as […]
Dawn of a Robot Revolution
June 6th, 2014Via: Financial Times: At the Automatica robot and automation fair in Munich this week the organisers devoted a whole section to so-called “service robots” for the first time. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for manufacturing, engineering and automation demonstrated a Care-O-Bot that sweeps office floors and empties waste paper bins. Pal Robotics showed Stockbot, which […]
Vodafone Reveals Direct Access by Governments to Customer Data
June 6th, 2014Via: New York Times: A number of countries have direct access to the communication network run by the British telecom company Vodafone. The revelation comes in a privacy report released on Friday by Vodafone, the world’s second-largest carrier behind China Mobile, that included information about how governments regularly requested data about the company’s users. Vodafone […]
After Texting Girlfriend Too Much In The Dark, Chinese Man Suffers Detached Retina
June 5th, 2014Via: MedicalDaily: A 26-year-old man from China suffered a detached retina after hours of texting his girlfriend in the dark, using his cell phone messaging app, WeChat. He was required to undergo emergency surgery after his eyesight became plagued with sudden flashes and he discovered his left eye’s retina had become detached. Retinal detachment — […]
