Archive for the 'Technology' Category
The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas
May 20th, 2014Via: First Look: The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge […]
U.S. Army’s Creepy Sci-Fi Helmets Come With Built-In A/C
May 20th, 2014Via: Bloomberg: If the U.S. Army greenlights a radical new helmet design, its soldiers may have a harder time winning hearts and minds overseas. Quite simply, the thing is frightening—think motocross storm trooper. Functionally, however, the helmet unveiled Tuesday marks a major advance. The same features that make it look so fierce—a full face mask […]
Cars Could Drive Themselves Sooner than Expected
May 19th, 2014Via: Reuters: Cars could be driving themselves down the world’s streets far sooner than expected, thanks to a change in a global treaty backed by European countries. A little-noticed amendment to the United Nations Convention on Road Traffic agreed last month would let drivers take their hands off the wheel of self-driving cars. It was […]
Tesla-Led Consortium to Build Massive Battery Factory
May 16th, 2014Via: San Jose Mercury News: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that Tesla will partner with several companies besides Panasonic for its planned “gigafactory” for battery production, painting a portrait of a facility resembling a massive industrial park and saying that there eventually will be a need for several more. Musk said that the […]
FCC Approves Plan to Consider Paid Priority on Internet
May 15th, 2014Via: Washington Post: The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted in favor of advancing a proposal that could dramatically reshape the way consumers experience the Internet, opening the possibility of Internet service providers charging Web sites for higher-quality delivery of their content to American consumers. The plan, approved in a three-to-two vote along party lines, […]
“Quantum Compass” Could Replace GPS
May 15th, 2014Via: Financial Times: The Ministry of Defence is investing millions of pounds to look for the holy grail of navigation: a tamper and interference-proof device capable of pinpointing a location anywhere on the globe. Scientists at Porton Down and the National Physical Laboratory believe they are three to five years away from developing a “quantum […]
‘Now The Military Is Going To Build Robots That Have Morals’
May 14th, 2014Via: DefenseOne: The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems.
Pervasive Monitoring Is an Attack
May 14th, 2014Via: Tim Bray: That’s the title of RFC 7258, also known as BCP 188 (where BCP stands for “Best Common Practice”); it represents Internet Engineering Task Force consensus on the fact that many powerful well-funded entities feel it is appropriate to monitor people’s use of the Net, without telling those people. The consensus is: This […]
Human Consciousness Probably Can’t Be Modeled On A Computer
May 13th, 2014Via: Medium: The central part of their new work is to describe the mathematical properties of a system that can store integrated information in this way but without it leaking away. And this leads them to their central proof. “The implications of this proof are that we have to abandon either the idea that people […]
Robotic Arm Catches Objects On The Fly
May 13th, 2014Via: EPFL: A robot developed by EPFL researchers is capable of reacting on the spot and grasping objects with complex shapes and trajectories in less than five hundredths of a second.
