Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
The Pirate Bay to Fly ‘Server Drones’ to Avoid Law Enforcement
March 20th, 2012Via: U.S. News: The world’s largest and most resilient BitTorrent site plans to redefine “cloud computing” with a plan to move at least some of its servers onto unmanned drones miles above Sweden. In a Sunday blog post, The Pirate Bay announced new “Low Orbit Server Stations” that will house the site’s servers and files […]
Microsoft: Data Mining Your Digital Effluvia
March 18th, 2012People seem to be cracking up and looking for technological fixes to what amounts to mental illness that was caused by their technology in the first place. Here’s how Becky chronicles milestones and other pleasant moments with our children. She pastes photographs to sheets of paper and handwrites the details of what happened on the […]
Using Mobile Phone User Location Data for ‘Crowd (Soft) Control’
March 18th, 2012shewhomeasures.com: Via: PhysOrg: Eighty-eight percent of Americans now own a cell phone, forming a massive network that offers scientists a wealth of information and an infinite number of new applications. With the help of these phone users — and their devices’ cameras, audio recorders, and other features — researchers envision endless possibilities for gathering huge […]
Bamford Claims NSA Has Made “An Enormous Breakthrough” in Cryptanalysis
March 16th, 2012Well, it has been the $64,000 question for a couple of decades: Can NSA break something like PGP? While there might be other black world technologies that could be up to the task (there’s no way to know), what we do know is that a practical quantum computing capability would be, for all intents and […]
CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher
March 16th, 2012Via: Wired: More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them. Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired […]
Cyborg Snails
March 14th, 2012Via: Nature: The dozen or so brown garden snails crawling around the plastic, moss-filled terrarium in Evgeny Katz’s laboratory look normal, but they have a hidden superpower: they produce electricity. Into each mollusc, Katz and his team at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, have implanted tiny biofuel cells that extract electrical power from the […]
Cheetah: Boston Dynamics Running Robot
March 6th, 2012Just FYI: You guys never need to submit stories that are mentioned on Slashdot. Via: Forbes: A warning for anyone who imagines a Skynet-ruled world of robot domination: Don’t watch the video below. Or if you do, prepare for nightmares of being chased at 18-miles an hour by a gas-powered steely automaton. Boston Dynamics, a […]
U.S. Air Force Developing “Optionally-Manned” Nuclear Bomber
February 27th, 2012Via: The Diplomat: The Air Force has been working on a bomber since 2006, according to most reports, with the aim of first complementing then replacing the existing fleet of 150 B-52, B-1 and B-2 bombers, the oldest of which date from the early 1960s. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suspended the bomber development […]
Swarms Of Autonomous Micro-Air-Vehicles Modeled On Insects
February 27th, 2012Via: NPR: Do bees, swarms of bees, make you nervous? Maybe not. Maybe they remind you of honey, flowers and warm summer days. You stay out of their way and they stay out of yours. What if, however, the bees weren’t bees at all but hundreds (or thousands) of autonomous microbots, facsimiles of the real […]
Red License Plate in Nevada Means the Driver Is a Robot
February 23rd, 2012Via: Singularity Hub: An extended campaign in Nevada by Google has led to a new host of provisions which will allow automated cars to legally drive in the state. Starting March 1st, 2012 innovators like Google can officially apply for a new kind of robot driver’s license that will give them permission to openly test […]
