Technology Category
Independent news, views, opinions and reviews on the latest gadgets, games, science, technology and research from Apple and more. It’s about the technologies that change the way we live, work, love and behave.
Now Silk Road has been taken down where will we all buy drugs?
YOU’LL have seen the news that Silk Road, the online drug bazar, has been taken down by the FBI. There’s a number of fun questions surrounding what actually happened.
For those who don’t know Silk Road was part of the “deep web”, the bit where Google doesn’t go. And it was a trading shop for just about anything: from heroin through computer trojans and all the way to hit men. All highly illegal of course and it seems the the bloke running it was a bit of an extreme libertarian. Which is going to cause problems for nice cuddly libertarians like me of course.
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Posted: 7th, October 2013 | In: Money, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
How Barack Obama, Michael Jackson and Britney Spears can help you evade the NSA and Facebook spooks
HOW can you prevent your face from being known by the authorities searching the American-corporation-owned web? Wear a burqa. A beard? Be old and grey (the ultimate invisibility cloak)? Dutch designer Simone C. Niquille has an idea how you can dodge facial-recognition software: wear clothes covered in pictures of other people. Her “REALFACE Glamoflage” T-shirts are great. She says:
“I was interested in the T-shirt as a mundane commodity. An article of clothing that in most cases does not need much consideration in the morning in front of the closet…I was interested in creating a tool for privacy protection that wouldn’t require much time to think in the morning, an accessory that would seamlessly fit in your existing everyday. No adaption period needed.”
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Posted: 6th, October 2013 | In: Fashion, Technology | Comment
Are you ready for glow-in-the-dark trees?
HOW about if science creates trees that glow in the dark? No need for lamp-posts? That hedge along the motorway’s central reservation makes night driving easier. Reason reports:
[Efforts to engineering a glowing tree] has been going on since the mid-1980s, when researchers first successfully transplanted a gene present in fireflies into tobacco plants [seen above]. By now you’d expect to see phosphorescent Marlboros casting an eerie glow in what few dive bars still allow smoking, but progress has been slow.
Things sped up last year after former Bain consultant Antony Evans watched biologist Omri Amirav-Drory give a presentation on the possibilities of using living organisms to produce energy, fuel, plastics, and fertilizers. Evans was inspired by Amirav-Drory’s suggestion that armchair tinkerers, utilizing sophisticated but easy-to-use software and a “biological app store,” might one day assemble the genetic material for producing a “renewable, self-assembled, solar-powered, sustainable street-lamp”—in other words, a bioluminescent oak tree.
One problem: how do you contain the seeds? Would you want your garden to start glowing? Neon mould, anyone?
Posted: 30th, September 2013 | In: Technology | Comment
It’s not just Apple’s iOS 7 that causes motion sickness
FOLLOWING on from last week’s news that users of Apple’s new operating system, iOS 7, were starting to feel motion sickness as a result of using it (and yes, up to the point of falling over and even vomiting) we’re getting the news that there are some people who are pretty much allergic to our bright new digital future. Quite simply some cannot deal with modern digital graphics and 3D effects and so are always going to be locked out: or on the floor throwing up of course.
The initial news that iOS 7 was causing problems came up in the Apple user forums:
The zoom animations everywhere on the new iOS 7 are literally making me nauseous and giving me a headache. It’s exactly how I used to get car sick if I tried to read in the car.
How do I turn them off? Do I have to revert to 6?
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Posted: 30th, September 2013 | In: Technology | Comment
Computer blessing: priest dispenses God’s grace on iPads and even Nokia phones
TODAY Gil Florini, parish priest of Saint Pierre D’Arene church in Nice, southeastern France, blessed mobiles phones and computers during a Mass to celebrate St Gabriel, the archangel of transmissions. In the past Gil Florini has enabled the blessing of all kinds of things, like vehicles and animals.
He blesses everything, does Gil. Like a drunk man asking for a donation outside a branch of Threshers, Gil shouts ‘Gawd bless yer” at everything and everyone. One day his iPhone was just a piece of throwaway gadgetry; the next it was a holy relic housed in an ornamental châsse, which on weekdays doubles as a branch of Phone 4 U.
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Posted: 28th, September 2013 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Finally: proof that Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA V) turns good kids into criminals
FOR too long we’ve been bombarded with stories that computer games create violent crime. The Sun told us that Adam Lanza had been playing Call of Duty before he killed – a game the paper told readers was “fantastic“. Call of Duty, according to the Mirror, drove Aaron Alexis murder 12 people on a US naval base.
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Posted: 27th, September 2013 | In: Technology | Comments (4)
Candy Crush Saga maker files for IPO: but are they a one hit wonder?
THE makers of Candy Crush Saga have filed for their IPO over on Nasdaq in the US. That they’re an English company floating over there is interesting but of rather more importance is whether they’re really just a one hit wonder?
The basic news is here:
It is understood that King will float on the Nasdaq exchange in what is likely to be the biggest IPO by a UK technology company for years.
King, which used to be referred to as Britain’s answer to Zynga before the latter company’s fall from grace, has lodged its pre-IPO “S-1” paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission, taking advantage of the same loophole for rapidly-growing businesses that allowed Twitter to keep its IPO confidential.
Few financial details are available, but it was turning over around £300m at the start of this year and has grown rapidly since then. Its games were played an average of 300m times a month in 2011 but that figure now tops 30bn, helped by the success of Candy Crush Saga, which is the most popular game played on Facebook.
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Posted: 27th, September 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
The artist as spambot: Daily Mail Reporter is brains behind horse_ebook
THE Twitter feed @horse_ebooks is not a spambot but a blog created and written by humans.
It may also turn out that the Daily Mail is not written by computers but humans deciding that Jan Moir (64% human) should be upset by the paper’s countless pictures of Miley Cyrus twerking. The super busy ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ might well be an actual person. He/She might one day mate with @horse_ebook and save the publishing industry a fortune in staff.
“When Susan Orlean (of all people!) revealed in the New Yorker (of all places!) that for at least the last two years, @Horse has actually been authored (shepherded? overseen? THERE IS NOT A WORD TO DESCRIBE THIS) by Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender two employees of Buzzfeed (seriously) and that the account was coming to an end today, with a culmination in a performance art piece (ouch) at a New York gallery (fuck), it felt devastating.”
[Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender] have been working on the project for almost four years, keeping their identities secret from just about everyone, including their colleagues at BuzzFeed, where Bakkila is a creative director, and Howcast, where Bender, until about a year ago, was the vice-president of product development.
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Posted: 26th, September 2013 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
Netflix and BitTorrent: If you let people buy things then they won’t steal them
TWO interesting little bits about Netflix, the online on demand film and TV show service.
The first one is that they monitor what people are stealing over the BitTorrents to see what shows they should try to go and buy the rights for:
Netflix acknowledged this week that the company eyes piracy statistics to determine what kind of video content to offer subscribers and what kind of television programs they should buy.
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Posted: 26th, September 2013 | In: Money, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Doctors grow nose on man’s forehead
TO China, where Xiaolian, 22, has had his new nose grown on his forehead ahead of transplant surgery.
His original nose suffered irreparable damage in an accident.
His new nose was created by contorting his forehead skin into a nose shape with a plastic strip and adding cartilage taken from his ribs.
It’s a great nose. But would you pick it?
Posted: 25th, September 2013 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Don’t go faking your online reviews – it’s a criminal act
AT least don’t go faking your online reviews in the US. For this might surprise a few people in this thriving little business, but faking a review online is actually a criminal act.
A year-long investigation by New York prosecutors has found 19 local businesses guilty of faking reviews on sites such as Google and Yelp, a practice that has now earned them over $350,000 in fines and penalties.
As part of “Operation Clean Turf,” investigators from the office of the New York Attorney General posed as yogurt shop owners from Brooklyn, and asked leading search engine optimization (SEO) companies for help in improving their presence online.
There’s all sorts of things one can do to manipulate results on the internet. Pay people to link to your website for example, this used to work. It creates a link that makes Google think your site is more important and thus raises you in the search results. Unfortunately Google has cottoned on to this and if they find out you’ve been doing it then you sink back down to the bottom of the results.
The rise of the recommendation sites has led to this other stuff. If people are going to read reviews to tell them where to go and anyone can submit a review then obviously people are going to submit fake reviews. It might cost $10 or so to get a decent one written and placed (that is about the right cost for a good one, bad ones are much cheaper) and you only need to get one or two customers to make that sort of price work. But, as above, at least in the US, this is illegal.
Someone will no doubt come up with another way to game the system soon enough. But for the moment…
Posted: 24th, September 2013 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
Apple’s competition is really Apple
IT may have passed you by but the best economist you’ve never heard of, Ronald Coase, passed away last week. One of the reasons he was so highly regarded within the profession was that he brought out into the open things that no one had seen before: but which once they were out in the open became immediately obvious. And it’s this that leads to the observation that Apple’s biggest competitor is really Apple itself.
Had I had room, I would have quoted a question that my former University of Rochester colleague, Ron Schmidt, a master teacher, posed in about 1976 and that I got the wrong answer to. The question: “What is General Motors’s biggest competitor?” [Remember that this was before the Japanese producers were a large part of the market.] My (wrong) answer: “Ford.” Ron Schmidt’s answer: “The used car market.”
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Posted: 24th, September 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Scientist attacked by the bull he cloned
DR Moreau is alive and well, it seems. Prof. Park Se-pill has been attacked by his cloned bull art Jeju National University in South Korea.
The man-contrived beast broke five of the scientists ribs and hurt his spine. An official says:
“Park was video-recording a black cow, which he cloned from species indigenous to Jeju four years ago, and all of a sudden, it charged and attacked him for 15 minutes. The 800-kilogram black cow is very strong because its cell donor was the best available. Park could not escape easily because he wore a special suit and long boots. He is now being treated at the university hospital.”
The report adds:
In 2009, Park cloned the black cow from a frozen cell, which was taken from a deceased animal as part of cloning work to technically “revive” the dead cow through the newly born clone. The 54-year-old said that the cow is now in a barn and no special measure will be taken despite the incident. “We didn’t have the cow neutered because we have to check its virility. Hence, it often gets very restless,” Park said.
And we thought butchering them was cruel…
This cloning cannot be stopped. On an island not all that far away:
There was blood, I saw, in the sink,—brown, and some scarlet—and I smelt the peculiar smell of carbolic acid. Then through an open doorway beyond, in the dim light of the shadow, I saw something bound painfully upon a framework, scarred, red, and bandaged; and then blotting this out appeared the face of old Moreau, white and terrible. In a moment he had gripped me by the shoulder with a hand that was smeared red, had twisted me off my feet, and flung me headlong back into my own room. He lifted me as though I was a little child. I fell at full length upon the floor, and the door slammed and shut out the passionate intensity of his face. Then I heard the key turn in the lock, and Montgomery’s voice in expostulation.
“Ruin the work of a lifetime,” I heard Moreau say.
“He does not understand,” said Montgomery. and other things that were inaudible.
“I can’t spare the time yet,” said Moreau.
The rest I did not hear. I picked myself up and stood trembling, my mind a chaos of the most horrible misgivings. Could it be possible, I thought, that such a thing as the vivisection of men was carried on here? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky; and suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid realisation of my own danger.
Ends of days, readers. End of days…
Posted: 24th, September 2013 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
How the game of Good Cop – Bad Cop works in job interviews
THE police love playing good cop- bad cop. One does the talking; one takes notes. What effect does the silent presence have on the subject? Let’s see:
Over 100 hundred students and university staff were allocated to either tell the truth in answering detailed questions about a real job they really had, or they were asked to lie and answer questions about a fictional job. After having three days to prepare, the participants were invited to a psychology lab for questioning. A female interviewer with a neutral style asked the questions (e.g. “If you were training me to do your job for a day, what things would I need to know about it?”) while a second male interviewer took notes. Crucially, this male interviewer either struck a supportive demeanour (smiling and nodding his head), a neutral demeanour, or acted as if he had suspicions (frowning and shaking his head). The participants were incentivised with the promise of a £5 reward if they fooled the interviewers.
Here’s the headline result – the truth-telling participants gave more detailed answers than the liars, but only when the second interviewer provided a supportive presence. This runs entirely counter to the aggressive questioning styles so often portrayed in fiction. By creating a reassuring atmosphere, the second interviewer encouraged the honest interviewees to open up more, which made the the lack of detail given by liars stand out.
Another sign of deception was the amount of negative comments made by liars about their (fictional) boss. But again, this difference only appeared when the second note-taking interviewer acted supportive. [Researcher Samantha] Mann and her team said this was the first time a study had shown the beneficial lie-detecting effect of having a supportive second interviewer.
The second interview is acting as the witness…
Posted: 23rd, September 2013 | In: Technology | Comment
In 1980 the US Military use Atari games to train troops for battle
COREY Meads look at how the US military has been using video games to train its fighters. He writes:
The military’s interest in the kinds of video games popular today dates to 1980, when Atari released its groundbreaking Battlezone. Not only did Battlezone evoke a three-dimensional world, as opposed to the two-dimensional worlds of such previous arcade hits as Asteroids and Tempest, but players viewed the action from a first-person perspective, as if they themselves were tank gunners peering through their periscopes at the battlefield outside — in this case, a spare moonscape with mountains and an erupting volcano in the distance. This first-person element made Battlezone a direct ancestor of today’s enormously popular first-person shooters.
Soon after Battlezone took off, the army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) requested Atari’s help in building a modified version of the game that could be used as a training device for the then-new Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. General Donn Starry, the head of TRADOC at the time, had recognized early on that soldiers would be more responsive to electronic training methods than to print-and lecture-based ones.
You can play Battlezone here.
Of course Pac-Man was a game that followed US military fighting procedure, notably in World War 2 when little pills kept the troops sharp…
Other Atari games that have inspired the US in war:
Berzerk
Golf
Xenophobe
Posted: 22nd, September 2013 | In: Flashback, Technology | Comment
Louis C.K. explains why his kids can’t have Smartphones
LOUIS C.K. explains why his kids can’t have Smartphones:
You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.
And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It’s starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it…
That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.
You are alone…
Posted: 21st, September 2013 | In: Celebrities, Technology | Comment
BBC News presenter can’t tell the difference between an iPad or a stack of paper
LIVE TV is a treacherous thing at the best of times, as a BBC News presenter fond out when he delivered a bulletin holding a pack of photocopier paper instead of an iPad.
Simon McCoy was doing his thing to camera, talking about ‘drunk tanks’ (not nearly as exciting as they sound) when he accidentally picked up a stack of A4 paper instead of his tablet.
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Posted: 18th, September 2013 | In: Technology, TV & Radio | Comment
Face of the day: iphone 5s fan Gad Harari sets up camp on the Regent Street iQ
FACE of the day: Gad Harari aged 17, from London, sits in his plastic greenhouse which is the only shelter for himself as he waits to buy the new iPhone in Regent Street central London, which goes on sale in the UK this coming Friday.
Gad, who sits at the head of the iQ, assembles his tent by pressing a single large button and installing an app.
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Posted: 18th, September 2013 | In: Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Full-kit wa*ker Jeremy Browne avoids Google cameras by wearing full veil in public
JEREMY Browne MP, minister for crime prevention at the Home Office, has been captured by Google Street View walking along a street in Paddington. He calls it “unnerving“. The Liberal Democrat MP for Taunton Deane, is not emerging from a massage parlour nor eating a kebab and smoking. He is suited, booted and holding his bright red ministerial box. He is the political equivalent of the Full Kit Wan**r, a title used to explain a grown man who is happy to be seen striding around in public wearing a full football kit; shirt, shorts, socks, even shinnies – the whole kit and caboodle. Professional footballers have been FKWs too, notably a former Spurs and Manchester United player who used to wear his full England tracksuit to walk around parts of urbanised Essex.
Says Browne of the bright red box:
“I think there is an issue about the intrusiveness of modern technology,” he said. “It is why the government is right to be alert to the public concern about excessive use of CCTV. We need to get the balance right with using technology to prevent crime and people not feeling that every time they enter a public space their movements will be potentially permanently recorded.”
“Campaigners are always most alert to the threats to individual liberties that can be caused by the state. But we also need to be guarded about how the evolution of technology means that private organisations can also intrude into individual privacy in a way that many people would find unsettling. Quite often the state is more regulated than private organisations.”
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Posted: 18th, September 2013 | In: Politicians, Reviews, Technology | Comment
Man mugged in Colindale for Grand Theft Auto V an hour after it was launched
AND so it begins:
A 23-year-old man was hit with a brick and stabbed before being robbed of the much awaited Grand Theft Auto V video game in Colindale, London at 01:20. The game was only launched at midnight.
The man also lost his watch and a mobile.
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Posted: 17th, September 2013 | In: Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Frog photobombs Nasa rocket launch (photos)
FROGS in spaaace….
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Posted: 13th, September 2013 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Security flaw in new iPhone 5s means your fingerprints are not your own
THE new Apple iPhone 5S turn your old – oh, so old – Apple 5 into a retro piece of vintage tat. The iPhone 5s contains a fingerprint scanner, meaning that Apple will soon have a huge store of your fingerprints. Look out for the Apple 6 which will access your DNA and the Apple 13 which will profile you and render you incapacitated with tube-tying electric shocks to your genitals should you be thought to be thinking about committing a crime.
The software is not safe, however, as this Reddit user proves.
Look out for your iPhone5s linking you to crime scenes:
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Posted: 12th, September 2013 | In: Technology | Comment (1)
GTA5: Looks like it will be life ruiningly large
EVERYBODY who plays video games – and that’s rarely pasty loners picking crumbs from their cracks in their mum’s basements because things have changed significantly in the past two decades – is incredibly excited about the imminent Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 5 (or GTA5 or GTA V to everyone else).
Previously, GTA improved with increasingly decent soundtracks, improved gameplay and such. However, GTA5 is a different ballpark. It looks nicer, has an eye-watering amount of new things to do and, it will be social life cripplingly large! WHICH IS EXCELLENT NEWS!
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Posted: 12th, September 2013 | In: Technology, The Consumer | Comment
