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.
Politicians and students agree that looking is a gateway to crime
Politicians all want to censor the web. CapX writes:
It took us many centuries, a lot of effort and much expended blood and gore to get to this place where we are free – at liberty and ruled by the law, not the whims of people nor the rage of the mob. That we have those who would snatch them from us worries me far less than what our rulers will do to us and our liberty in the name of protecting us from those bearded nutters.
Just wait until the next generation of politicians arrive in Westminster from our elite universities. Spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings tells us: “The more prestigious universities, those ranked highest in popular league tables, are nearly always the most censorious; the few green-ranking institutions are generally less highly esteemed.”
Joanna Williams adds:
The link between academic success and a fondness for censorship is more than just a mindset. It is precisely because they are the academic achievers that students at elite universities demand freedom from speech…They’ve learned that language constructs reality, and that ‘words that wound’ can inflict ‘spirit murder’ on those who, according to their gender, ethnicity or sexual identity, are assumed to be forever powerless. The students who excel in elite universities today have come to embody the vulnerability they see in others.
They don’t trust us. They moralise about our choices, thoughts and movements. They pick technical arguments about what should be banned and permitted over debating the root cause of the problem that leads people to become Islamist killers. In the minds of these superior prudes and knowing gatekeepers, the mere act of looking becomes a gateway to crime.
Posted: 7th, June 2017 | In: News, Politicians, Reviews, Technology | Comment
This Russian vending machine sells Instagram likes
As Alexey Kovalev writes: “Russia takes the worst excesses of capitalism to the extreme, so here’s a vending machine in a mall for buying Likes for your Instagram pics.”
How sad is that:
Spotter: @Alexey__Kovalev
Posted: 6th, June 2017 | In: Technology | Comment
Dominoes falling show us how changes happen
Something about butterflies and things getting bigger:
No, me neither. But I like the video
Posted: 5th, June 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
After London Bridge and Manchester: Douglas Adams was right about the internet
After London Bridge, the news is that there will be crackdown on the internet. Freedom of speech must be curtailed. Encryption must be done away with.
Author Douglas Adams go it. In 1999 he wrote:
“I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet’. They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea’, though each of these was new and controversial in their day.”
Agreed.
Posted: 4th, June 2017 | In: Celebrities, Key Posts, Reviews, Technology | Comment
A red ejector button for your car’s lighter
Be like Bond with this red eject button to excite your car’s bland and pretty useless cigarette lighter.
Spotter: Pee-wee Herman
Posted: 1st, June 2017 | In: Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Liverpool has the friendliest hackers in the world
To the Liverpool One Shopping Centre, England, where hackers have issued a directive: ‘we suggest you improve your security – sincerely – your friendly neighbourhood hackers – #JFt96’.
Spotter: Reddit
Posted: 30th, May 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
UKIP candidate campaigns for inter-stellar colony ship for ‘the chance to begin anew’
Check out this brilliant flyer from Suffolk UKIP candidate Aidan Powlesland. He calls for a fleet of inter-steller vehicles to mine Saturn’s astroid belt for platinum and water. Why? For “the chance to begin anew”.
Spotter: Johnny Paige
Posted: 26th, May 2017 | In: Politicians, Technology | Comment
Police watchdog investigates Met’s links to Indian hackers
The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating an anonymous tip-off that the London Metropolitan Police’s National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit asked Indian police to hire hackers to break into the private communications of hundreds of British people, including journalists, Greenpeace and Green Party peer Baroness Jenny Jones.
PCC deputy chairman Sarah Green appeals:
“This will be a complex investigation given the potential involvement of foreign participants.
“We would like to hear from the officer who brought these allegations to light or any other officers or police staff who may be able to provide information of use to the IPCC investigation.”
The Met Police said: “The IPCC made the Metropolitan Police Service aware of anonymous allegations concerning the access of personal data and requested the matter referred to them by the MPS. This has been done.
“The MPS is aware that the IPCC is carrying out an independent investigation.”
Spotter: BBC
Posted: 15th, May 2017 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
Computers fines drivers for ‘parking’ in a traffic jam
Computers can be wrong. Yes, we know what the system says but it is wrong. This bit of computer knowing resulted in human beings fined £100 per carload:
Parking cameras went live at the Ashford Retail Park in Kent in April, with signs telling drivers the new maximum stay is three hours.
But motorists got caught in gridlock on Easter Monday, and were trapped in the car park for hours when they struggled to join traffic on adjoining roads.
Says one customer parked in neutral:
Mr Donald continued: “On Monday we received a penalty charge notice from Highview Parking who enforce the three hour time limit on parking at this site.
“They must have had a flood of Penalty Charge Notices from this day.
“What troubles me is that there’s no quality control. It was utter madness. It’s just a money making exercise.
“I find it rather disappointing that these companies apply no common sense or quality control to their issuing of parking fines to innocent motorists who have over stayed due to no fault of their own.”
They apply computer sense.
Spotter: Daily Mail
Posted: 10th, May 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
US tech titans mint millionaires as globalised business model pays off
When the web first boomed, the dream was to become a dotcom millionaire for running you own website. Now you can rich by working for someopne who built a website that went huge. The trick is to work for one that operates on a global scale and is based in the US. In “Tech titans pay $20bn in bonuses” The Times’ Danny Fortsun writes:
Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google’s parent Alphabet doled out a combined $20bn (£15.4bn) in share payouts last year, on top of the techies’ salaries, according to an analysis of stock market filings…
The $20bn bonanza equates to $29,850 for each of the quintet’s 670,000 employees. Last year Britain’s bankers and insurance workers took home £13.9bn in bonuses, an average of £13,400 per employee.
Well, quite. As Tim notes: “Global industry pays more in bonuses across the world than the one country sector of a global business.” If you’re tax efficient, the share price will rise leaving more money to dish out amongst friends and employees back at HQ.
What we don’t know is that bonuses the Big Five’s UK-based workforce took home when compared to their colleagues in the USA, say, or Luxembourg?
Posted: 7th, May 2017 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
The horror beneath the $10,000 sex doll’s skin
Over at Realbotix boffins are “dedicated to integrating cutting edge emerging technologies with silicone doll artistry to provide a bridge between technology and humankind on emotional, mental, and physical levels.” They’re making love dolls. “When interacting with these dolls, we want users to ask themselves, ‘What is she thinking?'”
This is the love doll’s head (yours for $10,000):
She can listen, so don’t mention the terrifying teeth, the terrifying eyes, the terrifying nose or the terrifying colour. Just wonder ‘What is she thinking?’
Via: Realbotix
Posted: 4th, May 2017 | In: Technology | Comment
Man adapts car to let him piss whilst driving
One man has turned his car into a mobile toilet. With the power of hosing, need and creativity, he’s created a car you can piss in without soiling the seats.
Behold the Jeep Catheter:
If that’s Number 1, is this Number 2?
Spotter: Reddit
Posted: 1st, May 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
The French Election is a huge waste of paper
The French election are riding high on the news cycle. The field has narrowed into a straight fight between Front National’s Marine Le Pen and independent Emmanuel Macron. Round 2 will be defined not what the French are for but what they are against. Do you want a samey rosy-fingered dawn (Marcon) or a honey-soaked past dipped in aspic (Le Pen)?
But this post is about the system. In Round 1, French voters were given 11 pieces of paper – 1 for each candidate. In the booth they choose 1 and put it in envelope. The rest are, presumably, thrown away. More paper is printed than used. There is no electronic voting and very few voting machines.
Voting underway in France. Voters take 11 pieces of paper; 1 for each candidate. In the booth they choose 1 and put it in envelope @SkyNews pic.twitter.com/2pCicrbgsB
— Mark Stone (@Stone_SkyNews) April 23, 2017
Michæl Saunby tweets: “Avoids the need for pencils, which some (kippers) have a phobia of.”
Indeed, at the EU referendum some voters smelled a rat:
@Rox_Tans tweeted: “When you vote take a pen with you! They just tried making me do mine in pencil yeah ok so you can rub it out? Don’t think so bruv.”
Echoing this sentiment, @Kez_777 wrote: “Please make sure you take a BLACK PEN with you to vote as pencil votes can be tampered with (I wouldnt put anything past Cameron) #VoteLeave”
So is the French system better?
Posted: 24th, April 2017 | In: Politicians, Reviews, Technology | Comment
The Internet of things: hacker makes all city’s emergency sirens go off at once
When everything is on the Internet, it might be wise to sleep with one eye open and beneath a tinfoil blanket. People living in Dallas didn’t get much sleep when a hacker triggered the city’s 156 emergency sirens – used to hail sever weather – to wail all at once 60 times from 11.42 pm until 1.17am.
Feel safer?
You might want to unplug that toaster. When Andrew McGill linked his toaster to the web, hackers plugged in. In a day, 300 hackers had attempted to control his toaster. “I switched on the server at 1:12 p.m. Wednesday, fully expecting to wait days—or weeks—to see a hack attempt,” says McGill. “Wrong! The first one came at 1:53 p.m.”
If it’s on the web, it can be hacked.
Spotter: Telegraph, USA Today, The Inevitability of Being Hacked
Posted: 9th, April 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
Molecule mixture triggers hair growth and cures hearing loss
Good news its that technology is on course to cure hearing loss caused by the dying off of cochlear hair cells. C&EN tells us that a healthy ear contains about 15,000 hair cells in the cochlea. As you age, they die:
Scientists from Harvard, MIT, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary have discovered a mixture of molecules that can dramatically reverse hair cell loss in the cochleas of mice.
Why is it those elitist mice always get new technology first – what about us humans? And, of course, if you can regrew cochlea hair, look out for lots of ageing rockers and footballers tilting the tops of their heads towards you when you talk.
Posted: 1st, March 2017 | In: Technology | Comment
Find household items lost inside your anus with the Body Orifice Security Scanner (BOSS)
Ever lose something up your nostrils, vagina, anus or other orifice? Something like a Donny Osmond poster, keepsake, drugs stash, lungfish, hacksaw, shovel, shot glass or eel?
Well, help is at hand. Beat the Boss, aka Xeku’s Body Orifice Security Scanner (BOSS), will give you a gel-free “hygienic cavity search”. Ostensibly targeted at prisoners smuggling contraband into choky, the BOSS will be a boon to sexual explorers and nudists who spend too long asking, ‘Has anyone seen the keys?”
Posted: 28th, February 2017 | In: Strange But True, Technology | Comment
A Chinese clickfarmer at work on her apple iPhones
If you’re too busy to tweet yourself, you can outsource the task and others to the woman above. She’s a clickfamer installing apps on a screen of Apple iphones. The more installs an app has the higher it ranks on Apple’s marketplace.
For a $11,000 one-off payment – plus $65,000-a-week for upkeep – you too can ensure your crappy appy hits the Top 10 of free apps. You can hire a cheat / marketeer to game the system on China’s Taobao.
The original photo was tweeted on Weibo with the caption, “Hard-working App Store ranking manipulation employee.”
Apple tries to prevent PC-based iPhone emulation programs (bots) made for this purpose and bans apps that use them, so manual labor is the best way to ensure the closest simulation of actual users.
A search for “app store ranking manipulation” (刷榜 app store) on Taobao, China’s most popular C2C ecommerce site, reveals dozens upon dozens of vendors selling similar services. Their prices are listed as one yuan, but it’s more likely that the real negotiations take place through direct chat.
Can you hire out your iPhone for the day to do this? Asking for a friend.
Spotter: JWZ
Posted: 3rd, January 2017 | In: Online-PR, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
Drones can hack your lightbulbs from 1000 feet overhead
Drones can hack your lightbulbs. It’s true. It sounds mad to say it, granted. But it’s true. PC World reports on a cyber attack on your so-called smart bulbs:
Researchers were able to take control of some Philips Hue lights using a drone. Based on an exploit for the ZigBee Light Link Touchlink system, white hat hackers were able to remotely control the Hue lights via drone and cause them to blink S-O-S in Morse code.
The drone carried out the attack from more than a thousand feet away.
If they can blink for help, presumably they can also be turned off and on in, say, an attack by an enemy? The war-time command to “Put that light out” would be null and void if the enemy was controlling the things.
“There is no other method of reprogramming these [infected] devices without full disassemble (which is not feasible). Any old stock would also need to be recalled, as any devices with vulnerable firmware can be infected as soon as power is applied,” according to the researchers.
Apparently, the Israeli and Canadian researchers have informed Philips of the design flaw and it’s been “patched”.
Isn’t technology marvellous.
Spotter: iotWorm
Posted: 7th, November 2016 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
This 3D map of the Universe shows 43,000 galaxies
How big is space? The 2MASS Redshift Survey is trying to find out. After 10 years toil,we can see the universe rendered as a 3D map. It features – get this- 43,000 galaxies within 380 million light-years from Earth.
It is awe-inspiring.
Via Space.com
Posted: 26th, September 2016 | In: Technology | Comment
The colours of blindness and love
When Ashley was blind, her nearest and dearest described colours to her like this:
Yellow. I didn’t touch anything for this, they just told me that whenever you laugh so hard you can’t stop, that that happiness is what yellow looks like.
Green. I held soft leaves and wet grass. They told me green felt like life. To this day it is still very much my favorite color.
Spitter: Kottke
Posted: 8th, September 2016 | In: Technology | Comment
Why I’m not buying an iPhone 7
Like millions of you, I’m not buying the New iPhone 7 because: a) they told me the iPhone 6s was the greatest phone ever and could not be beaten, and I beliveed them – still do!; b) the new cameras are so clear they force you see your own life as it really is; c) something about tax and stuff.
In the Guardian, you can read one man’s reasons for opting out:
….because they had pulled the Double Irish, the European commission has ruled, Apple deprived the EU of $14.5bn over the last 10 years. The EU ordered Apple to pay the taxes with interest at the end of August, a decision whose logic the company refutes.
No. The EU does not set tax rates.
This is hardly surprising: Apple is a massive multinational, and behaves like one despite its sanitized image. It has a long track record of looking the other way on suppliers’ human rights abuses, documented by the New York Times and other outlets. And it pays a tax rate lower than that of 99.99% of the human beings reading this story right now – and they clearly work harder at that profit margin and squeezing their supply chain now than they do on their actual technology. And in the last few years it is beginning to show.
d) They’re expensive.
Posted: 8th, September 2016 | In: Money, Reviews, Technology | Comment (1)
Watch the Apollo 11 Moon blast in very slow motion
On July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 blasted into space. In this video the blast off is stretched from 30 seconds of action to over eight minutes of viewing time.
“The Saturn V vehicle produced a holocaust of flames,” says NASA.
Hot!
via Flashbak
Posted: 22nd, August 2016 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
Normal teenagers will lose virginity to robots
Lock up your sons and daughters – the sex bots are coming. The Mail warns:
Teenagers may lose their virginity to sex robots in the future, a leading expert predicted yesterday. Professor Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of robotics at Sheffield University, warned that android sex dolls may have damaging consequences for society.
Oh?
He said that just as the rise of internet porn took the Government by surprise, a similarly seismic robot revolution is on the way – with far-reaching consequences.
Seismic stuff. did the earth move for you?
Says Noel:
“It’s not a problem having sex with a machine. But what if it’s your first time, your first relationship? What do you think of the opposite sex then? What do you think a man or a woman is?… It will get in the way of real life, stopping people forming relationships with normal people.”
Normal people?
Posted: 10th, June 2016 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
How to burn a carjacker to death and get away with it
How do you fend off carjackers? On YouTube, we find an answer:
When this foot switch is pressed, two things happen. One, a 14-thousand volt spark would appear here in this nozzle, and then you have these four jets here shooting out gas. Liquid gas from the gas bottle in the boot. Liquid gas, as soon as it exits over the spark here, will ignite and a ball of flame will shoot out of both side of the vehicle. Incapacitating the hijackers immediately.”
Amazingly perhaps, the system’s legal in South Africa – provided the driver is acting in self defence as depicted in this mock-up.
Peter Hicks would have enjoyed it.
Posted: 2nd, June 2016 | In: Reviews, Technology | Comment
SatNav directions send woman into a deep harbour (photos)
Do you trust machines? Would you buy a driverless car? To Tobermory, Ontario, Canada, where a 23-year-old woman who followed her car’s SatNav instructions ended up in a harbour.
Ontario Provincial Police say the driver “took a wrong turn into Little Tub Harbour… weather conditions and the driver being new to the area, a fully submerged vehicle was the result,” police said. The woman escaped by sliding from the car’s window and swimming 30 metres to the shore in 4°C water.
Posted: 16th, May 2016 | In: Key Posts, Reviews, Strange But True, Technology | Comment
