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Gaming Vest Makes Virtual Fights Real and Painful
Next time your character gets shot while playing Call of Duty it could hurt for real. A tactile gaming vest created at the University of Pennsylvania can make wearers feel a punch or a gunfire hit in sync with what’s happening on screen. Ouch! “The idea is to develop a haptic interface for first person shooting games,” [...]
03.26.10 -
New RFID Tag Could Mean the End of Bar Codes
Lines at the grocery store might become as obsolete as milkmen, if a new tag that seeks to replace bar codes becomes commonplace. Researchers from Sunchon National University in Suncheon, South Korea, and Rice University in Houston have built a radio frequency identification tag that can be printed directly onto cereal boxes and potato chip bags. [...]
03.26.10 -
Brave and the Bold Returns With Multiversal Batmans
After months of hibernation in the Bat-cave, Cartoon Network’s surreal animated series Batman: The Brave and the Bold returns to brain-frying life Friday night with its mind on the multiversal money-shot. Riding the same parallel-universe possibilities that energized recent films like Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths and comics like Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, Brave and [...]
03.26.10 -
Check the Hype — There’s No Such Thing As ‘Cyber’
How can you tell the difference between a real report about online vulnerabilities and someone who is trying to scare you about the security of the internet because they have an agenda, such as landing lucrative, secret contracts from the government? Here’s a simple test: Count the number of times they use the adjective “cyber.” Nobody [...]
03.26.10 -
One Book, One Twitter: A Status Update
First, a point of order: You guys f*cking rock. In a world rife with partisan rancor, there’s one thing we can agree on: We all love books. Here’s what we don’t agree on: What book we should read! And therein lies all the fun. As most of you have noticed, American Gods by the inimitable Neil [...]
03.26.10 -
Dung Beetles Inspire Video Enhancements for Camera Phones
Video cameras on your cellphone could soon be good enough to record a jazz concert, a nighttime street scene, or a candlelit dinner. A Swedish start-up has created an algorithm, inspired by dung beetles, that can be integrated into camera modules to offer high-quality video in extremely low light situations. “We are talking about shooting video [...]
03.26.10 -
New iTunes Rules Complicate iPad Magazine Opportunities
Apple this week revised the terms of service for its iTunes software, adding a new feature to send apps as gifts. However, the new feature comes with restrictions that may limit the flexibility of magazine publishers to market their wares as they see fit. Apple prohibits the gifting of “in-app purchases, in-app subscriptions, [and] upgrades” which [...]
03.26.10 -
Our DIY Electric Beetle Runs!
It runs! Our dirt-cheap homemade electric Volkswagen runs! At long last: For weeks I’ve been telling everyone I’ll test drive it this weekend, only to be sidelined by one problem or another. I was starting to get discouraged when Mark Clifford, who is building that electric Porsche 911 I told you about, came by the house [...]
03.26.10 -
Hacker Sentenced to 20 Years for Breach of Credit Card Processor
BOSTON — Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years and a day, and fined $25,000 on Friday for his role in breaches into Heartland Payment Systems, 7-Eleven and other companies. The sentence will run concurrently with a 20-year sentence he received on Thursday in two other cases involving hacks into TJX, Office Max, [...]
03.26.10 -
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt Spotted Together Again
Jobs and Schmidt, whose companies have just ended their love affair, were spotted minutes ago talking business at Calafia in the Town and Country shopping center in Palo Alto. Our tipster saw em and snapped these shots, and noted that the cafe is owned and operated by former Google chef Charlie Ayers. [...]
03.26.10
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Samsung Galaxy S Phone Processor Packs a Punch
With its large screen and the latest version of Android operating system, Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy S phone is part of a new generation of Android ’superphones’ that are set to launch this year. But Galaxy S is ahead of its rivals at least when it comes to one aspect of computing power. The Galaxy S [...]
03.26.10 -
What’s It Like to Fly the Space Shuttle? We Find Out
As a person who really enjoys flying airplanes, I never thought I would ever say this, but flying a simulator can be as much fun as flying the real thing. Of course it helps when the simulator is a replica of the space shuttle cockpit at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. On a recent assignment [...]
03.26.10 -
Lab-Quality Booze Detector Fits in a Suitcase
Ever found yourself staring down a punch bowl at a frat party and wondering just how spiked it might be? What you needed was the AlcoQuick 4000, a briefcase-sized infrared spectrometer that can accurately determine the alcohol content of a wide variety of beverages in just 60 seconds, according to a new study in the open [...]
03.26.10 -
Take a Freeride on KTM’s Electric Motorcycles
This bit of kit is KTM’s foray into the battery-bike arena, and it shows the big boys are catching on to the fact this electric motorcycle thing might not be a fad after all. The Austrian company pulled a bright orange sheet off a pair of pre-production e-motos today at the Tokyo Motorcycle Show and said [...]
03.26.10 -
U.S. Army Gets Pumped to Use Apple Gear, Apps
The touchscreen Apple phone that you use to listen to music, text friends and play games could soon be used by the Army to track foes, train soldiers and plan attacks. In a statement this week, the Army said that key members of its staff visited Apple headquarters on March 5 to take a tour of [...]
03.26.10 -
BlizzCon Returns To Anaheim in October
Blizzard Entertainment, creator of World of Warcraft, announced Thursday that its BlizzCon convention would be held in Anaheim, California, on Oct. 22 and 23. BlizzCon is videogame convention that focuses solely on games made by Blizzard Entertainment, namely the Warcraft series, Starcraft and Diablo. BlizzCon attendees get early hands-on access to forthcoming Blizzard games and expansions [...]
03.26.10 -
Retro Tron Intro Mimics ’60s Cool of Saul Bass
The original Tron title sequence gets reimagined, ’60s-style, in this flashy animated clip by Vimeo user Hexagonall. “I love the simplicity and minimalism of Saul Bass,” who did animated intros for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and North by Northwest, writes Hexagonall. “I love the film Tron and I thought, ‘[What] if Saul Bass had done the opening [...]
03.26.10 -
Ron Howard Was Wrong: Apollo 13 Would Have Burned, Not Frozen
The Apollo 13 module, had it not been for NASA’s heroic efforts to get it back on course, would have missed Earth and tumbled into the depths of cold, lonely space. At least that’s been the story repeated in popular, academic, and cinematic accounts of the ill-fated mission, like Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. Now, space writer Andrew [...]
03.26.10 -
Inch-by-Inch: Spotify Now Buying Server Space in United States
The legend of Spotify grows stronger with news that the music service is buying server space in the United States with the aim of launching here in the third quarter of this year. As Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told me at SXSW last week, one likely form Spotify will take when it reaches these shores [...]
03.26.10 -
Making Contact With Mr. Gmail
Google’s Todd Jackson carries the weight of the web on his shoulders. As the product manager for Gmail, it’s his responsibility to make sure your inbox experience is fast, secure and always available. Jackson is also the product manager for Buzz, Google’s real-time social sharing system that launched in February and was promptly criticized over [...]
03.26.10
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Playlist: Top-Shelf Tracks From SXSW Standouts
A team of Wired.com editors descended upon Austin, Texas, last week for the annual South by Southwest festival. A flurry of gadget fidgeting, film watching and music listening ensued — all that and a lot of barbecue, cocktails and Lone Star beer. Michael Calore was one of those on the ground. In this special SXSW edition [...]
03.26.10 -
Drone Attacks Are Legit Self-Defense, Says State Dept. Lawyer
America’s undeclared drone war has been controversial, for any number of reasons: Pakistani politicians have cried foul over “counterproductive” strikes. Critics worry they may create more popular support for militants. And civil liberties groups have asked whether, in effect, it amounts to a program of targeted killing. Now the State Department’s top legal adviser has offered [...]
03.26.10 -
iPhone Hacker Thinks He’s Cracked the iPad, Too
George Hotz, famously known as the first hacker to unlock the iPhone, says he’s done it again. The whiz kid on Thursday evening said he had cooked up a new hack for all iPhone OS devices, and he’s betting it will work on the iPad, too. When the hack is released (Hotz won’t disclose a release [...]
03.26.10 -
Beautiful Websites: Former Apple Designer’s Amazing Photo Gallery
Slick photo gallery plug-ins for JQuery, Dojo and other JavaScript libraries mean that the days of the boring thumbnail grids are well behind us. But the same ease-of-use means that slick slideshows are everywhere — it’s hard to stand out. Unless you’re Mike Matas. The former Apple designer and co-founder of Delicious Monster recently unveiled a [...]
03.26.10 -
Adobe’s Magical ‘Content Aware Fill’ Bends Pixels to Your Will
Adobe is already counting down to a new version of its creative suite, with updates for Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop and other apps common in the web designer’s toolkit. While the company is characteristically tight-lipped about new features, it is showing off a mind-bending new tool for Photoshop — content aware fill. Like the content aware scaling [...]
03.26.10 -
PAX: Shank, The Gory ‘Cinematic Brawler’
BOSTON — “You should go in the meat grinders. It’s fun to die.” The first annual PAX East, a Boston gaming convention produced by the webcomic juggernaut Penny Arcade, will throw its doors open at 2 p.m. Friday. One of the games sure to attract attention on the show floor is Shank, an Xbox Live Arcade [...]
03.26.10 -
Despite Drawdown, Big Bucks for Baghdad Embassy Security
When it comes to diplomatic security, contractors are a hard habit for the State Department to break. According to a new audit by the department’s Office of the Inspector General, or IG, the department has paid one company — Triple Canopy — a whopping $438 million to guard the embassy in Baghdad since mid-2005. The report [...]
03.26.10 -
Fan-Made WebOS Commercial Beats Palm’s Efforts
This fantastic ad for the WebOS comes not from Palm, a company which has proven itself unable to make a compelling commercial for the Pre, but from a fan. Heiko Thies is the fellow behind this video spot, which manages to be both exciting and slightly edgy. It also totally makes me want [...]
03.26.10 -
This Week in The Clone Wars: Anakin on the Attack
Rumor has it that Anakin Skywalker is a great pilot–”the best star pilot in the galaxy,” in fact. If you’ve been keeping up with your Star Wars: The Clone Wars comics, then you’ve gotten a recent reminder, as the “Hero of the Confederacy” storyline pits Anakin up against a Valahari master pilot. But it’s [...]
03.26.10 -
SweetSpotter Tracks Your Head, Keeps You in Stereo Heaven
SweetSpotter is a quite ingenious application that adjusts the output of your stereo setup so you are always in the “sweet spot” using nothing but your webcam and some clever trickery. The problem: Every pair of speakers has a sweet spot floating between and in front of them. If you plant your head (and therefore your [...]
03.26.10
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Dork Tower Friday
Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad. Find the Dork Tower archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.
03.26.10 -
Australian LEGO Champion In Full Flight
Australia’s LEGO Brickvention Champion, Ryan McNaught is bringing his winning entry to the United States for the Brickworld event in Chicago in June. The novel aspect to this trip, McNaught’s model is actually an airplane. The Qantas replica of the world’s largest passenger plane, the Airbus A380 is 2.2-meter long, 1.8-meter wide and constructed from 35,000 bricks. But, [...]
03.26.10 -
Star Wars Lightsaber Bookends
What better way to show your contempt for the mail-order set of “classics” on your bookshelf than burning through their hearts with a Lightsaber? After all, if you’re never going to read Moby Dick or Ulysses, you might at least make them useful. Now you can, with the glowing Lightsaber book-ends from the Star Wars shop. [...]
03.26.10 -
8 Things Parents Should Know About How to Train Your Dragon 3D
What better way to spend the weekend than soaring with dragons and sailing with Vikings? How to Train Your Dragon 3D combines the two for a fantastic adventure about a scrawny Viking’s coming-of-age and his friendship with his village’s mortal enemy: a fearsome dragon he improbably wounds in battle and then nurses back to health. Will [...]
03.26.10 -
Godzilla Attacks More Tracks
Making a quick street car is easy in comparison to racing, which is easy in comparison to racing successfully. As impressive as Nissan’s GT-R is — and make no mistake, it is mighty impressive — Nissan really ought to be racing it a lot more. Turns out that Nissan will be letting its big dog off [...]
03.26.10 -
iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch
When Apple opens up its iBooks Store for business on the iPad, the shelves will be fully stocked. According to a screen-shot posted at iPhone software blog App Advice, iBooks will contain many free, public-domain titles from Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg takes out-of-copyright texts and, using an army of volunteers, turns them into free e-books. You [...]
03.26.10 -
Ten Geeky Places to Visit in Portland
My family spent spring break in Portland, Oregon, where we once lived for four too-short years. While a lot of our time was spent visiting beloved friends and savoring foods from our favorite restaurants, we did manage to make a few geeky trips as well. Here, in brief, are ten geeky places we visited. Six Geeky [...]
03.26.10 -
Cheap Pocket Video Camera Shoots for Hours
I’m oddly drawn to devices like the uCorder, wearable video-cameras which measure their shooting time in chunks of a day rather than minutes. At first it seems vain and boring, or even a little creepy, to shoot your own point-of-view for hours at a time, but I’d bet that once you got your hands on [...]
03.26.10 -
Need Some Help Making That iPad Decision?
While in the United States people have been able to start tossing up their options and filling out pre-orders for the latest in Apple droolware, the iPad, here in Australia (and many other countries) we are still no closer than an anticipated late April release. So, for those geeks downunder, and others still yet to make [...]
03.26.10 -
Alt Text: How Will Nintendo 3DS Work? 5 Eye-Popping 3-D Theories
Nintendo revealed few details when announcing the upcoming 3-D version of its DS gaming handheld, other than saying you won’t need special glasses to play. The company then winked coyly before disappearing behind a corner and blending into the crowd. With so few particulars, I’m left to wonder how Nintendo is going to pull off this [...]
03.25.10
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SXSW: Byrne Doc Ride, Rise, Roar Burns With Strange Grace
AUSTIN, Texas — Most of the time, David Byrne’s face is a mask of stoicism. He speaks in a scattered monotone. His smile can seem forced. He’s a thoughtful artist, a serious guy. But there are moments in Ride, Rise, Roar, the new documentary by David Hillman Curtis that centers on Byrne, when the musician is [...]
03.25.10 -
Calling All Pill-Poppers! Who’s Your Alice?
With just north of a half-billion dollars tucked beneath its mad hat, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland continues to clown most iterations of Lewis Carroll’s famed narrative of sense and nonsense. But is it your favorite? We already listed our five favorite Alice iterations, and offered up a free copy of Jonathan Miller’s stripped-down, satirical entry [...]
03.25.10 -
E-Bomb Awareness Day: Grab Your Tinfoil Hat
Imagine a day on which all members of Congress had their BlackBerries simultaneously switched off — and then had to go without lunch. Change we can believe in! Well, that’s idea behind “EMP Recognition Day,” an idea being cooked up by our friends at the Heritage Foundation. That’s right, Heritage is proposing a special day to [...]
03.25.10 -
Go Daddy Says China Refusal Is No PR Stunt
Go Daddy, the net’s largest domain registrar, is infamous for its Super Bowl ads featuring busty models testifying at a fake congressional hearings, but when the company’s top lawyer testified at a real hearing Wednesday about the company’s decision to stop selling .cn domain names, it wasn’t a publicity stunt. At least not according to Christine [...]
03.25.10 -
Eye-Tracking Tablets and the Promise of Text 2.0
The best thing about reading a book on a tablet (so far) is how closely it approximates reading a “real” book — which is why the Kindle’s screen is matte like paper rather than luminescent like a laptop. Some (not all) fear for the demise of real reading and writing, but it’s more likely we’re [...]
03.25.10 -
Study: 1 in 4 Consumers Considering a Plug-In Car
Cars with cords are coming. It’s inevitable, because everyone from Audi to Volvo is working on one. The first of them will be in showrooms by the end of the year. That’s great, but is there really a market for plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles? Consumer Reports says there is and it could be big [...]
03.25.10 -
Why ‘Flutter’ Is a 4-Letter Word for Pilots
The aviation world has been all aflutter about Boeing completing a critical part of the 787 Dreamliner testing program — the all-important flutter tests. They went off without a hitch and the Dreamliner is cleared to fly throughout its normal performance range, which includes speeds up to Mach 0.85 and altitudes just over 40,000 feet. [...]
03.25.10 -
TJX Hacker Gets 20 Years in Prison
BOSTON — Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for leading a gang of cyberthieves who stole more than 90 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX and other retailers. The sentence for the largest computer-crime case ever prosecuted is the lengthiest ever imposed in the United States [...]
03.25.10 -
Laser Guidance Adds Power to Wind Turbines
The wind industry may soon be dependent on a different kind of environmental awareness that has more to do with lasers than ecology. A new laser system that can be mounted on wind turbines allows them to prepare for the wind rushing toward their blades. The lasers act like sonar for the wind, bouncing off microscopically small [...]
03.25.10 -
WIPO: Dope-Vaporizer Seller Not Bogarting Domain Names
The German producer of a popular device used to vaporize marijuana is claiming a North American dealer is bogarting its domain names. But the World Intellectual Property Organization on Thursday sided against Storz & Bickel, the maker of the Volcano Vaporizer, ruling that MSI Imports’ four dozen Volcano-related domains aren’t treading on Storz & Bickel’s trademarks. Storz [...]
03.25.10
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Chemical Fingerprints Could Finger Weapons Makers
SAN FRANCISCO — Finding out whodunit in chemical warfare cases may be aided by scientists focused on the howdunit. Researchers have developed a technique to ascertain the chemical fingerprint of compounds such as mustard gas, rat poison and nerve agents such as VX. Figuring out the details of how these compounds were created in the first [...]
03.25.10 -
Photos: Inside Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey
A sun-baked replica of Hogwarts castle opens its doors to the public June 18 when The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme-park attraction finally goes live in Florida. Universal Orlando Resort on Thursday announced the long-awaited opening date for its J.K. Rowling-inspired theme park. The Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride will be the centerpiece [...]
03.25.10 -
As Temperature Rises, Earth Breathes Faster — and Maybe Harder
As planetary temperatures rise, Earth’s soils release steadily larger amounts of carbon dioxide, according to massive data crunching from hundreds of soil respiration studies published since 1989. The critical question is whether soils release more CO2 because faster-growing plants pump more in, or if soils release CO2 that would have stayed in the ground at lower [...]
03.25.10 -
Web Browsers Crushed in ‘Pwn2Own’ Contest
Think your web browser is secure? Think again. Nearly every common browser on the web has been compromised as part of the Pwn2Own contest at the annual CanSecWest security conference. Whether it was Internet Explorer on WIndows 7, Safari on OS X, Firefox on Windows or Mobile Safari on the iPhone, just about every browser on [...]
03.25.10 -
Female Chimpanzees Drive the Culture
Chimpanzee culture is driven by its females, suggests a new analysis of six long-term chimp studies. The number of cultural traits in each colony is linked to the number of females. How many males there are makes no difference. “Our results suggest that females are the carriers of chimpanzee culture,” wrote study co-authors Johan Lind and Patrik [...]
03.25.10 -
Air Force Enforces BlackBerry Crackdown
In the military, a true PowerPoint Ranger goes nowhere without a firmly holstered BlackBerry. But new Air Force regulations are about to make life much more complicated for users of the popular handheld device. Last week, the Air Force introduced sweeping changes to boost BlackBerry security. Among other things, the service will disable most Bluetooth functionality: [...]
03.25.10 -
PAX East is Almost Here! Do You Know Where Your GeekDads Are?
Session Friday 7:00 Wyvern Theatre (somewhere in the Hynes Convention Center) “How young is too young for The Hobbit? What should my kids’ first LEGO set be? How can I control my disgust if my child tells me he likes Jar Jar and the Ewoks? When should I buy my kids their first [...]
03.25.10 -
Get a Clue on the Mystery Express
I always loved Clue. Okay, the die-rolling was largely unnecessary but I loved the deduction and record-keeping, the strategy behind deciding which cards to show which people to keep them in the dark. Well, now Days of Wonder is releasing a new deduction-style board game, Mystery Express. It’s like Clue, except on a train, and [...]
03.25.10 -
Installing the Lego Autopilot (GeekDad Wayback Machine)
After my proof of concept of a Lego autopilot a couple weeks ago, the hard work began. First thing was to find an appropriate “avionics platform”, AKA a good-sized R/C airplane. We settled on the Electristar .40-sized trainer, which seemed to have the right balance of stability and equipment compartment size. The HiTechnic guys had seen [...]
03.25.10 -
The Tiny-But-Wondrous World of Mouse Guard
What is it about talking animals that fascinates us? And by us, I mean me. I’ve always loved books involving critters, whether they behave more like real animals who just happen to talk (as in Watership Down) or like small furry people (think Secret of NIMH). And, of course, there are plenty of books in [...]
03.25.10
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Google Turns Up the China Burner, Microsoft Feels the Heat
Google is urging the U.S. government to make net censorship a part of its trade and diplomatic negotiations, even as it holds out hope that China does not start blocking its uncensored Hong Kong servers, where Google.cn users have been diverted since Monday. Not unexpectedly, Google came in for heavy congressional praise Wednesday at a hearing [...]
03.24.10 -
Beautiful Websites: Pictory’s Ode to Spring
There’s currently a debate raging in the publishing world over whether the web is robust enough of a platform to present magazine-like stories properly — paginated content heavy on photography, design and stylized type. The current popular opinion is that the web is not up to snuff, and thus the scramble towards dedicated readers and [...]
03.24.10 -
Hello, and Welcome to Movie Phone: Mobile Apps Duke It Out
Video rental companies made big moves this week in the race to deliver movies to phones. But as compelling as thought of a movie in your pocket alone may be, this isn’t just about delivering content to handset. The companies vying for your mobile movie dollars want to tie you to an ecosystem they hope [...]
03.24.10 -
Mercedes Builds a Sweet Gullwing For the Track
We knew that Mercedes was serious about performance with the new AMG SLS, aka, “The Gullwing,” but this is really serious. Some sweet pics and a few details have come out of Germany showing Mercedes will soon roll out a race-ready version of the high-flying neo-retro ride for the GT3 class. Porsche, et al, watch out. The [...]
03.24.10 -
ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws
The United States is nudging the international community to develop protocols to suspend the internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a leaked draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The United States is leading the 2-year-old, once-secret negotiations over the so-called ACTA accord. The Jan. 18 draft, about 56 pages and labeled “confidential,” [...]
03.24.10 -
Front Mission: Evolved Creators Assuage Fan Fears
Square Enix has a new Front Mission game in the works, but the forthcoming Front Mission: Evolved — an action-oriented, third-person shooter — promises to be a far cry from the traditional turn-based mech warfare that gamers have come to love. The long-running Front Mission series was created by Toshiro Tsuchida in 1993. The games, [...]
03.24.10 -
9 SXSW Bands That Blew Us Away Unexpectedly
AUSTIN, Texas — The best thing about the South by Southwest music festival is the nonstop blur of bands from around the world. Even with thousands of musicians converging on the so-called Live Music Capital of the World, it can be difficult to catch a truly transcendent show — if nothing else, the sheer volume [...]
03.24.10 -
Military Helicopters May Get Gunshot Location System
Military helicopters have sophisticated electronic countermeasures to detect and defend against surface-to-air missiles, by jamming or fooling the seekers that guide the missiles to target. Now the Pentagon’s far-out research arm wants to take things a step further, by protecting against unguided — but equally dangerous — small arms fire. In testimony yesterday, Regina Dugan, the [...]
03.24.10 -
DNA Reveals New Hominid Ancestor
A new member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic sequence, not fossil bones. Even more surprising, this novel and still mysterious hominid, if confirmed, would have lived near Stone Age Neandertals and Homo sapiens. “It was a shock to find DNA from a new type [...]
03.24.10 -
Report: Warner Bros. Developing Spy Hunter Movie
Moviegoers may be hearing the Peter Gunn theme soon if Warner Bros. has its way. According to Variety, the studio is developing a movie based on the classic arcade game Spy Hunter. Producers Dan Lin and Roy Lee are steering the project for Warners, with Chad St. John writing the script. Spy Hunter debuted in arcades in [...]
03.24.10
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The Trials and Tribulations of Internet Explorer
Every few months, we see a new set of statistics or a new report showing how Internet Explorer is losing browser share, becoming increasingly irrelevant or dying on the vine. This of course sets off ripples across the tech blogs, which gather into a wave of “Death of IE” posts that we all tweet, Digg [...]
03.24.10 -
Review: New Pokémon Games Blend Classic Monsters, Modern Gameplay
When Nintendo’s Pokémon videogames were taking the world by storm a decade ago, Pokémaniacs couldn’t wait for the sequels Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver. The two games, identical aside from slight differences in the pocket monsters in them, blew away fans when they were released in 2000: The sequels boasted a much larger quest, better [...]
03.24.10 -
Go Daddy Stops Selling Chinese Domains Over Censorship Concerns
Go Daddy, the net’s largest domain-name registrar, announced Wednesday it would stop selling .cn domain names, saying it was unwilling to comply with new rules from the Chinese government that require new and existing .cn domain-name holders to provide photo ID. The announcement comes just two days after Google redirected its censored Google.cn search engine to [...]
03.24.10 -
Law Enforcement Appliance Subverts SSL
That little lock on your browser window indicating you are communicating securely with your bank or e-mail account may not always mean what you think its means. Normally when a user visits a secure website, such as Bank of America, Gmail, PayPal or eBay, the browser examines the website’s certificate to verify its authenticity. At a recent [...]
03.24.10 -
Futuristic Pod Car Combines GM Vision, Segway Practicality
General Motors sees a future where people navigate crowded cities in big Segways that look kinda like a Dyson vacuum cleaner and can drive you home when you’ve had one too many. Seriously. The General unveiled a trio of electric “urban mobility vehicles,” built with help from the über-geeks at Segway, today in Shanghai. They’re called [...]
03.24.10 -
XSS Vulnerabilities, Raw SQL Top List of Common Programming Errors
No programmer is perfect, but some mistakes are more dangerous than others. While some mistakes might just slow down your site, others can open up vulnerabilities that expose your code, your database and even your users to all manner of attack. To help you identify the more serious errors common in programs of all types, a [...]
03.24.10 -
Chemical From Plastic Water Bottles Found Throughout Oceans
A survey of 200 sites in 20 countries around the world has found that bisphenol A, a synthetic compound that mimics estrogen and is linked to developmental disorders, is ubiquitous in Earth’s oceans. Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found mostly in shatter-proof plastics and epoxy resins. Most people have trace amounts in their bodies, likely absorbed [...]
03.24.10 -
What If Everyone on Twitter Read One Book?
I have a dream. An idea. A maybe great notion. Actually, as Auggie March might say, “I got a scheme.” What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club? Usually such programs are organized by big-city libraries. Seattle started the trend for collective reading [...]
03.24.10 -
Break Up the NSA!
When Google called in the National Security Agency to help secure its networks, it made a lot of us queasy. Sure, the NSA has some of the world’s most sophisticated cyber defenders. But the agency’s intelligence arm has a long and ugly history of mass surveillance on American citizens. So when Google teams up with [...]
03.24.10 -
Mercs vs. Pirates: Deadly Shootout on the High Seas
For months, shipping firms have been testing ways to repel pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia, trying everything from sonic blasters to warning shots. But things have now escalated to lethal force: A Somali pirate was apparently killed yesterday in a gunfight between a cargo ship and a pirate skiff. According to a news release [...]
03.24.10
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Exclusive: New Time Lord’s Take on Doctor Who
No one knows quite what to expect as Matt Smith steps into David Tennant’s shoes as Doctor Who’s new Time Lord. In the quick clip we’ve seen so far, Smith seems quirkier for sure — and he looks to be an enthusiastic traveler. So what is Smith’s take on the Doctor’s psyche? “I think the Doctor’s got [...]
03.24.10 -
James Cameron Pegs Avatar DVD Release to Earth Day
HOLLYWOOD — James Cameron is taking Avatar’s eco-friendly message seriously, announcing Tuesday that the sci-fi blockbuster’s DVD release will be pegged to the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day. “I’m not trying to sell DVDs on the back of the hardship of the planet as much as I’m hoping that continued conversation surrounding Avatar and these issues [...]
03.23.10 -
Shoplifting Couple Jailed for eBay Toy Sales
A California couple that bragged on national television about shoplifting toys — which included Lego and Star Wars-themed toys — have been sentenced to more than a year in prison each after being busted selling the hot goods on eBay. Matthew and Laura Eaton were indicted in September, more than a year after they appeared on [...]
03.23.10 -
Meet Merton, Chatroulette’s Drive-By Piano Guy
Chatroulette’s instant intimacy makes the daisy-chain webcam service the perfect “venue” for Merton, the improv piano player whose witty real-time songwriting has become a hit on YouTube. “I’m not really comfortable performing onstage in front of a lot of people, and it’s also much harder to have an intimate experience with a lot of people” when [...]
03.23.10 -
Video: SpaceShipTwo First Captive Flight
Virgin Galactic has released video from yesterday’s first captive flight of SpaceShipTwo, also known as the VSS Enterprise. Yesterday’s flight lasted 2 hours and 54 minutes and flew to 45,000 feet. It was the 25th flight for WhiteKnightTwo since the aircraft first flew back in December of 2008. The video from Virgin Galactic shows crews preparing [...]
03.23.10 -
Danger Room Mythbuster: Nazi Rocket Barge, Sunk
In a speech yesterday on missile defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn talked about a “new and more complex era of hybrid threats” in which potential U.S. adversaries might combine high-tech and low-tech tools to mount a surprise attack. And to make his point, he drew on a history lesson: German plans during World [...]
03.23.10 -
Innovative SpyParty Is Ultimate Mind Game
SAN FRANCISCO — At last year’s Game Developers Conference, designer Chris Hecker unveiled a prototype of a new game called SpyParty. This year, he let me play it. SpyParty is like nothing else I’ve ever played. It’s an asymmetrical multiplayer game: One player mingles among computer-controlled party guests, attempting to perform sly feats of espionage. The other [...]
03.23.10 -
Archie Bronson Outfit Spins 21st-Century Sci-Fi Grooves on Coconut
Coconut, the title of Archie Bronson Outfit’s latest dizzying blend of grooves, sounds organic enough. But from its vintage synths and sine oscillators to its spacey, sci-fi sound, the record is an inorganic pleasure. In an era up to its space helmet in retrospective gold rushes, it’s practically impossible to listen to Coconut and think it [...]
03.23.10 -
Lawmakers Eyeing National ID Card
Lawmakers are proposing a national identification card — what they’re calling “high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security cards” — that would be required for all employees in the United States. The proposal by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) comes as the states are grappling to produce another national identification card at the [...]
03.23.10 -
Video: Opera Mini on the iPhone
As we mentioned last week, we got to see a preview of Opera’s Mini 5 browser running on the iPhone. Opera was showing off the app at its booth at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. But the Opera folks wouldn’t let us photograph it or shoot video of it, and they [...]
03.23.10
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Review: Stand, Shoot and Slash in Red Steel 2 Wii
I played Red Steel 2 on my feet, for hours at a stretch. I don’t know if that’s how you’re “supposed” to play this new Wii game, available Tuesday, a first-person shooter in which you don’t do a whole lot of shooting. What makes this game unique is that your character’s most powerful weapon is his [...]
03.23.10 -
Gonzalez Accomplice Gets Probation for Selling Browser Exploit
A computer security professional who sold Internet Explorer exploit code to credit card hacker Albert Gonzalez was sentenced Tuesday in Boston to three years probation and a $10,000 fine. Jeremy Jethro, 29, was paid $60,000 by Gonzalez for a zero-day exploit against Microsoft’s browser, “the purpose and function of which was to … enable the conspirators to unlawfully [...]
03.23.10 -
Better Place Charges Ahead Down Under
Better Place is going Down Under with a plan to roll out an EV charging network in Australia beginning in 2012. The Silicon Valley company’s announcement makes Australia the third country — behind Israel and Denmark — to join entrepreneur Shai Agassi in creating the infrastructure we’ll need if electric vehicles are to catch on. Better [...]
03.23.10 -
Lord Vader, Your Motorcycle Is Ready
This is the Magpul Ronin, and it’s what you get when a company that makes firearms accessories decides to make a motorcycle. The motorcycle in question is, mostly, a Buell 1125R sportbike. The guys at Magpul are riders who loved the bike but thought the aesthetics — never a strongpoint for Buell — sucked. When Harley-Davidson [...]
03.23.10 -
Rocket-Launched ‘Rapid Eye’ Drone’s Rapid Demise
Drones are an indispensable tool in modern warfare: They can loiter for hours, providing crucial surveillance of distant targets. But what if you need to get a drone somewhere in a hurry? That was the idea behind Rapid Eye. In 2007, Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out science arm, announced plans to package a folding drone inside the [...]
03.23.10 -
Nintendo 3DS Will Boast Glasses-Free 3-D, Coming Soon
Nintendo’s next portable game machine will be called “Nintendo 3DS” and feature 3-D graphics, the company said Tuesday morning. The Nintendo 3DS is a next-generation portable game machine, a successor to the current line of products. It will feature a 3-D display that does not require the use of glasses. It will be released in Japan [...]
03.23.10 -
Vials of Artist’s Blood, Skin Show Up in Freaky Art Show Flesh and Blood
Even the most jaded art connoisseurs have to marvel at John U. Abrahamson’s weird sense of mission: The artist spent a year extracting skin samples and blood from his own body, then stored the material in 650 vials for an installation that includes 20 oil paintings of distorted body parts. In Flesh and Blood, the [...]
03.22.10 -
New Doctor Who Emerges From the Tardis
After a glorious run with David Tennant as the Doctor and Russell T. Davies as the show’s writer, a new Doctor Who is emerging from the Tardis. Matt Smith is the 11th incarnation of the Time Lord in the show, the longest-running sci-fi television series in history. In the one-minute video clip above, we get a [...]
03.22.10 -
Conway’s Game of Life in JavaScript
The Game of Life, the most famous example of cellular automata and the basis of countless generative music, art and computer programming projects, has its own JavaScript simulator. The concept, created in 1970 by the mathematician John Conway, relies on very simple rules applied to cells on a board. The cells are either “on/alive” or “off/dead,” [...]
03.22.10 -
Australian Game Censor Resigns
Michael Atkinson, South Australian attorney general, resigned from his position on Sunday. Atkinson has long been considered the roadblock to Mature-rated videogames being sold in the country. Australia is the only Western democracy without a rating similar to our Mature classification. Atkinson came under fire from gamers for refusing to help create an R18+ rating for [...]
03.22.10
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Eye-Tracking Tablets and the Promise of Text 2.0
03.25.10 -
Why ‘Flutter’ Is a 4-Letter Word for Pilots
03.25.10 -
Alt Text: How Will Nintendo 3DS Work? 5 Eye-Popping 3-D Theories
03.25.10 -
3-D Tabletop Display Gets Rid of the Glasses
03.25.10 -
TJX Hacker Gets 20 Years in Prison
03.25.10 -
Go Daddy Says China Refusal Is No PR Stunt
03.25.10 -
Taurus Concept Is Like Hot Segway Bike From the Future
03.25.10 -
iPhone Hacker Thinks He’s Cracked the iPad, Too
03.26.10 -
Fan-Made WebOS Commercial Beats Palm’s Efforts
03.26.10 -
WIPO: Dope-Vaporizer Seller Not Bogarting Domain Names
03.25.10 -
Laser Guidance Adds Power to Wind Turbines
03.25.10 -
Air Force Enforces BlackBerry Crackdown
03.25.10 -
Ron Howard Was Wrong: Apollo 13 Would Have Burned, Not Frozen
03.26.10 -
Law Enforcement Appliance Subverts SSL
03.24.10 -
Chemical Fingerprints Could Finger Weapons Makers
03.25.10 -
It’s True: Hot Water Really Can Freeze Faster Than Cold Water
03.24.10 -
As Temperature Rises, Earth Breathes Faster — and Maybe Harder
03.25.10 -
First Look: Digg for iPhone Launches in App Store
03.25.10 -
Hipsters Grieve: The $150 Walmart Fixie
03.26.10 -
Study: 1 in 4 Consumers Considering a Plug-In Car
03.25.10
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