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Domain: vice.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to vice.com.
Stories · 1,377
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Is 3D Printing the Future of Disaster Relief?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Advocates for the technology say that it's only a matter of time before we're shipping raw materials and 3D printers instead of medical supplies to the site of a disaster. 3D printers are already being used in the medical field to create customized tracheal valves, umbilical cord clamps, splints, and even blood vessels. A group in Haiti is already using the umbilical cord clamps to show locals the potential for the technology. And it's only a matter of time before they get deployed in a disaster scenario, according to Thomas Campbell, a Virginia Tech professor and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council." -
Is 3D Printing the Future of Disaster Relief?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Advocates for the technology say that it's only a matter of time before we're shipping raw materials and 3D printers instead of medical supplies to the site of a disaster. 3D printers are already being used in the medical field to create customized tracheal valves, umbilical cord clamps, splints, and even blood vessels. A group in Haiti is already using the umbilical cord clamps to show locals the potential for the technology. And it's only a matter of time before they get deployed in a disaster scenario, according to Thomas Campbell, a Virginia Tech professor and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council." -
Online Retailers Cruising Tor To Hunt For Fraudsters
Daniel_Stuckey writes "This week, the verification company Service Objects announced a new tool to help websites detect 'suspicious' visitors using Tor and other anonymous proxies. Its updated DOTS IP Address Validation product identifies 'suspicious' discrepancies between the user's home location and the location of the IP address the order's coming from. It joins a handful of other tools on the market promising Tor-detection for retailers. It's a logical strategy: If you're trying to buy something with a stolen credit card, you're obviously going to want to block your real identity and location while doing it. But it also raises the question of whether targeting anonymity services to hunt out fraudsters could have chilling effects for harmless Tor users trying to protect their privacy online—particularly this year in light of the NSA-spying scandal." -
The Cybersecurity Industry Is Hiring, But Young People Aren't Interested
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Cybersecurity, as an industry, is booming. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, jobs as network systems and information security professionals are expected to grow by 53 percent through 2018. Yet, young people today aren't interested in getting jobs in cybersecurity. By all accounts it's a growing and potentially secure, lucrative job. But according to a new survey by the defense tech company Raytheon, only 24 percent of millennials have any interest in cybersecurity as a career." -
A Live Map of Ongoing DDoS Attacks
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Check out the Digital Attack Map. It was produced in a collaborative effort by Google Ideas and Arbor Networks to raise awareness about distributed denial of service attacks. You know, those malicious digital attempts to choke, or shutdown websites by sending them volumes of traffic far too large for them to handle. The map 'surfaces anonymous attack traffic data to let users explore historic trends and find reports of outages happening on a given day,' as its about page explains. Created using attack data from Arbor's 'ATLAS® global threat intelligence system,' this is the D.A.R.E. of DDoS — it's about the danger of having information streams cut off. Under the heading 'DDoS Attacks Matter,' Google and Arbor explain that 'sites covering elections are brought down to influence their outcome, media sites are attacked to censor stories, and businesses are taken offline by competitors looking for a leg up.'" This comes alongside Google's announcement of Project Shield, the company's homegrown DDoS mitigation service. -
How PR Subverts Wikipedia
Daniel_Stuckey writes "We all know that Wikipedia can be subverted—it’s an inevitability of an open platform that some people will seek to abuse it, whether to gain some advantage or just for a laugh. Fortunately, the Wikipedia community has strong mechanisms in place to deal with this, from the famous cry of [citation needed] to the rigorous checks and standards put in place by its hierarchy of editors and admins. In recent months though, Insiders have encountered something altogether more worrying: a concerted attack on the very fabric of Wikipedia by PR companies that have subverted the online encyclopedia's editing hierarchy to alter articles on a massive scale—perhaps tens of thousands of them. Wikipedia is the world's most popular source of cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge—if their fears are correct, its all-important credibility could be on the line... Adam Masonbrink, a founder and Vice-President of Sales at Wiki-PR, boasts of new clients including Priceline and Viacom. Viacom didn't respond ... but Priceline — a NASDAQ listed firm with over 5,000 employees and William Shatner as their official spokesman — did. Sadly, Priceline didn't choose to respond to us via Captain Kirk; instead Leslie Cafferty, vice president of corporate communications and public relations, admitted, 'We are using them to help us get all of our brands a presence because I don't have the resources internally to otherwise manage.'" -
Why Bitcoin Boomed During the Government Shutdown
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Just two weeks after the Feds shuttered the Silk Road, the notorious online drug bazaar, Bitcoin prices have touched a five-month high — with a single Bitcoin fetching nearly $156 on Tokyo-based exchange Mt. Gox. Bitcoin's resiliency can no longer be denied, especially as the digital currency continued its ascendancy even against the backdrop of a U.S. government in utter disarray. At the 11th hour of the crisis, President Obama signed a bill that ended the partial government shutdown and, more importantly, raised the debt ceiling, an arbitrary limit on the amount of money the country can borrow that would have been surpassed today. If Congress had failed to reach a deal and the U.S. was unable to pay its bills, the results might have been catastrophic, eclipsing the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers five years ago, the domino that could trigger the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." -
NSA Director Keith Alexander Is Reportedly Stepping Down
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Keith Alexander will step down by April or May of next year. What's more, the agency's deputy director Chris Inglis also plans to retire by the end of next year, anonymous US officials told Reuters today. Though the news comes in the midst of a global public backlash over the NSA's widespread surveillance programs, it's worth pointing out that Alexander had revealed his plans to retire before Edward Snowden leaked details of PRISM in June. Officials didn't give a reason for his departure." -
No, Oreos Aren't As Addictive As Cocaine
Daniel_Stuckey writes "If you give a mouse a cookie, you can spend all day following it around the house while it wants to do a bunch of tedious activities. Or, you can trap it in a box, keep feeding it cookies, and then make the outrageous claim that Oreos are as addictive as cocaine. Students at Connecticut College opted for the second option, and the consequences that ensued were much more annoying than making some arts and crafts with a darn mouse. Fox News reported that a 'College study finds Oreo cookies are as addictive as drugs,' Forbes explained 'Why Your Brain Treats Oreos Like a Drug,' and a ton of other sites ran with the story as well. Here's how the experiment, which has not been peer reviewed and has not been presented yet, went down. Mice were placed in a maze, with one end holding an Oreo and the other end holding a rice cake. The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture." -
Finland's Algorithm-Driven Public Bus
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Where's the Uber-like interactivity for getting a bus to come to you after a tap on your cell phone? In Finland, actually. The Kutsuplus is Helsinki's groundbreaking mass transit hybrid program that lets riders choose their own routes, pay for fares on their phones, and summon their own buses. It's a pretty interesting concept. With a ten-minute lead time, you summon a Kutsuplus bus to a stop using the official app, just as you'd call a livery cab on Uber. Each minibus in the fleet seats at least nine people, and there's room for baby carriages and bikes. You can call your own private Kutsuplus, but if you share the ride, you share the costs — it's about half the price of a cab fare, and a dollar or two more expensive than old school bus transit. You can then pick your own stop, also using the app." -
Finnish Doctors Are Prescribing Video Games For ADHD
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Ville Tapio runs a private psychiatry center in Helsinki, and psychiatrists had told him they were reluctant in particular to hand out drugs for patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD drugs are psychostimulants, they are frequently abused, and kids can be prescribed them young and kept on a regimen for years. Tapio had an idea to do it better. His alternative? Getting people with mental health concerns to play video games. They're special video games, of course — ones that can change how your brain works, with a technique loosely termed gameified neuroplasticity therapy." -
Finnish Doctors Are Prescribing Video Games For ADHD
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Ville Tapio runs a private psychiatry center in Helsinki, and psychiatrists had told him they were reluctant in particular to hand out drugs for patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD drugs are psychostimulants, they are frequently abused, and kids can be prescribed them young and kept on a regimen for years. Tapio had an idea to do it better. His alternative? Getting people with mental health concerns to play video games. They're special video games, of course — ones that can change how your brain works, with a technique loosely termed gameified neuroplasticity therapy." -
New York Subpoenaed AirBnb For All NYC User Data
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The war between New York City and Airbnb is raging on, and the future of the hospitality business hangs in the balance. The city is fighting the startup for breaking local laws against operating an illegal hotel out of your home, worried that hustlers are abusing the online service to turn a profit. To that end, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman just slapped the company with a subpoena to hand over the user data of all New Yorkers who've listed their apartment on the site, the New York Daily News reported today. That's about 225,000 users." -
Protesters Are Dodging Sudan's Internet Shutdown With a Phone-Powered Crowdmap
Lasrick writes "Motherboard's Africa correspondent, Amanda Sperber, has a great piece on how protesters in Sudan are getting around the government's shutdown of the internet. Quoting: 'Since Wednesday afternoon, Sudan's internet has been sporadically shut off amid a fifth day of protests against President Omar al Bashir's regime. Despite the attempt to cut off communications and limit organization and reporting on the ground, a group of tech-savvy people based in Khartoum have developed a map for recording key data about the protests that's powered by cell networks. '" -
Nissan's Autonomous Car Now Road Legal In Japan
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The current test vehicle uses what Nissan calls its 'Advanced Driver Assist System,' which isn't fully autonomous, but rather can be thought of as a really advanced cruise control system. According to the company, the system can keep a car in its own lane, while automatically changing lanes to pass slower vehicles or prepare to exit a freeway, which it can also do automatically. Along with that, the car automatically slows for congestion, and — most impressively in my opinion — can automatically stop at red lights. In other words, the car isn't fully automatic in that you can't simply type in a destination and have it do all the work, but the bulk of driving load is taken care of. Curiously, Nissan's goal appears to be to take sloppy human drivers out of the equation to eliminate road fatalities." -
Can There Be a Non-US Internet?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "After discovering that the US government has been invading the privacy of not just Americans, but also Brazilians, Brazil is showing its teeth. The country responded to the spying revelations by declaring it'll just have to create its own internet. In reality, although Brazil President Dilma Rousseff is none too happy with the NSA's sketchy surveillance practices, Brazil and other up-and-coming economies have been pushing to shift the power dynamics of the World Wide Web away from a US-centric model for years." -
Dogs Love Robots, Prefer Humans
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Researchers recently spent some time forcing dogs and robots to hang out together, in order to better understand the social qualities of interactive robots. The scientists had two objectives: to find out whether canines would interact with a robot and also to see whether they would ascribe social qualities to a non-living, non-human-like being. Dogs were divided into two groups: one would have a social interaction with the robot while the other would have an asocial interaction. They were allowed to watch their owners interact with the robot before meeting it themselves, which was then followed by a session wherein the canine subjects had to obey gestural cues from either a robot or a human. The robot purposely did not look human, save for its arms and gloved hand, as the researchers wanted to explore sociality apart from anthropoid features. As it turns out, dogs were interested in the robots, especially if the robots themselves were social and they saw owners interact with the robot, but ultimately were not as responsive or successful in following cues as they would otherwise be with humans." -
The iPhone 5S Hasn't Been Officially Announced, Already Has Line
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The iPhone 5S line has already begun, despite Apple not even having made its announcement yet. From the looks of the invite to the unveiling in San Francisco on Sept. 10 (and another event the following day in Beijing, where iPhones are all the rage), the company will not only be announcing a next generation iPhone, the 5S, but also the lower-priced 5C model, in a variety of cheaper-looking colors." -
New Smartphone Tech To Alert Pedestrians: 'You Are About To Be Hit By a Car'
cartechboy writes "Usually, smartphones are a problem for humans transporting themselves — a massive distraction. But Honda is working on a way to use smartphones to protect pedestrians from bad drivers. The 'V2P' (Vehicle-to-Pedestrian) tech uses a smartphone's GPS and dedicated short range communications (DSRC) to warn drivers when a pedestrian say, steps out from behind a parked car. So the driver sees a dashboard message warning of an approaching pedestrian (which also notes whether said walker is using phone, texting or listening to music — which sort of shouldn't matter as you, uhm, brake.) The lucky pedestrian gets an alert on their phone telling them there's a DSRC-equipped car coming – that's if, say, actually looking at the road isn't telling you that already." The lesson here is to always keep your eyes on your smartphone when you're crossing the street. If you get an alert, stop where you are and read it! Relatedly, there's another phone app in development to help you avoid gunfire. -
Social Media's Role In Peer Pressure
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The Fear of Missing Out phenomenon is part of why people tend to get addicted to social networking and then depressed. And if you're a young, impressionable teenager, it could pressure you into making sure you, too, are happily intoxicated the next time someone snaps a group shot. That's the gist of the latest study to find that social media photos of people drinking and smoking can influence teens into partaking in the same degenerate behavior. The University of Southern California study was published online today in the Journal of Adolescent Health." -
Lockbox Aims To NSA-Proof the Cloud
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Lockbox, a tech startup founded in 2008, just received $2.5 million in seed funding for its end-to-end encryption cloud service, Client Portal. So, how does end-to-end cloud encryption work? Lockbox encrypts and compresses files before they are uploaded to the cloud. Only a person in possession of the corresponding key can unlock, or decrypt, the files. This means that the NSA, malicious hackers, business competitors, and even crazy girlfriends and boyfriends won't be be able to peer into users' most sensitive and private files." -
Will Robots Replace Rent-a-Cops?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Now, an EU-funded, £7.2 million ($11 million USD) collaborative project, called Strands, is underway in England to develop 4D, artificial intelligence for security and care applications. It aims to produce intelligent robo-sentinels that can patrol areas, and learn to detect abnormalities in human behavior. Could their project eventually replace security guards with robots? It looks possible. Strands, as Nick Hawes of the University of Birmingham said, will 'develop novel approaches to extract spatio-temporal structure from sensor data gathered during months of autonomous operation,' to develop intelligence that can then 'exploit [those] structures to yield adaptive behavior in highly demanding, real-world security and care scenarios.'" -
A Closer Look At the Syrian Electronic Army
tsu doh nimh writes "Yesterday saw the publication of two stories focusing on two different Syrian men thought to be core members of the Syrian Electronic Army, the hacking group that took credit for recent break-ins that compromised the Web sites of The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets. Working with a source who says he hacked into the SEA's servers this year, Vice.com profiles a fairly high-profile SEA member who uses the nickname "ThePro" and outs him as a young man named Hatem Deeb. Separately, Brian Krebs managed to get hold of the SQL database for the SEA's Web site after it was allegedly hacked this year, and follows a trail of clues back to one of two administrators of the SEA, which leads to another Syrian guy — a Web developer named Mohammed Osman, a.k.a. Mohamed Abd AlKarem." -
This Satellite Could Be Beaming Solar Power Down From Space By 2025
Daniel_Stuckey writes "A NASA veteran, aerospace entrepreneur, and space-based solar power (SBSP) expert, [John] Mankins designed the world's first practical orbital solar plant. It's called the Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large PHased Array, or SPS-ALPHA for short. If all goes to plan, it could be launched as early as 2025, which is sooner than it sounds when it comes to space-based solar power timelines. Scientists have been aware of the edge the "space-down" approach holds over terrestrial panels for decades. An orbiting plant would be unaffected by weather, atmospheric filtering of light, and the sun's inconvenient habit of setting every evening. SBSP also has the potential to dramatically increase the availability of renewable energy." -
Wikipedia Can Predict Box Office Flops
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Despite a record year, like every year before it, 2013 remained fraught with its fair share of box office disasters. What if studios could minimize their loses and predict when the next Pluto Nash-level flop was imminent? According to new research published in PLoS One, they may actually be able to. Using data gleaned from Wikipedia articles, researchers measured the likelihood of a film's financial success based on four parameters: number of total page views; number of total edits made; number of users editing; and the number of revisions in the article's revision history, or 'collaborative rigor.'" -
The CIA Is Closing the Office That Declassifies Historical Documents
Daniel_Stuckey writes "As a result of the sequester-induced budget cuts, the CIA is closing the Historical Collections Division office, which declassifies historical documents, and transferring the divisions responsibilities to the office that handles FOIA requests. The Historical Collections Division is described on its website as 'an important part of CIA's ongoing effort to be more open and to provide for more public accountability.' It is a 'voluntary declassification program that focuses on records of historical value,' including information on the Vietnam War, spy satellites, the Bay of Pigs and other historical scandals and operations." -
Report: By 2035, Nearly 100 Million Self-Driving Cars Will Be Sold Per Year
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The rise of autonomous cars might turn out to be more rapid than even the most devout Knight Rider fans were hoping. According to a new report from Navigant Research, in just over two decades, Google Cars and their ilk will account for 75 percent of all light vehicle sales worldwide. In total, Navigant expects 95.4 million autonomous cars to be sold every year by 2035. That's pretty astonishing. For one thing, that's more cars than are built every year right now." -
Soda Makes Five-Year-Olds Break Your Stuff, Science Finds
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Shakira F. Suglia and co-authors surveyed 2,929 mothers of five-year-olds (PDF) and found that 43 percent of the kids consumed at least one serving of soft drinks per day. About four percent of those children (or 110 of them), drank more than four soft drinks per day, and became 'more than twice as likely to destroy things belonging to others, get into fights, and physically attack people.' In the past, soda and its various strains have been related to depression, irritability, aggression, suicidal thoughts, and delusions of sweepstake-winning grandeur. Of course, this study didn't find out what types of soda the children had consumed." -
"451" Error Will Tell Users When Governments Are Blocking Websites
Daniel_Stuckey writes "To fend off the chilling effects of heavy-handed internet restriction, the UK consumer rights organization Open Rights Group wants to create a new version of the '404 Page Not Found' error message, called '451 unavailable,' to specify that a webpage wasn't simply not there, it was ordered to be blocked for legal reasons." -
The First 'Practical' Jetpack May Be On Sale In Two Years
Daniel_Stuckey writes "This week, New Zealand-based company Martin Aircraft became certified to take what it calls 'the world's first practical jetpack' out for a series of manned test flights. If all goes well, the company plans to start selling a consumer version of the jetpack in 2015, starting at $150,000 to $200,000 and eventually dropping to $100,000. 'For us it's a very important step because it moves it out of what I call a dream into something which I believe we're now in a position to commercialize and take forward very quickly,' CEO Peter Coker told the AFP." -
Is New York City Ready For Digital Voting?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Turnout for local elections in New York City was 33.7 percent in 2010, according to Fair Vote. And while some apps and startups are looking to resurrect turnouts in future elections, most candidates still couldn't tell you how they work or why they might be necessary. Benjamin Kallos is a candidate for New York City Council's fifth district, which includes the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island, and has his sights on modernizing the electoral process. He's campaigning on a high-tech platform that he says aims to deepen technology's role in promoting transparency, inclusion, and accountability within pockets of New York City's voting pool that remain largely disengaged." -
Soldiers Looking For Hookups On Craigslist Are Being Warned of a Military Sting
Daniel_Stuckey writes with this excerpt from Motherboard: "Word has it there's a military sting operation to bust soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are using Craigslist to find casual hookups, and now troopers are being warned to keep their sexual exploits on the down-low. It all started when news article published last week in the Army Times suggested undercover military cops were trolling the Craigslist Baghdad personals to catch officers posting lewd photos looking for casual sex. (The Baghdad site is presumably a product of the war in Iraq, though most of the posters now are deployed in Afghanistan.) The story was picked up by the Daily Mail and a subsequent wave of media outlets, exposing the X-rated subculture." -
Omni Magazine To Reboot
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Adi Robertson reports in The Verge that classic science fiction magazine Omni, created in 1978 by Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione and partner Kathy Keeton, is coming back — and with it, questions about how our vision of science and science fiction has changed since Omni closed up shop in 1996. 'There's a heavy dose of nostalgia in the proceedings, and it's not just about bringing back an old name,' writes Robertson. 'Longtime editor Ben Bova has described Omni as "a magazine about the future," but since his time as editor, our vision of the future has been tarnished — or, at the very least, we've started looking at the predictions of the past with rose-tinted glasses.' Omni's resurrection comes courtesy of Jeremy Frommer, a collector and businessman who acquired Guccione's archives earlier this year. Like the original magazine, now available at the internet archive, the new Omni will publish a mixture of new fiction and nonfiction publishing the old illustrations that helped define Omni alongside the stories. Longtime science writer Claire Evans will edit the new online project described as an 'Omni reboot' but plans to jettison one of the magazine's most dated elements — a fondness for extraterrestrials and conspiracy theories. 'Omni always had a distressing new agey tinge to it,' says Bruce Sterling. 'There was a lot of "aircraft of the pharaohs'"rubbish going on, which I didn't have very much tolerance for.'" -
World's First Road-Powered Electric Vehicle Network Opens
Daniel_Stuckey writes "South Korea continues to pull out all the stops on the long road to a high-tech utopia. Last year, the city Yeosu hosted the Expo 2012, an international exhibition that highlighted emerging technology and design that attracted 8 million visitors over three months. Today, the nation has finally unveiled the world's first road-powered electric vehicle network for regular use. Here's how it works: the network runs on newly-built roads that have electric cables and wires embedded below the surface. This allows for the magnetic-resonance transfer of energy to the network's vehicles, which not only already run on small batteries (about a third of the size of a typical electric vehicle) but also do not require the plug-in-and-recharge process common to other electric cars." -
Def Con Hackers On Whether They'd Work For the NSA
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Premier hacker conference Def Con, which just wrapped up its 21st year, played host to security professionals who all had very different opinions on what the NSA is up to. In fact, the only thing everyone could agree on is that the PRISM revelations came as no surprise. Even if it isn't news to this crowd, it is still a significant development in the general climate of government surveillance and national security. And at Def Con, where government recruitment was hampered this year by conference founder Jeff Moss's requesting that feds stay away, it seemed like a good idea to walk around asking people if they would still want to work for the NSA." -
Def Con Hackers On Whether They'd Work For the NSA
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Premier hacker conference Def Con, which just wrapped up its 21st year, played host to security professionals who all had very different opinions on what the NSA is up to. In fact, the only thing everyone could agree on is that the PRISM revelations came as no surprise. Even if it isn't news to this crowd, it is still a significant development in the general climate of government surveillance and national security. And at Def Con, where government recruitment was hampered this year by conference founder Jeff Moss's requesting that feds stay away, it seemed like a good idea to walk around asking people if they would still want to work for the NSA." -
Crowd-Funding a Mission To Jupiter's Moons
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Like so many great leaps for mankind, getting a human to one of Jupiter's moons must begin with a small step. And Objective Europa is aiming to do exactly that. A small team — architects, futurist designers, private space pioneers and even Jacques Cousteau's son — is beginning the planning stage to send human beings on a one-way trip to the Jovian moon Europa. The effort is headed up by Kristian Von Bengston, the founder of Copenhagen Suborbitals, an open source DIY space program based in his native Denmark. And he's quite serious about transporting a man or woman beyond our atmosphere, Mars and the asteroid belt." -
Is China Wiring Africa For Surveillance?
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Huawei has invested billions of dollars in Africa over the last two decades, providing affordable cell phones, internet access, and telecommunications networks to the continent. Over the last few months Huawei has closed major deals in Africa to get more areas on the grid. The company says it's bridging the digital divide, but others suspect it's wiring the continent for surveillance." -
A Circular New York City Subway Map To Straighten Things Out
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The U.K.'s Max Roberts, a mapmaker and critic, has created a map that sees this problem and then solves it by adopting a similar distortion strategy to the MTA map, but to a far greater degree. The map heads in the direction of a diagram and away from a map representing features. It may be the most lucid reinterpretation of the New York City subway map I've seen yet." -
In Canada, a 3D-Printed Rifle Breaks On First Firing
Not all 3-D printed guns can encounter the smooth, uneventful success of Cody Wilson's Liberator; Daniel_Stuckey writes with this excerpt: "A Canadian has just fired the first shot from his creation, 'The Grizzly,' an entirely 3D-printed rifle. In that single shot, CanadianGunNut (his name on the DefCad forum), or "Matthew," has advanced 3D-printed firearms to yet another level. Sort of: According to his video's description, the rifle's barrel and receiver were both damaged in that single shot." -
Wi-Fi-Enabled Tooth Sensor Rats You Out When You Smoke Or Overeat
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Researchers at National Taiwan University have created a tooth-embedded sensor that will catch you in an unhealthy act, whatever it may be, and lets your doctor know so he can shame you during your next checkup. The sensor consists of a tiny circuit that fits inside a tooth cavity and can be rigged into dentures and dental braces. The circuit is able to recognize the jaw motions of drinking, chewing, coughing, speaking, and smoking, and the results get sent directly to your doctor's smartphone." -
MIT's "Hot Or Not" Site For Neighborhoods Could Help Shape Cities
Daniel_Stuckey writes "When you walk around a city, there are things you can just sense, like if you've wandered into a dodgy neighborhood, or where the new happening spot is. Intuitively, we know that a city's more intangible characteristics, like class or uniqueness, play a big role in what it’s like to live there, but until now there was no way to actually quantify that idea. Researchers from MIT Media Lab may have found a way to measure this 'aesthetic capital' of cities, with their website Place Pulse, a tool to crowdsource people's perception of cities by judging digital snapshots—a sort of 'hot or not' for urban neighborhoods. Some 4,000 geotagged Google Streetview images and 8,000 participants later, the team found that by using digital images and crowdsourced feedback, they can accurately quantify the diverse vibes within a city (pdf), which in turn can help us better understand issues like inequality and safety." -
Bill Gates Is Beginning To Dream the Thorium Dream
Daniel_Stuckey writes "TerraPower, the Gates-chaired nuclear power company, has garnered the most attention for pursuing traveling wave reactor tech, which runs entirely on spent uranium and would rarely need to be refueled. But Terrapower just quietly announced that it's going to start seriously exploring thorium power, too." -
What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Artist Nickolay Lamm, a blogger for MyDeals.com, decided to shed some light on the subject. He created visualizations that imagine the size, shape, and color of wi-fi signals were they visible to the human eye. 'I feel that by showing what wi-fi would look like if we could see it, we'd appreciate the technology that we use everyday,' Lamm told me in an email. 'A lot of us use technology without appreciating the complexity behind making it work.'" -
DNI Office Asks Why People Trust Facebook More Than the Government
Daniel_Stuckey writes "General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Robert S. Litt explained that our expectation of privacy isn't legally recognized by the Supreme Court once we've offered it to a third party. Thus, sifting through third party data doesn't qualify 'on a constitutional level' as invasive to our personal privacy. This he brought to an interesting point about volunteered personal data, and social media habits. Our willingness to give our information to companies and social networking websites is baffling to the ODNI. 'Why is it that people are willing to expose large quantities of information to private parties but don't want the Government to have the same information?,' he asked." -
Sci-Fi Stories That Predicted the Surveillance State
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Just to address one thing straight away: one of your favorite science fiction stories dealing, whether directly or indirectly, with surveillance is bound to be left off this list. And 1984's a given, so it's not here. At any rate, the following books deal in their own unique way with surveillance. Some address the surveillance head-on, while others speculate on inter-personal intelligence gathering, or consider the subject in more oblique ways. Still others distill surveillance down to its essence: as just one face of a much larger, all-encompassing system of control, that proceeds from the top of the pyramid down to its base." -
Hardly Anyone Is Buying 'Smart Guns'
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The technology is here. So-called 'smart guns' are being programmed to recognize a gun owner's identity and lock up if the weapon ends up in the wrong hands. Entrepreneurs and engineers have been developing technology to make safer guns since the early '90s, and by now we've got working prototypes of guns that read fingerprints, hand grips or even sensors embedded under the skin. But after 15 years of innovation, personalized guns still haven't penetrated the marketplace." -
The Air Force's Love For Fighter Pilots Is Too Big To Fail
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Just look at what's been going on throughout the Air Force. It's as if drones pose such a threat to traditional means of aerial warfare that the flying service's historically kneejerk resistance to anything too closely aligned with sweeping technological change finds it bristling today at prospective gamechangers of the unmanned sort. Nevermind that the AF's active remotely-piloted combat aircraft outnumber its active manned bomber inventory by about 2-to-1. For perspective, as Lt. Col. Lawrence Spinetta writes in the July issue of the Air & Space Power Journal, an official USAF publication, consider that 'RPA [remotely-piloted aircraft] personnel enjoy one wing command' while fighter pilots control 26. In other words, 'the ratio of wing-command opportunities for RPA pilots versus those who fly manned combat aircraft is a staggering 1-to-26.' Such personnel policies that seemingly favor manned standbys are part and parcel of deep-rooted, institutional stigmas. In a 2008 speech, General Norton Schwarz, who served as AF chief from 2008 to 2012, did not mince words when he said that this systemic obsession with all-things manned has turned the Air Force's swelling drone ranks into a 'leper colony.'" -
How Old Is the Average Country?
Daniel_Stuckey writes with a snippet from his piece at Vice: "I did some calculations in Excel, using independence dates provided on About.com, and found the average age of a country is about 158.78 years old. Now, before anyone throws a tizzy about what makes a country a country, about nations, tribes, civilizations, ethnic categories, or about my makeshift methodology, keep in mind, I simply assessed 195 countries based on their political sovereignty. That is the occasion we're celebrating today, right?" -
Introducing the NSA-Proof Crypto-Font
Daniel_Stuckey writes "At a moment when governments and corporations alike are hellbent on snooping through your personal digital messages, it'd sure be nice if there was a font their dragnets couldn't decipher. So Sang Mun built one. Sang, a recent graduate from the Rhode Island Schoold of Design, has unleashed ZXX — a 'disruptive typeface' that he says is much more difficult to the NSA and friends to decrypt. He's made it free to download on his website, too. 'The project started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them?' he writes. 'I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker) — misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence.' He named it after the Library of Congress's labeling code ZXX, which archivists employ when they find a book that contains 'no linguistic content.'"