Hack that passport
The proof of concept code opening up that RFID passport you always wanted to have has been made public and posted on Bugtraq.
HAL-5 robosuit ramping up production
Yes, soon you too will be able to scale Mt. Everest with someone on your back thanks to your augmented powersuit exoskeleton. If you have the +- $60,000 to buy one with. Production for 2007 is expected to be around 20 units, with around 400 + rolling off the lines in 2008.
Vista woes
Vista is upsetting everyone, with rumours that you can’t turn off the starting sound or have access to the kernel etc. but now it’s getting quite serious. First, Patchguard has been compormised by Authentium prompting a backlash from Redmond stating that companies have no business even trying to compromise the kernel protection because it makes Read more about Vista woes[…]
More free fonts
Loads of them here
Multipath radar
or how to track stealth aircraft using your GSM network. This is the clearest explanation I’ve found over the past few years.
Blue dyed jeans fight cancer
Apparently the blue dye in jeans, when inserted in cells and activated by red light destroy said cell. As cancer cells are voracious there is a way to get them and nothing else to eat the blue dye. Zap with red light and off it goes.
Translator device that doesn’t work on sound
You attach some electrodes to your throat and mouth the word. The device says the word in the other language. Far from complete, with an 80% accuracy rate with a lexicon of 100 words, it’s very promising and the only system that doesn’t try to work with acoustic input.
Maths wins the lotto?
These boffins have managed to win the jackpot worth $13 million using probability theory. Or did they? They’ve been going at it for the past eight years…
Lab created diamonds
ADIA is breaking the monopoly of de Beers with their lab created diamonds. The highest quality I saw on the site was around 1.5 carats and cost around $6500,- As they are manufactured, this is the choice for environmentalists and people worried about conflict diamonds. I hope these guys have good insurance – de Beers Read more about Lab created diamonds[…]
Page Defrag
Sysinternals PageDefrag defragments your registry and pagefiles on windows machines, optimising your performance as other defrag programmes leave these areas of your disk untouched.
Morphing clothing
Hussein Chalayan launched something quite spectacular at the Paris Fashion week – morphing clothing. It moves as you walk around, revealing or concealing, changing it’s shape. Really cool stuff. If you watch the video, this type of clothing is modelledat just over halfway through.
Terrorist Profiling TIA2
In their quest for global domination in the Global Big Brother State of USA, they’ve come to the conclusion that all of their seperate profiling and tracking systems don’t work, so what they’re gonna do is combine them all into one huge system called TIA 2. This will supposedly not use personal information (hahahahaha) and Read more about Terrorist Profiling TIA2[…]
RFID Credit Cards
Yes, after having proven time and again that RFID is not safe (it’s easily readable and copyable) those twits at the credit card companies have helped enable fraud on a massive scale by deploying RFID on credit cards. Naturally none of your data is protected at all (like, for example encryption) and (almost) all the Read more about RFID Credit Cards[…]
Fingerprinting at pubs in the UK
Big Brother isn’t just watching you (with the most camera’s deployed anywhere in the world), they are also fingerprinting you in the pub in the UK. Pub owners have been pressured gangland style by HM Government to take your fingerprints on entry.
Tax deductions patented
The US Patent office has allowed 50 tax deduction strategies to be patented and there are 81 more pending. Which means that financial firms can now sue other people and companies for interpreting the law the same way they do.
CSS tools
This is a huge list of different tools for CSS.
Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk
Samsung has unveiled their new hybrid hard drives (HHD) composed of storage in the form of partially platter based (rotating) storage and flash memory storage. The flash memory works like a prefetch cache, but because it’s much faster than platter technology there should be significant speed increases on bootup and with writing small files. Once Read more about Samsung Hybrid Hard Disk[…]
The swarm is coming
These robots swarm together to achieve unified goals, based on an insect model. Check out the videos.
Piper unveils cheap new jet
For $2.2m you too can own a jet which flies 6 people! After Honda’s jet, Piper is now following in the same low cost jet strategy. When are Cessna, Bombardier and Lear going to follow suit?
Why GooTube isn’t being sued
They own a fair chunk of YouTube – and got that chunk just scant hours before the sale with Google was signed!
How to make a laser vortex
Using a laser pointer and a mirror mounted to a motor you can make cool laser vortex effects cheaply.
Google Operating System
How the Google OS works – links and articles about the ins and outs of google as well as other search engines. All the services and software provided by Google and how to use them. Interesting stuff.
New York Film Festival Shorts
The Cinematical has links to a few very good short films online.
Space elevator challenges
NASA has set up two annual competitions to spur development of space elevator technologies – one in which the robot climber has to go up the tether at a minimum speed of 1m per second and one to measure the strength of the tether itself.
When Galaxies Collide
And we get to watch it – aparently these are the best pictures we’ve had yet of the closest colliding galaxy to ours.