Though a failure on the privacy front, this video is amusing to watch. Does anything strike you as odd about the movements of the curtain? Probably not, because we’re all habituated to computer-based automation and its limitations. But if it were controlled by a human, it would act quite different, anticipating the movements of the …
Continue reading ‘“Robotic privacy curtain moves across window to block snoops”’ »
How long do you think it will take for this to be adopted by intelligence services worldwide? 😉 So much for hiding conversations from electronic eavesdroppers by holding them near running water. (My guess: they’ve already got it. I could be wrong, but it’s an obvious idea to any science guy — or hard science …
Continue reading ‘“Zoom for audio enables you to hear a single conversation in huge crowd”’ »
Just in case you didn’t have enough to worry about already. 😉 For the record, I sometimes use my Apple MacBook Pro on my lap, occasionally for extended periods, and have never suffered from Toasted Skin Syndrome. But then, like almost everyone, I’m smart enough to move it when it gets uncomfortably hot, even if …
Continue reading ‘“Yet another thing to worry about – Toasted Skin Syndrome”’ »
I’ve always thought that computers could do more to protect themselves from theft. Even something as simple as full drive encryption, built into all hard drives, would at least prevent any thief from getting the data on a machine (and the data is usually worth far more than the machine itself). Apparently someone at Intel …
Continue reading ‘“Intel slips anti-theft tech into hardware to deter thieves”’ »
Something else to file in the “if only I had money to burn” category. I’d dearly love to see Ada Lovelace’s programs run on the machine they were written for.
(This is the conclusion of yesterday’s post about my new fourth-generation 32GB iPod Touch. This first part is being written as iTunes loads my music and applications onto it for the first time.) Kid in a candy store… GoddessJ didn’t sleep well last night, so she was taking a nap. When she got up to …
I bought a 16GB first-generation iPod Touch a few years ago. It has served me well, but its battery is starting to wear out, and iOS updates will no longer work with it. So when the fourth-generation ones came out a few weeks ago, I was ready to buy a new one. They’ve added a …
It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money …
Continue reading ‘“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”’ »
Apple’s “Time Machine” backup just got a lot more interesting. I’d buy one of these in a heartbeat.
I recently had a discussion with a friend about webcams, and we both mentioned that we rarely had any use for them… at least, for the usual uses. We’ve had a problem in the last few months with one of our cats defecating on the floor in a particular spot. As mentioned, we have three …