Future Technologies

Have you ever wished for a flying book? A flying keyboard? Or, perhaps, a flying bodyboard? Well, it's your lucky day, because thanks to "Drone It Yourself," you can turn pretty much any object into a quadrocopter. The drone kit, created by Dutch independent designer Jasper Van Loenen, is comprised of pieces that can be 3D printed, and then clamped to any object you so desire. All that's needed are the control unit and four propellers, and then you can make virtually anything airborne. news source

    'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. We've evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. In...

STORY HIGHLIGHTS Raspberry Pi works when plugged into an HDTV or digital monitor Pi can display videos, browse the Internet and more Pi does not have internal storage The hottest computer on the market isn't a $1,000-plus decked-out gaming machine. It's actually a bare bones circuit board the size of a credit card. And it costs just $25. Meet the Raspberry Pi. What's it good for? For starters, you hook the Pi to an HDTV or digital monitor using HDMI. It can display high-definition videos, browse the Internet, play games or work on spreadsheets. Sound great! Is it for you, though? Well, it depends. First, let's look at a bit of history. The low-cost Raspberry Pi is the brainchild of Eben Upton. In 2006, he was teaching computer science at the University of Cambridge. He found that computers were too expensive and too hard for ordinary users to program. So, he set out to make a low-cost programming computer. His charitable foundation is working...

This is interesting. You can log into your Facebook account using three passwords – one is the main password that you created and the other passwords can be constructed by toggling the case of characters that form your original password. For example, if your Facebook password is  operati@nGeronimo! , you can convert the uppercase characters to lowercase (and vice-versa) and the toggled password string – OPERATI@NgERONIMO!  – will also get you into Facebook. There’s another variation as well. If the first character of your Facebook password is in small case, just change that character to upper case – like  Operati@nGeronimo ! -  and Facebook will gladly let you in. You may try these variations with your own password on the Facebook login screen available at facebook.com/login.php . Multiple Facebook Logins You don’t just have multiple passwords on Facebook, you can log into Facebook using multiple usernames as well. The default username is the em...

Hitting a target at 1,000 yards is a skill only possessed by a few elite snipers. But all that is about to change, thanks to a high-tech bullet guidance system created by Texas gun manufacturer TrackingPoint. For better or worse, almost anyone with $20,000 to burn can soon have the skills of a special forces assassin. At the heart of TrackingPoint’s sophisticated firearms, dubbed the XactSystem, is the company’s “networked tracking scope,” which sports a color heads up display, and instantly monitors a wide variety of factors, including wind speed and direction, target distance, gravity, the rotation of the earth, and more, to calculate when and how to accurately fire the ammunition. TrackingPoint’s so-called smart rifles, which range from $22,500 to $27,500, even pack built-in Wi-Fi, which allows shooters to transmit live video of their shots to an iPad, then upload them to YouTube or social networks. “They like to post videos; they like to be in constant communication w...

Microsoft today  updated  Bing Maps with its largest shipment of Bird’s Eye imagery yet, nearly 270 terabytes of data. The company also expanded the number of Venue Maps to more than 4,700 in 59 countries and added a new “Report a problem” feature. So far, Microsoft has published a total of 1,452,958 sq km, or half a petabyte of data, in Bird’s Eye scenes from around the world. The Bing Maps coverage for this release is shown in yellow (it’s mainly for the US, some Europe, plus a little Canada and Australia): Venue Maps meanwhile let you navigate your way around malls, airports, amusement parks, casinos, shopping districts, convention centers, museums, stadiums, universities, hotels, and so on, using your Windows phone, tablet, and PC. It’s Microsoft’s answer to Google’s  indoor floor plans . Here’s an example: Microsoft also explained that while using Bing Maps within a zoom level of 1,000 feet, purple (stores) and green (restaurants) polygons will ...

STORY HIGHLIGHTS Apple's new operating system for mobile devices includes app for cars It is designed to make sure drivers are not distracted Look for it in 2014 in up to a dozen car brands The new operating system will come to cars where it can controlled by voice Apple's new operating system for its popular mobile devices goes well beyond iPhone and iPad. It will be showing up in new cars. It's called iOS 7 and will be available to download this fall. The new operating system features a number of design changes to the devices' interface. It also adds a new application that will let an iPhone5 display a few essential functions through a car's multimedia system. It's called "iOS in the Car." It "seamlessly integrates your iOS device — and the iOS experience — with your in-dash system. If your vehicle is equipped with iOS in the Car, you can connect your iPhone 5 and interact with it using the car's b...

It turns out Koobface is washed up – not raging. Last week, McAfee  released a threat report  showing samples of Koobface, the Facebook spreading worm, spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. But on Friday, the anti-virus giant that's now part of Intel did a complete reversal. In a  cryptically-worded blog post  , researcher Craig Schmugar notes that sample counts can be "influenced by repacking of the same underlying code . . . and other forms of server or client polymorphisms." Schmugar confesses that "these factors led to our Koobface statisitcs being off by a large margin." Facebook issued no public statement. But the company's PR agency contacted all the publications that ran with McAfee's initial, alarming, survey results. Cyberattacks are real and pose tangible risk to consumers and businesses. And public awareness is not what it should be. McAfee is not alone when it comes to competitive vendor...

 UPDATE: McAfee on Friday, June 6, said it  made a mistake . Koobface has actually been quiet of the past three months. Koobface, the fast-spreading Internet worm cybergangs use to hijack Facebook accounts on a massive scale, is on the move once again. McAfee this morning released a  threat report showing samples of Koobface spiking in the Internet wild all through the first three months of 2013. "The resurrection of Koobface reminds us that social networks continue to present a substantial opportunity for intercepting personal information," says Vincent Weafer, senior vice president, McAfee Labs. Meanwhile, the bad guys also are turning up the spam spigot, as activity of the equally infamous spam-spreading botnet Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, also surged in the first quarter. After remaining more or less stable in 2012, spam levels reached the highest volume McAfee has seen in the past two years. The rising trends are very probably related. The logon...

SAN FRANCISCO —Think Apple's critics struck a raw nerve with the company? "Can't innovate anymore, my ass." That's from Phil Schiller, Apple senior vice president for worldwide marketing, speaking on stage at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Schiller was essentially talking about Apple's new tubular-designed Mac Pro, the kind of powerful computer used by developers who make up much of the WWDC audience. But he might as well have been addressing Apple's most vocal detractors, those who say that Samsung is now the company that Apple used to be, and that Tim Cook isn't Steve Jobs. These are the fickle what-have-you-done-for-me-lately types who wonder whether the company that forever altered the tech landscape with the Mac, iPod and iTunes, iPhone and iPad has somehow lost its mojo. As if pumping out game-changing hardware is some sort of divine obligation. There were no true game-changers introduced at WWDC, though thi...

President Obama's  defense of the government's collection  of phone records and Internet traffic may not appease staunch privacy advocates. Jody R. Westby, adjunct computer science professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, would prefer that Obama call for "a full investigation to ensure that no laws have been stretched or broken." Should the wide exposure of the government's Internet and telephone records data mining projects prompt a similar reaction among the general public, the tech giants that generate and store this data very well might be compelled to adjust their business models, going forward. Americans have always been willing to know that some crimes will take place simply because people are acting undetected, but the rule of law, based on police, courts, and prosecutors to keep the public safe works well, says Westby, who is also CEO at consultancy Global Cyber Risk LLC. "Whatever happened to that line of thinking? It is an odd tw...

Microsoft has orchestrated the bust-up of another top-tier botnet operation. These bad guys – operators of the sprawling Citadel botnet -- make the fictional band of sophisticated thieves from the movie Ocean's 11 look like amateurs. Authorities estimate they've scored more than $500 million from banks in the United States and abroad by accessing online accounts and rerouting funds. The software giant and the FBI, working with law enforcement and tech officials from some 80 countries, knocked out 1,000 of 1,400 of the Citadel botnets. A botnet is a collection of hundreds to thousands of infected PCs that respond to commands routed through a command-and-control server, which is also an infected PC. The bad guys running Citadel commanded as many as 5 million infected PCs, making Citadel one of the biggest botnet operations. Botnets are the engins that drive cybercrime. They fuel spam, denial of service attacks and cyberespionage. And they are used in big operations,...