Much like marathon runners, everything goes fine for a drone until it hits a wall. Only, unlike marathoners, in the case of drones the wall is usually a literal wall. A new crowdfunding project available on Kickstarter called the eBumper4 wants to change that, by retrofitting drones with four sonar sensors, so they can detect walls before they crash into them.
Augmented reality glasses are hotter than Drake right now. Last fall, Microsoft's Hololens glasses dazzled us with promises of 'holograms' beamed throughout our workplaces. NASA announced this week that they plan to guide astronauts with projection glasses. And CastAR wants the whole family to play games in augmented living rooms.
Unveiled last month, Hello Barbie is a clever toy with a little bit of an oversharing problem. With a microphone, Hello Barbie can listen to what children tell it. With a computer and a Wi-Fi connection, Hello Barbie can take those words, encrypt them, and then send them over the internet to a cloud server where voice recognition software listens to the recording and then picks a reply for Hello Barbie to send back. Only there's a minor hitch: it might be illegal to record children and then store that information elsewhere.
In the past year, Apple, Sony, and Home Depot were targeted in notorious criminal hacks. But not all hackers are bad. Pablos Holman, an inventor and hacker at patent firm Intellectual Ventures' (IV) Laboratory, breaks electronics every day—and he thinks more people should be doing the same.
Neil Blomkamp's new film CHAPPiE, which hits US theaters this weekend, follows the unlikely transformation of a defective robot into a one-of-a-kind conscious machine. The movie inserts the audience into a Johannesburg, South Africa, that's protected by a fully robotic police force. The brilliant designer of these bots, Deon Wilson (played by Dev Patel), isn't quite satisfied with soulless automatons--so he secretly works after-hours to instill his creations with consciousness.
The latest security vulnerability to make the rounds, aptly dubbed FREAK, shines a spotlight on why it's maybe not such a great idea to weaken the technology behind the security that we all rely on. Turns out that we're still paying for the mistakes of the 1990s--and I don't mean acid-washed jeans.
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