Companies are convening on the Automate 2013 conference in Chicago to discuss robotics, automation, and what it all means for the future of industry. Some reports of late have expressed concern that the robot-driven future could have worrying implications for the workers whose jobs could be...
"Automation has absolutely created jobs." Matt Tyler, Vickers Engineering
British security company Selectamark has launched a new system to help police and military tie suspects to the scene of a crime. The SelectaDNA High Velocity System pistols and rifles fire non-lethal pellets that mark targets with DNA traces so...
A group of scientists at the University of Southern California are trying to figure out exactly how beatboxers make that music with their mouths, using real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) to track the physics behind the complex vocal performances.
The study, by Michael Proctor, Shirkanth Narayanan, and Krishna Nayak, is particularly focused on how different tones and rhythms can...
Authorities in the United Kingdom have fined Sony £250,000 ($396,000) for a widespread 2011 PlayStation Network data breach — a breach that the government says "could have been prevented." Describing the incident as a "serious breach of the Data Protection Act," the country's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) criticized Sony's European branch for not doing more to strengthen the security of its gaming network.
The April 2011 hack shut down Sony's PSN for several weeks, after exposing the personal data of about 100 million accounts. Company officials publicly apologized for the breach in May of that year, offering free games to all PSN users, but the ICO on Thursday said Sony's infrastructure should have been strong enough to defend against the hack in the first place.
"This is a business that should have known better." David Smith, ICO deputy commissioner
"I've gone through multiple sharing apps, such as GrabBox, puush, or Slingshot." Zenonas Kyprianou
Steve Jobs threatened patent litigation if Palm wouldn’t agree to stop hiring Apple employees, says former Palm CEO Edward Colligan in a statement dated August 7th, 2012. The allegation is backed up by a trove of recently-released evidence that shows just how deeply Silicon Valley's no-hire agreements pervaded in the mid-2000s. Apple, Google, Intel, and others are the focus of a civil lawsuit...
The New York Police Department this week unveiled new radiation scanners capable of identifying concealed weapons from a distance. As the New York Daily News reports, the scanners are small enough to be installed in police vans or on notoriously violent street corners, thereby allowing police to identify carriers of illegal guns without going through the traditional pat-down procedure.
Developed in conjunction with the London Metropolitan Police, the devices are designed to pick up on the terahertz radiation naturally emitted by both humans and inanimate objects. Anything blocking that...
Following the rather successful iOS launch of Temple Run 2 — over 20 million downloads in the first four days — the shrine-escaping sequel is now available for Android. As with the iOS version, it's a free download, and you can pick it up now at the Google Play Store.
Imangi's Keith Shepherd had expressed a little reservation that the game would make it to the Play Store this week, but it appears to have arrived on Android without issue. For more on the creation of Temple Run 2, read Polygon's full interview with Shepherd.
jOBS, the biopic of late Apple founder Steve Jobs, will be arriving in theaters on April 19th, says The Hollywood Reporter. If you don’t want to wait four months to see how Ashton Kutcher fares with the lead role, or whether Josh Gad can pull off a convincing Woz, you can always check it out at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday. Can’t make it to Utah, you say? Lucky for you, we can. Keep an eye out for our full review this weekend.
Four full months to grow out your moustache
North Korea has announced plans for its third nuclear weapon test. In comments carried by the state-run KCNA and reported by Reuters, the country's National Defence Commission said "We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the...
Logitech has posted its financial results for Q3 of its 2013 fiscal year, and they're not too encouraging: the company made an operating loss of $180 million off sales of $615 million. Retail sales were down 14 percent year on year, and CEO Bracken Darrell has announced plans to take "decisive...
Research into mammalian strains of avian influenza, also commonly known as H5N1, ceased a year ago over fears that creating more transmittable forms of the virus could spark an outbreak or risk bioterrorist attacks. Today, though, scientists have...
Google is making some big changes to Image Search that will hopefully make it easier and faster to find what you’re looking for. The company is announcing a redesign (pictured above) that lets you navigate through search results with the keyboard, putting the...
The iPhone app for the long-awaited Pebble smartwatch is now available for download. Pebble's creators finally started shipping the first units to Kickstarter backers today, but warned that an App Store review delay meant that iPhone users may have faced a further wait to unlock much of their...
I met Aaron Swartz in Cambridge shortly after he’d been indicted for downloading lots of JSTOR articles on MIT’s network in 2011. My Wired colleague Ryan Singel had been writing about his story, and I’d talked a lot with my friends in academia and publishing about the problems of putting scholarship behind a paywall, but that was really the level at which I was approaching it. I was there to have brunch with...
Nine years ago, Shane Carruth won Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize for Primer, a complex science fiction tale about the ramifications of time travel. Famously filmed on a $7,000 budget, Primer went on to gain a cult following for its incredibly...
Sheffer, Sheffer, bo-beffer!
Banana-fana, fo-feffer!
Fee-fi-mo-meffer!
Sam Sheffer!
In one of its periodic transparency reports, Google revealed that requests for user information from governments worldwide have grown steadily in...
Facebook often flaunts the vast stores of data it has on its users — last week's announcement of Graph Search is only the latest example — but some of the information posted onto the site is...
Netflix has announced a total of 27.15 million US streaming subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2012, with revenue of $945 million and a surprise profit of $8 million, rather than the loss that...
As part of Apple's Q1 2013 earnings call, Tim Cook revealed that Apple has sold more than 500 million iOS devices, up from the 400 million that we last heard. During the last quarter, the company...
Icelandic minimalist band Sigur Rós may be known for shrouding itself in mystery, but the band will communicate directly with its fans tomorrow,...
The tech team behind the 2012 Obama campaign has probably received more attention than any political programmers in history. A so-called "dream team of engineers from Facebook, Google and Twitter [who] built the software that drove Barack Obama’s reelection" were extolled in the press for bringing Silicon Valley strategies like Agile development to the normally hidebound process of a...
Question and answer site Quora just announced a new feature that represents a significant shift for the startup: blogs. In addition to posing and responding to questions, users can now start their own blogs on Quora. The site is a powerful distribution system for bloggers, Quora's Marc Bodnick...
