Techno-News Blog

by the BBC

A new spec-free 3D TV, that tracks the movements of viewers’ faces, has hit UK shops. The 55in Toshiba is the world’s first large-screen, glasses-free 3D TV available in our shops. Start saving now though: it’ll cost almost £7000! Like some digital cameras, it can recognise and follow faces. So when you move, it adjusts its picture to suit. It then directs different images to the left and right eyes. This creates the illusion that the image is 3D.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/17313487

by the BBC

Soldiers’ lives are being put at risk by geotagged photos – marked with a location – on social media sites like Facebook, the US Army has warned. It says Facebook’s new Timeline feature, which creates a map of places geotagged by users, also poses a risk to soldiers and their families Many smartphones automatically geotag photos with GPS co-ordinates. In 2007 four US Army helicopters were destroyed in Iraq after geotagged photos were posted on the internet. By posting photos on Facebook or checking-in on social media sites like Foursquare or Gowalla, soldiers may reveal the exact location of their unit or their family, the US Army said in a statement. The release follows an army warning last year that geotag data in photos could tip off criminals.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17311702

by the BBC

It is hoped the new technology could transform how sign language users communicate Technology aimed at translating sign language into text is being developed by Aberdeen scientists. The portable sign language translator (PSLT) would use the camera on devices such as laptops and phones. An app would then translate the movements into text which can be read by people, who may not understand sign language. Computing scientists at Technabling, a spin-out company of the University of Aberdeen, are behind the technology. Their signs are immediately translated into text which can be read by the person they are conversing with” It is hoped this could transform how sign language users – from the profoundly deaf to those who have lost hearing in later life – communicate.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-17297489

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

I’m not going to win any genius points for making this observation, especially because I stole it from Benedict Evans, but the new iPad’s 2048×1536 screen resolution presents a unique set of problems for image-heavy apps. For those of us who remember the old days, when it was the people doing design for print who bought the extra RAM for their towers in order to handle “giant” images, it’s clear that the base 16GB iPad 3 isn’t going to cut it any longer. Those 250 MB copies of WIRED you’ve grown fond of? A 4x increase in resolution won’t translate directly to a 4x increase in file size, but I can only imagine that the folks at Adobe are furiously trying to figure out how to tamp down the file size of the magazines and ebooks their publishing system produces.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27634/?p1=blogs

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

It turns out that one of the ways you can speed up a microprocessor — shoving more current into it — also works on the human brain. The technique is called Transcranial Direct Stimulation, and while bioethicists are debating whether or not it’s ethical to use it to enhance learning in children, hobbyists have figure out how to try it out at home. Think of it as the new Adderrall — without, apparently, the side effects.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27636/?p1=blogs

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Researchers at Microsoft have made software that can learn the sound of your voice, and then use it to speak a language that you don’t. The system could be used to make language tutoring software more personal, or to make tools for travelers. In a demonstration at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Tuesday, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong showed how his software could read out text in Spanish using the voice of his boss, Rick Rashid, who leads Microsoft’s research efforts. In a second demonstration, Soong used his software to grant Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, the ability to speak Mandarin.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39885/?p1=A2

by CHRISTOPHER MIMS, Technology Review

A lot of this comes down to human factors in programming languages. If they’re not easy to use, they won’t spread. In this way, languages and entire systems (like UNIX) have been likened to computer viruses. This sort of thing is difficult if not impossible to measure. It’s subjective — the sort of problem that design, not science, can solve. The fact that computer “scientists” will be those designers is merely semantic. Code is poetry, after all.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27630/?p1=blogs

by MIKE ORCUTT, Technology Review

The number of devices capable of connecting to the Internet has exploded in the past few years, giving millions of new people access to the Internet. But does this mean the end of the “digital divide”—the gulf between wealthy people with easy access to information and communications technologies, and poor people without such access? Not exactly, according to new research by Martin Hilbert, a professor of communications at the University of Southern California. Although the disparity between the rich and poor in devices per person shrank during the past decade, the world’s total installed capacity to send and receive data over the Internet remains concentrated in wealthier nations, his work shows.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27626/?p1=blogs

by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

For those of us who still think tablets are a less enjoyable reading experience than plain old glossy magazine paper, the good news is that the elves at Qualcomm have been busy turning their Mirasol color e-ink display into something more than perennial vaporware. Displays like this one are different from the backlit LCD panels on tablets in that they are reflective and require an external light source to be viewable. Ultimately, it’s this sort of display that will give us true replacements for printed material.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27622/?p1=blogs

by WILL KNIGHT, Technology Review

Microsoft released a sneak peak of Windows 8, the next major rethink of its operating system, which is expected to go on sale later this year. As tablets and smart phones have started to replace desktops and laptops, and as increasingly sophisticated Web services have grown in importance, Microsoft has fallen behind the likes of Apple, Google, and Facebook in providing the software that most people use every day. Windows 8 represents an attempt to catch up and remain relevant. Although unfinished (and subject to significant changes before its official release), Windows 8 looks set to be the most radical reinvention of Microsoft’s operating system since Windows 95. It blurs the line between desktop and mobile computing, and contains some clever tricks that could help Microsoft push into mobile, social networking, and consumer cloud services.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39844/?p1=A5

by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

The processors in smart phones and tablets leak radio signals that betray the encryption keys used to protect sensitive data. At the RSA computer security conference last week, Gary Kenworthy of Cryptography Research held up an iPod Touch on stage and looked over to a TV antenna three meters away. The signal picked up by the antenna, routed through an amplifier and computer software, revealed the secret key being used by an app running on the device to encrypt data. An attacker with access to this key could use it to perfectly impersonate the device he stole it from—to access e-mail on a company server, for example. The antenna was detecting radio signals “leaking” from the transistors on the chip inside the phone performing the encryption calculations.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/39855/?p1=A2

by Kevin Bullis, Technology Review

Republicans and Democrats in Congress don’t agree on much, especially when it comes to the U.S. Department of Energy, but they agree that the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), is a good thing. Last year, when they were cutting every program in sight, they actually voted to increase the agency’s funding by 50 percent. The bipartisan support was clear last week at the agency’s third Innovation Summit, attended by a mix of liberal and conservative politicians and business leaders. ARPA-E has been popular in large part because it’s inexpensive—for about the same amount the government gave to failed solar-panel maker Solyndra in the form of a loan guarantee, ARPA-E has funded 180 projects.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/39843/?p1=A3

by Global Edmondton

In the world of apes, swings and trees are standard. Now, orangutans at the Toronto Zoo might be adding an iPad to their toy chest. Apps for Apes, the brainchild of David Zimmerman and Orangutan Outreach, aims to give the primates a creative outlet to create art or music. Proponents hope the program will provide stimulation during long northern winters, when orangutans are often kept locked indoors. “We want to make sure that the orangutans get more enrichment,” said Zimmerman. “This is strictly for those orangutans born in captivity . . . that can benefit mentally from this sort of activity.”

http://www.globaltvedmonton.com/high-tech+animals/6442590791/story.html

by Sky News

A mini computer that aims to get a new generation of children programming and writing software has been launched in the UK – with intial interest crashing the manufacturer’s website. Called the Raspberry Pi and costing just £22, the machine has been created by a research team of volunteers in the UK. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK charity that claims it wants to encourage school children to learn programming skills and write software. It has been six years in the making; the number of things that had to go right for this to happen is enormous. I couldn’t be more pleased. The Raspberry team have said the aim was to make “a BBC Micro for the 21st century”.

http://news.sky.com/home/technology/article/16179337

BY FRAN SPIELMAN, Sun-Times

Five technology giants will join forces with Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges to open six-year public high schools that allow students to graduate with an associate’s degree and the expertise they need to qualify for high-tech jobs. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions and Verizon will develop curricula, mentor students, provide summer internships and guarantee every student who completes the program a “first-in-line” job interview after graduation. “We want to hire them all. All they need to do is be able to successfully complete a curriculum through Grade 9 to 14 that’s gonna be their ticket to a good-paying job and to the middle class,” said Stanley Litow, IBM’s vice-president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/10936381-418/new-six-year-tech-high-schools-to-open-this-fall-offer-associate-degrees.html

by KFC,  Technology Review

Unlike many Web pages, the traffic to some sites doesn’t fall over time. A new model of Web traffic shows why. Back in 2005, a group of computer scientists carried out a now-famous study of the way visits to a website fall over time. These guys looked at the traffic to a Hungarian news site and found that it decayed as a power law. This, they said, has a straightforward explanation: the amount of traffic is simply a reflection of people’s browsing habits. They speculated that during each visit, surfers access all the new articles that appeared since their last visit. And since the time between visits follows a power law, the number of people who have not yet seen a story also follows a power law. This explains the observed pattern of traffic.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27591/

by Scott Stein, Cnet news.com

Samsung executive Hankii Yoon said at Mobile World Congress, “The best thing to survive in the market is to kill your products.” He was referring to new Samsung Android tablets cannibalizing older ones, but let’s take that comment even further. The first tablet demonstrating Windows 8 at Mobile World Congress was a Samsung one. Sure, Samsung is playing the field, and they’ve made Windows tablets before. However, it only goes to show that if you’re not the one vertically integrating software and hardware, it’s a free-for-all as far as where tablet hardware might evolve next. The iPad isn’t going anywhere: it has huge popularity, a massive app catalog, and dominating market share going for it. However, that spot at #2 seems wide open.

http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-57388847-12/windows-8-could-leapfrog-android-to-be-the-true-ipad-competitor/?tag=mncol;topStories

By Ignacio Mas, Technology Review

Technology has yet to fundamentally change how we think about money. As the mobile Internet begins to take financial control out of the hands of bank tellers and regulators, innovators are connecting us to our money in new ways. Mobile payments, meanwhile, still seem to many an unnecessary complication. But the appeal of being in constant contact with your money—and information about your money—will prove irresistible. Back in the days when electronic devices were expensive, someone had the clever idea of giving dumb plastic cards to all of us and the more expensive card readers only to merchants. Now that we have a virtual card and card reader right in our pocket in the form of a smart phone, who will be content to carry a credit card we cannot ourselves read?

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/39820/

by Dave Lee, BBC

Companies are now able to search and analyse up to two years of Twitter updates for market research purposes. Firms can search tweets back to January 2010 in order to plan marketing campaigns, target influential users or even try to predict certain events. Until today, only the previous 30 days of tweets were available for companies to search. Regular users can access posts from the past seven days. UK-based Datasift is the first company to offer the archive. Its existing customers will be able to use access “historical” tweets from today, the company said. “No-one’s ever done this before,” Tim Barker, Datasift’s marketing manager, told the BBC.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17178022

by Tom Simonite, Technology Review

The annual RSA computer security conference, in San Francisco this week, offers one of the world’s greatest concentrations of well-founded paranoia. Experts from the highest levels of government mingle with enterprising hackers working for no one but themselves. And, as far as I can tell, all of them share the opinion that things are worse than most of us realize and set to get worse. On the conference’s first full day, some experts told attendees about which specific bogeymen we need to be wary of. Here are seven taken from talks at the event today, starting with some surprising ones from influential security expert Bruce Schneier:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27614/?p1=blogs

By Tom Simonite

A chilling demonstration to a small, packed room at the RSA security conference today showed how clicking a single bad Web link while using a phone running Google’s Android operating system could give an attacker full remote control of your phone. Once George Kurtz and colleagues from security startup CrowdStrike were done, they could record phone calls, intercept text messages, and track the hacked phone’s location at all times. “What is ubiquitous, has a camera, a microphone, knows where you are at all times, is always on, and stores your sensitive information?” asked Kurtz. “The smart phone is the ultimate spying tool.” Smart phones have been hacked before, but Kurtz said this was the first public demonstration of an end-to-end system able to wrest control of one remotely with just a single click on a Web link.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39824/?p1=A2