Tag: Technology
This one couldn’t be more terrifying: at a security conference in Amsterdam, hacker and researcher Hugo Teso demonstrated how to hijack a plane’s controls from the ground using his Android smartphone. The details are almost a moot point, but just in case you’re interested, Teso exploited a protocol called the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Report System (ACARS), […]
So you keep tagging the same wall, and, try as you might, your work keeps getting buffed. What do you do? If you happen to be writing on wood, and you happen to have a lot of time on your hands, you might consider the FireWriter by the artist and designer Lucien Langton. Rigged together […]
Even with two-step verification (which you should probably sign up for now), the idea of using simple text for access to your most precious online information–like email and bank accounts–is almost astoundingly simple and dated. With that in mind, a team of researchers from UC Berkley came up with a surprisingly inexpensive alternative: using brain […]
Because why not squeeze a little good old-fashioned shredding into even the day’s most mundane activities, David Neevel developed a way to use his guitar to write out an email. Using a Roland snyth guitar pickup, Neevel sends MIDI data into an optoisolator circuit, an Arduino, a relay board, and finally into the “brains” of […]
Times Haiku, an algorithm designed by the New York Times’s senior software architect, scans the day’s paper for any fragments of text that could be broken into a three-line, seventeen-syllable poem, then posts it to Tumblr. Brilliant! Some highlights: To many, the Mets appear destined for a fifth straight losing season. His wife was his world […]
Not even six-second clips are safe from Prince’s well–documented copyright fury, it seems, as the artist’s label has served Vine and its parent company, Twitter, with several Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaints over videos posted to the service. In all likelihood, this was the result of innocent people innocently Vining something that happened to involve […]
Our ability to read into the emotions of others through body language — sometimes more accurately than through their words — is one of those psychological phenomenons that makes humans awesome. But could a computer do it better than a flesh-and-blood psychiatrist? The digital program SimSensei tries: It monitors users’ subtle body language and facial […]
They’re one of the most beguiling architectural features of the modern landscape: cell phone towers, poorly disguised as trees, dotting the forests, highways, and suburbs. Photographer Dillon Marsh noticed the towers’ garish beauty and began documenting them in 2009. Coming from South Africa, the birthplace of foliage-clad network towers, he’s had a lot of time […]
For yet another artistic example of why Vine is the most exciting social media platform going, take a look at the music video for Masters in France’s “Flexin,” which automatically populates itself with clips based tagged with words from the song’s lyrics. If a verse includes the word “high,” for example, and you once Vined […]
Imagine getting all the visceral thrill of Chatroulette without the anxiety brought on by actually having to hold a conversation with another human. It looks a little like Rando, an iOS app that lets you take photos that are shared with exactly one other randomuser. In return, of course, you’ll occasionally receive photos from your anonymous friends around […]
