Blind Man Test Drives Google's Autonomous Car. Behold! Or rather, don't: Bendy see-through DRAM. High performance access to file storage Boffins at Rice uni in the States have devised bendy transparent memory chips using pure silicon crystals. James Tour, a polymath chemist at the university working at the Tour Lab - he is also a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science, as well as Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry, revealed the see-through memory chip an an American Chemical Society meeting in San Diego.
Transparent flexible RAM (Rice University) Tour said: “Generally, you can’t see a bit of memory, because it’s too small [and] silicon itself is not transparent. A 2010 discovery showed that "pushing a strong charge through standard silicon oxide, an insulator widely used in electronics, forms channels of pure silicon crystals less than 5 nanometers wide.
We might end up wearing our memory devices. How bots are taking over the world | Dan O'Hara and Luke Robert Mason. 'We’ve started to see numbers of humans pretending to be bots, a strange development that signals a shift in the power and identity politics of the internet.' Photograph: Blutgruppe/zefa/Corbis As part of the Esc and Ctrl series, Jon Ronson recently published two videos on Comment is free in which he confronts a spambot version of himself and accuses it of stealing his identity. We're two of the people in the second episode. Although we didn't create Ronson's bot, we provide research and consultancy for the company that did. Like Ronson, we're interested in bots, algorithms and issues of identity on the net. The bigger story that Ronson misses, but that we have been researching and to which we tried to alert him, is that it's not just Ronson who has bots manipulating his life.
It's all of us. 'Although we didn't create Ronson's bot, we provide research and consultancy for the company that did' Link to video: Jon Ronson v 'Jon Ronson' spambot ... part two Bots create 24% of tweets. How will the new law on cookies affect internet browsing? | Technology. We are being watched. The websites we visit, and the advertisers who promote products on those sites, are tracking our online activity, building a profile of where we go and in some cases what we do when we get there.
The computer on which this article is being written has no fewer than 2,901 tracking files (known as cookies) monitoring its online activity, from sites including Google (121 cookies), Amazon (14), the UK government (46) and dozens upon dozens of advertising networks. These track different things: some monitor which sites are visited, some track which adverts are clicked, others store and report back on preferences and favourites on different sites. The Guardian site is no exception. Unless your browser's security settings are particularly high – and most users' aren't – the Guardian will have placed several cookies on your computer as you arrived at this article, and its advertisers will have placed a few of their own.
This may be less sinister than it might first seem. Google Project Glass: will we really wear digital goggles? | Technology. The first surprising thing about Google Glasses is that anybody thinks this is a new idea (just have a look at this history of mobile augmented reality). Steve Mann, a Canadian known as the father of wearable computing, has been developing systems since the 1980s with obvious industrial, medical and military applications.
One example is the Battlefield Augmented Reality System, where having information overlayed on your view of the world could be a matter of life and death. The second surprising thing is that we aren't all wearing computerised glasses already. In a 2001 Guardian article titled "From man to borg – is this the future? " Early users of wearable computers with head-mounted displays considered it a triumph if people didn't cross the street to avoid them. Today, however, most of us carry a mobile internet computer terminal that packs all of these capabilities into one light, pocketable device. But Google is just one of hundreds of companies working on similar ideas. Half a million Mac computers 'infected with malware'
5 April 2012Last updated at 08:54 ET Dr Web says most infected computers are in the US More than half a million Apple computers have been infected with the Flashback Trojan, according to a Russian anti-virus firm. Its report claims that about 600,000 Macs have installed the malware - potentially allowing them to be hijacked and used as a "botnet". The firm, Dr Web, says that more than half that number are based in the US.
Apple has released a security update, but users who have not installed the patch remain exposed. Flashback was first detected last September when anti-virus researchers flagged up software masquerading itself as a Flash Player update. Later versions of the malware exploited weaknesses in the Java programming language to allow the code to be installed from bogus sites without the user's permission. Remote control Dr Web said that once the Trojan was installed it sent a message to the intruder's control server with a unique ID to identify the infected machine. Update wait. Esc and Ctrl: Jon Ronson v 'Jon Ronson' spambot - video. Jon Ronson v 'Jon Ronson' spambot ... part two - video. Icann's internet suffix application deadline looms.
12 April 2012Last updated at 10:10 ET Canon could start publishing pages ending in its brand name if it secures the suffix Organisations wishing to buy web addresses ending in their brand names have until the end of Thursday to submit applications. For example, drinks giant Pepsi can apply for .pepsi, .gatorade or .tropicana as an alternative to existing suffixes such as .org or .com. Parties are able to request up to 50 web address endings. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers plans to publish application details on 30 April. Companies had to sign up to its process by March to qualify for the upcoming deadline. 'Smooth experience' Canon and Google are among the companies to have said that they paid the $185,000 (£116,355) fees required to take part in the process.
Nominet, the organisation which manages .uk domains, confirmed it was applying for .wales and .cymru. Successful applicants face $25,000 in costs per year to maintain the generic top-level domains. Auctions Backlash. Football bots: robots play a football match in Iran - in pictures | World news. Future - Technology - Future of computer interaction: Brain control. The computer keyboard and TV remote control may be the ways we interact with our technology today, but new ideas are appearing all the time. In the second of a series of reports for BBC Future and Click, Ian Hardy looks at how your eyes or even your brain can be used to control technology. Hands on with the Apple iPad 3.
Big Security for Big Data First look Last night, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed the company’s latest tablet. It’s the new iPad, folks. And this year it’s just called "the new iPad", not iPad 3 or iPad HD. To some, it means that 2011’s model, the iPad 2, sounds newer than the latest, 2012 one. Ladies and gentlemen, the iPad 3... er... This is the first iPad with a decent camera. Few tablets feature really outstanding camera sensors, not least because – well, have you tried holding a big flat piece of metal and glass up so you can take pictures on it? Smart covers still work, BTW Note that there’s no flash on this camera, so deploying it for stills or video is best suited to brightly lit situations.
But the real benefit of all this comes when you play the images or movies back. The retina display is gorgeous Take one glance at it and you can see Apple's claim is true. Apple promises it has 44 per cent more colour saturation. Even close up, you can't see the joins Big Security for Big Data. If year > 2013 then PC != Personal Computer. High performance access to file storage The abbreviation 'PC' will soon no longer stand for 'Personal Computer', but 'Personal Cloud'. Come 2014, the latter will be where consumers keep their digital content, not the former. So says Gartner, a market watcher, reckons what you might call 'PC 2.0' will be ushered in by legions to tech-savvy punters already used to operating online through social network tech and who will soon expect to access their content as easily and as quickly on the move as they do at home.
"No one device will be the primary hub," said Gartner research VP, Steve Kleynhans. "The personal cloud will take on that role. " Users will use a collection of devices, with the PC remaining one of many options, he added. Case in point: look what OnLive is doing, not only with games but also Windows and Microsoft Office. True, OnLive may fall foul of Microsoft's licensing terms, but it seems more likely that that two will come to an arrangement that allows OnLive to continue.