Hardware

Microsoft's been awfully busy at this year's SIGGRAPH conference: <embers of the company's research division have already illustrated how they can interpret speech based on the vibrations of a potato chip bag and turn shaky camera footage into an experience that feels like flying.

Look at the list of projects Microsofties have been working on long enough, though, and something of a theme appears: These folks are really into capturing motion, depth and object deformation with the help of some slightly specialized hardware.

Microsoft's Nokia division has revealed its latest mobile phone – but rather than a high-end flagship number designed to take on Apple, it's taking aim squarely at the bottom of the market.

It's no less than a plastic mini-mobe that will sell for no more than €19 ($25) before taxes and subsidies.

Billed in the company's marketing materials as "an ultra-affordable mobile phone with music and video player," the Nokia 130 targets the kind of pre-iPod media consumers that have all but vanished from developed markets with the advent of smartphones.

If you thought the Samsung Galaxy Round was peculiar, get ready for another whole level of quirk. According to a Korean supplier of Samsung parts, the company has begun testing three-sided displays for potential application on mobile devices.

The technology has been rumored for quite some time, but it finally seems to have gained some steam, with sources claiming that such a device could go into production by the end of this year.

Specialized servers used by many ISPs to manage routers and other gateway devices provisioned to their customers are accessible from the Internet and can easily be taken over by attackers, researchers warn.

By gaining access to such servers, hackers or intelligence agencies could potentially compromise millions of routers and implicitly the home networks they serve, said Shahar Tal, a security researcher at Check Point Software Technologies. Tal gave a presentation Saturday at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas.

As we inch towards the end of summer in the United States, we also get a bit closer to the release of possibly one of the most anticipated Android Wear devices of the year, the Motorola Moto 360.  Although it was announced in March and teased at Google I/O, we have heard very little information about the Moto 360 since that time. Interestingly, it looks like tech blogger, Luca Viscardi aka Mister Gadget, has gotten his hands on the device and has given his first impressions.

During his keynote and a press conference that followed here at the Black Hat information security conference, In-Q-Tel Chief Information Security Officer Dan Geer expressed concern about the growing threat of botnets powered by home and small office routers.

The Radeon brand has been a staple of the PC world for years, best known as the primary competition to Nvidia's GeForce line of graphics cards. But parent company AMD is apparently not satisfied with keeping the logo exclusively on graphics boards, as its dabbling in the RAM market with Radeon-branded sticks suggests. Now you can apparently add solid-state drives to the list of components that AMD wants to sell with the Radeon badge on them.

A fact check on a PC workstation concept from Hack A Day suggests that consumers might want to be wary about investing in the concept device. Silent Power's pitch is for a compact tower that, among other unusual features, stays cool through the use of "copper foam," which Hack A Day calls "quite literally, one of the worst possible heat sinks imaginable."

USB devices such as keyboards, thumb-drives and mice can be used to hack into personal computers in a potential new class of attacks that evade all known security protections, a top computer researcher has revealed.

Karsten Nohl, chief scientist with Berlin's SR Labs, noted that hackers could load malicious software onto tiny, low-cost computer chips that control functions of USB devices but which have no built-in shields against tampering with their code.

There are some things in this world you're better off not trying, and dismantling a microwave to make a stick-mounted weapon is probably one of them. Still, as with all things, someone somewhere will eventually try it, as was the case with the person(s) behind Kreosan.

Kreosan is the YouTube handle of a young Russian man who, featured in the video below, tore into a microwave's innards and transplanted them onto the end of a stick (in addition to what appears to be a can of soup, which seems to be used as an antenna).