Anthony Lee had just begun trying to hack his brain when his girlfriend caught him at it. He was sitting in the living room of his Alabama home with electrodes attached to his head, fiddling with the device he’d built to send a current through his gray matter, when she walked in. “It was that awkward moment when your family walks in on you while you’re doing science,” he says with a laugh.
With only a couple more months to go until Apple's rumored launch of the iPhone 6, Sonny Dickson has come out with rumored specifications of the device on his twitter account. Dickson, who last year leaked the iPad Air, Mini, and iPhone 5C well ahead of its proper release date, revealed that these specifications could be "the real thing" and ended each post with the hashtag "#JustSaying".
We've already got machines that give ophthalmologists a close-up view of the inside and outside of the human eye. The problem is they're big and heavy, expensive, and rarely accessible to those in third world nations. So researchers at Stanford University have created a simple iPhone add-on that lets almost anyone, anywhere, perform eye exams.
As enthusiasts, we have to like that Sony shies away from proprietary storage technologies in its gaming consoles. Instead, the company sticks with standard hard drives, making upgrades quick and easy. Back in the day, its PS2 accommodated 3.5-inch PATA devices, which sound downright ancient now. The PS3 was compatible with 2.5-inch SATA-based storage. Today, the PlayStation 4 includes an easy-to-replace 2.5" disk as well, keeping the tradition going.
In my Mac Pro review I lamented the state of 4K display support under OS X 10.9.0. In my conclusion I wrote: "4K display compatibility under OS X is still a bit like the wild west at this point". Compatibility was pretty much only guaranteed with the ASUS/Sharp 4K displays if you cared about having a refresh rate higher than 30Hz. Even if you had the right monitor, the only really usable resolution was 3840 x 2160 - which ends up making text and UI elements a bit too small for some users.
You already know that laptops, desktop computers, tablets and mobile phones are all at risk of being hacked. But did you know that intruders might use the built-in camera to take surreptitious pictures and videos of you and your surroundings or hijack your microphone to eavesdrop on conversations?
The latest story from the Edward Snowden leaks yesterday drives home that the NSA and its spy partners possess specialized tools for doing exactly that. According to The Intercept, the NSA uses a plug-in called GUMFISH to take over cameras on infected machines and snap photos.
Some side effects can come with activity monitoring with a Fitbit Force health tracker, but they're not sore muscles or an accelerated heart rate -- rather, they involve skin irritation around the wrist.
More than 10,000 people have reported skin irritation -- including redness, rashes, itchy and dry patches, and blistering -- from their Fitbit Force, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Because of these issues, the CPSC posted Fitbit's official recall notice on its site on Wednesday. Now, all Force owners can get a full refund for their device.
Security researchers have developed a password storage system that uses inexpensive hardware to prevent the cracking of passwords—even the most common and weak ones such as "123456," "password," and "letmein."
A variety of projects unveiled in the past year aim to give mobile apps the ability to instantly detect a person's emotional state.
A startup called Affectiva, which emerged out of MIT's Media Lab, last month launched a software developer kit (SDK) for its emotion-tracking technology. The company claims that it's possible to assess the effect that advertising and branding have on a person if you analyze that person's facial expressions through the camera of a mobile device.
Texas Instruments is tapping into the growing trend among enthusiasts who want to make their own wearable devices and small electronics, announcing the Tiva C Series Connected LaunchPad mini-computer.
The $19.99 mini-computer has a microcontroller to which sensors, displays, connectivity and memory components can be independently attached via expansion cards. The expansion cards, called "Booster Packs" by TI, can help in prototyping devices and testing applications.
