Category Archives: Blog

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MIT researchers create cheap "sixth-sense" ubiquitous computing device

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800px-Augmented_reality_-_heads_up_display_concept The era of ubiquitous computing progresses apace (Via PhysOrg):

US university researchers have created a portable “sixth sense” device powered by commercial products that can seamlessly channel Internet information into daily routines.

The device created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures.

The gadget can even take photographs if a user frames a scene with his or her hands, or project a watch face with the proper time on a wrist if the user makes a circle there with a finger.

The MIT wizards cobbled a Web camera, a battery-powered projector and a mobile telephone into a gizmo that can be worn like jewelry. Signals from the camera and projector are relayed to smart phones with Internet connections.

According to the researchers, the gadget (unveiled by MIT researcher Pattie Maes at the Technology, Entertainment, Design [TED] conference currently underway in Long Beach, California) uses about $300 U.S. worth of store-bought components, and can do things like recognize items on store shelves, retrieve and project information about products, look at an airplane ticket and let the user know whether the flight is on time, or recognize books in a book store, project reviews or author information from the Internet onto blank pages, and recognize articles in newspapers and retrieve the latest related stories or video from the Internet. You can interact with the data using any surface–even your hand if nothing else is available. “Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant,” Maes said.

Forgot about trekking to the Wizard. Dorothy should have got the Strawman one of these.

(Image: Leonard Low, Concept for augmented reality mobile phone, via Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]computers,augmented reality,technology,gadgets[/tags]

Blog

Windshield handbills as computer virus vector

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windscreen flyerThey may be vampiric bastards, but you’ve got to give malware builders their due – they’re cunning and inventive. They’ve found a new way to get people to sign in to a website that will infect their computer with a virus: stick a handbill on their car with a URL on it.

Several days ago, yellow fliers were placed on the cards in Grand Forks, ND. They stated:

PARKING VIOLATION This vehicle is in violation of standard parking regulations. To view pictures with information about your parking preferences, go to [website-redacted]

Now that’s some crafty social engineering right there; find an approach that people have no historical reason to mistrust, and exploit a common fear. Bam – brand new bot-net. I suppose it’s too much to hope that this indicates normal email spam is becoming less effective…

Now, think of all the vectors for this sort of attack that become available once we’re all wandering through a world of ubicomp around draped in Personal Area Networks. [story via SlashDot; image by dewet]

Blog

RFID wardrivers can ping your passport

Just in case you’ve not clocked this already, it’s time to break out the tinfoil: using equipment sourced from eBay, a bunch of hacker types have built a proof-of-concept system that can be used to scan the unique RFID number from the biometric passports of pedestrians… as they drive past them.

Come on kids, repeat after me: everything can – and will – be hacked. [story via grinding.be, among others]

Blog

The stone canal

oil_rigJo Walton has a review of Ken MacLeod‘s The Sky Road over at Tor, looking at it as a standalone novel rather than the culmination of the Fall Revolution series:

The thing I never really appreciated, reading it as the culmination of the series, is the way in which Clovis’s story is shaped like fantasy. The woman comes to him through the fair, she is beautiful and perilous, she is something more than she seems, and they fall in love and she takes him into a world of enchantment.

I re-read this book for the third time recently and definitely agree with Jo’s conclusion that it works as a standalone novel, as well as an excellent choice as a introductory science fiction book.

[via Ken MacLeod][image from ccgd on flickr]

Blog

Digital books are already here

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Amazon Kindle ebook reader screen-saverThe last few years or so has seen plenty of talk in publishing circles to the effect that the era of the digital book is imminent, but no one seems willing to accept that it’s already here.

The folk at Pan Macmillan’s Digitalist blog, however, have decided that the digital fiction future has already arrived, and that it’s time for publishers to stop sitting on their thumbs over electronic content delivery:

Beyond even games we already have the outlines of digital fiction. Projects like Inanimate Alice, the story games and ARGs, narrativised blogs and twittered fiction. All the tools and standards are now roughly in place. A wave of innovation has most likely come to a close as the “social media boom” hits the skids. We have been innovation addicts, slavishly jumping on each new trend, application and concept, moving without thinking. The dust is now settling and the landscape for digital fiction and digital books is clear.

To recap, digital books/fiction looks like this:

  • ebooks and ebook derivatives
  • “writerly” computer games
  • stories told used existing forms of social media (blogs etc)

They close with a right hook to the jaw:

Let’s not wait for the future anymore; it arrived in about 2006.

Zing! Perhaps the current tough times will be the eye of the needle that the camel of publishing has to slim down and wise up to pass through… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. [image by tvol]