Lightbeam, a firefox plugin you may want to try... or not... in order to have an idea about what it means for you and your privacy to browse the Web. Nowadays, this is something obvious and well spread that the 'free' Web is now a very old chimera. Web drills you the same way one drills for oil.
Collusion is a similar plugin for the Chrome Web browser.
Gaming accessory maker SteelSeries has partnered with Tobii Technology
to develop a device that will let gamers use their eyes to control game
play.
SteelSeries expects to announce further details about the partnership
and products over the next several months. But the Tobii EyeX
Controller, which will be demonstrated at International CES, will show
how eye-tracking peripherals can look and function.
SteelSeries is sure eye tracking will play a big part in the future of
gaming, because it expands the number of ways players can interact with
games, company CTO Tino Soelberg said in a video announcing the partnership.
The prototype EyeX hardware.
Danish SteelSeries and Swedish Tobii have several ideas about how
players will be able to use their eyes to control games. It makes
accessing menus easier, and makes games with complex controls easier to
learn, they said. Developers can also let gamers aim a flashlight or a
weapon by looking at a target, and then use regular controls to shoot.
Another idea is to let gamers select the player they want to pass the
ball to by looking at them.
Developers who want to be part of the first wave of games with eye tracking can preorder the Tobii EyeX Developer Kit for $95 during the show, according to Tobii.
The kit includes hardware, middleware and a development framework, and will start shipping in March.
MarkerBot opened this store in Boston on November, 22 2013. There is now 3 such stores in USA (New York, Greenwich and Boston). You can of course buy MakerBot 3D printers, filaments, but there also some 3D printed gifts and some workshops seem to be regularly organized as well.
The shop is located in one of the most famous street for shopping in Boston (144 Newbury Street). Beyond the fact that the MakerBot outlet is contiguous to fashion boutiques (being the only computer hardware shop for miles around), the idea is mainly to democratize the ownership of a 3D printer, trying to morph 3D printer into the fridge of the 21st century.
From ATLAS to Antarctica, photographer Stanley Greenberg has
travelled the world in a high-energy treasure hunt for the shapes of
physics. In a book of photographs to be published next year, Greenberg
will show the results of his five-year photography tour of detectors and
accelerators across the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Germany,
Italy, Argentina, Japan and Antarctica.
The book’s title, “Time Machines,” refers to the experiments’ efforts
to recreate the period just after the big bang. Yet the photos
themselves create something of a time warp effect: the most high-tech
equipment in the world shot on black and white film.
Greenberg, who has already published two photography books on New
York City’s infrastructure and architecture under construction around
the country, was impressed by the structural forms and large spaces that
comprise detectors.
“It’s an extra feature that there’s all this incredible research going on,” he said.
A self-described science nerd, Greenberg became interested in the LHC
when it was under construction in 2005 and contacted a Columbia
University physicist to ask about photographing it. She put him in touch
with some of her colleagues at CERN and from other laboratories, all of
whom were happy to open their doors to Greenberg. Grants from the Sloan
Foundation and the National Science Foundation allowed him to travel
wherever he wanted among the world’s high-energy physics experiments.
“I started to live and breathe physics for a while,” Greenberg said.
“When it quickly becomes an obsession, you know that you’re going to
stick with it.”
His network quickly expanded as each physicist referred him to
friends at other collaborations. Eventually, physicists he’d never even
heard of emailed him, asking when he was coming to photograph their
experiments. Their openness, he said, was a “welcome change” from his
previous projects photographing NYC’s underground where getting access
to the structures was difficult, if not impossible.
The teamwork that exists in high-energy physics collaborations,
Greenberg said, was one of the most interesting things about the
project.
“It’s such a perfect model for so many other things,” he said.
“People from 15 different countries can work on one project and get
along.”
Their hospitality allowed him many unique views for his shots and
experiences such as climbing around inside the LHC’s ATLAS and ALICE
experiments while they were still under construction.
“Even getting to some of these places was amazing,” he said. “At
SNOLAB, first you’re dressed like a miner, then you’re dressed like a
lab technician, then you get dropped a few hundred feet by a rope. It’s
not the kind of thing you forget too quickly.”
Nor was the richness of the assortment of remote locales lost on Greenberg.
“I like to go to places where you’re the only one that’s there,” he
said. “I’ve been to the bottom of a mine, inside a mountain, to the edge
of the world.”
To learn more about “Time Machines” and view Greenberg’s previous work, visit www.stanleygreenberg.net.
To see more photos from "Time Machines," click on the thumbnail images below.
MiniBooNe Horn, Fermilab, Illinois, 2006. Click to see full-size image.
CEBAF Large Acceptance Spectrometer, Jefferson National Laboratory, Virginia, 2008
Instead of hanging up on a suspected
robot telemarketer wanting to talk about health insurance,
Time’s Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer decided to engage her and
question her on her robot status. But the telemarketer, who identified
herself as Samantha West, would have none of these accusations, leading
to a hilarious conversation and several questions as to her true
identity.
When Scherer asked point
blank if she was a real person, or a computer-operated robot voice, she
replied enthusiastically that she was real, with a charming laugh. But
then she failed several other tests. When asked “What vegetable is found
in tomato soup?” she said she did not understand the question. When
asked multiple times what day of the week it was yesterday, she
complained repeatedly of a bad connection.
Over the course of the next hour,
several TIME reporters called her back, working to uncover the mystery
of her bona fides. Her name, she said, was Samantha West, and she was
definitely a robot, given the pitch perfect repetition of her answers.
Her goal was to ask a series of questions about health coverage—”Are you
on Medicare?” etc.—and then transfer the potential customer to a real
person, who could close the sale.
Listen to Samantha West’s response when she’s asked if she’s a robot:
All in all, the person or robot on the other end of the call never would say “I’m not a robot.”
One reporter prompted, ”if you could say the words ‘I’m not a robot,’ it would really mean a lot to me.”
She would instead answer with a comment like “I’m a real person” and laugh.
A Time reporter who answered the
caller’s questions without challenging if she was real or not, was
transferred to someone they officially felt was a human on the line.
Once given the Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., company’s website
(premierhealthagency.com), a reporter called the company directly and
asked about use of robots to make calls.
“We don’t use robot calls, sir,” a person who answered the company’s phone said before hanging up, according to Time.
Time published the phone number at
which Samantha West could be reached and noted that several online
discussions about the caller had already taken place. A complaint was made in Sept. 2012 on the Ripoff Report, labeling the company a “scam.”
Taking the idea that the caller was a robot a step further, The Atlantic tried to figure out how one would acquire such realistic sounding and relatively responsive technology.
The Atlantic investigated various
technologies and options that might have this capability and found that
most are not sophisticated enough to do what Samantha West, if she was a
robot, was doing.
So, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal wrote this hypothesis as to what West could be:
Samantha West is a human
being who understands English but who is responding with a soundboard of
different pre-recorded messages. So a human parses the English being
spoken and plays a message from Samantha West. It is [interactive
voice response], but the semantic intelligence is being provided by a
human. You could call it a cyborg system. Or perhaps an automaton in that 18th-century sense.
If you’re reading this, you must be wondering: WHY?!?!
Well, while Americans accept customer service and technical help from people with non-American accents, they do not take
well to telemarketing calls from non-Americans. The response rates for
outbound marketing via call center are apparently abysmal.
So, Samantha West, could be the rather
strange solution to this set of circumstances and technical
capabilities. Perhaps a salesperson like this doesn’t have to say too
many things to figure out if someone might be interested in buying
insurance.
Shortly after its story last week,
Time wrote in an update that the phone number was no longer functional
and the company pushing the health insurance — Premier Health Plans
Inc. – no longer had a working website.
"A once-shuttered warehouse is now a state-of-the-art lab where new
workers are mastering the 3D printing that has the potential to
revolutionize the way we make almost everything." This is the first line
you'll hear when you start playing the 39-second voice clip from "voice
sculptor" Gilles Azzaro's Next Industrial Revolution, an
artistic reworking of President Barack Obama's 2013 State of the Union
Address. Though you'd probably never realize it without the audio,
they're also the first words you'll "see" if you walk past the glass
case holding a mountainous 3D-printed translation of the clip. Azzaro tells Wired UK
that he began working on his piece the day after the address,
converting Obama's voice print into a 5-foot, 22-pound sculpture whose
3D-printed ridges make it jagged from afar and lushly layered when magnified. Azzaro explains his process and ideas to Wired, but you can watch Next Industrial Revolution being made and played for yourself, and Azzaro's website holds more pictures of this and other "voice sculpture" work.
HELSINKI — Helsinki, Finland, is in one of its coldest, darkest
months of the year, but yet, some of the hottest startups and investors
meet in the remote Nordic region annually at this time to discover the
next big thing in tech.
The Slush startup conference — which was held in Finland’s capital of Helsinki last week and founded five years ago by Finnish-based Rovio
(Angry Birds) CMO Peter Vesterbacka — has become a gathering place for
new businesses across Europe. Set up in the old space where Nokia
did its research and made most of its phones during its heyday in the
1990s and early 2000s, Slush kicked off the event with a keynote from
Finnish Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen, who wore (in true startup style) a
blue hoodie as he discussed the need for innovation.
The story of Finland’s fascinating emergence as a hotbed for startups
— quite possibly the next Silicon Valley of Europe — can’t be told
without looking at Nokia, the once hometown hero of the country. If you were to ask a Finnish child 15 years ago where they wanted to work one day, the answer was almost always “Nokia.”
But as the company imploded in recent years — long before Microsoft acquired Nokia’s mobile division
for $7.2 billion in September — former executives and staffers who left
or were cut loose started to build their own businesses. Soon, hundreds
of new companies popped up across the country.
The startup scene in Finland has a unique flavor that matches the
country’s culture. In a nod to its love of saunas to keep warm during
the cold months, many budding companies hold major meetings and
negotiate deals inside heated vestibules, where it’s encouraged to strip
down to get to the bottom line in a relaxed environment. Some offices
even have “meeting saunas” for this very purpose.
You’re asked to take your shoes off when arriving at most startup
offices too — a small effort to make employees feel at home, as much as
it is to keep winter slush outside the office.
The gaming industry is especially flourishing in Helsinki, where even the graffiti acknowledges the trend.
Companies such as Rovio and more recently Supercell (Clash of Clans, Hay Day) continue to top the iOS mobile app charts and have reminded the Finnish it’s possible to hit it big without Nokia on top.
‘Too Big for Comfort’
When Nokia sold its mobile division to Microsoft this year, it was an
emotional time for the Finnish who grew up with the manufacturer’s
phones in their pockets. But nearly anyone you ask about the deal in
Finland will say the sale was best for the country.
“It got to the point where Nokia made up 4% of the Finnish GDP and it
was too big for comfort,” said Alexander Stubb, the Minister of
European Affairs and Foreign Trade. “At the end of the day, what
happened is good news. I wrote on Twitter at the time that the news was
going to be emotional for people, but we would be better for it.”
Even Nokia itself admits it got “too big” for Finland, with the country essentially putting all eggs in one basket.
“It’s important for any country to have diversity,” said Samuli
Hanninen, Nokia’s VP of product. “The move was a healthy one. Now,
Finland has a strong Microsoft presence too, as well as growth from
younger companies. The goal is to build strong products, and it will be
great to have more resources, too, so we can all work together.”
Hanninen said Nokia’s corporate culture in Finland hasn’t changed too
much following the Microsoft acquisition: “When Steve Elop started with
Nokia a few years ago, that changed the culture for sure — we became
more productive, faster,” he said. “So far, it seems Microsoft has the
same sort of straightforward approach we have adopted, so it’s been a
seamless transition.”
Emerging Startups
Stubb — who, like so many in Finland, proudly uses a Nokia 1020
smartphone and considers himself pretty tech-savvy — attributes the
Finnish success story from going from a top 30 country in the world in
terms of education to the top three to the tech sector and the rise of
Nokia. But he also said the restructuring of Nokia plays a key role in
job and economic development across Finland.
“When Nokia started to collapse, suddenly we had all of these
intelligent engineers with seed money looking to build businesses of
their own. Instead of just one tech giant here, it became a diversified
tech hub.”
The Finnish people, often stereotyped as shy, are branching out. And
while it was once considered to be a last resort to start your own
company — a fear most dreaded by parents who want their children to
succeed — it’s becoming “cool” in the country.
“The scene has been a slow build but recently exploded with such a force we have never seen before. After one company reaches success, others say, ‘Hey, why can’t I do that?’ These startups are completely fearless too — they celebrate failures as much as they do success,” he said.
Not to mention, Rovio finally reached success with Angry Birds after 52 failed games.
Public Funding
Public sector group Tekes is behind a lot of the startup success in
Finland, helping hundreds of companies get their feet off the ground
with funding resources. In the 1990s, it financed 26% of Nokia's
projects and has also given financial assistance to Rovio and Supercell.
“It’s difficult to copy and paste methods from one country to
another, and I am reluctant to give advice because every scene is
specific,” Stubb said. “[The] public sector can be a really good thing
as long as it doesn’t become the norm. Rovio and Supercell have
benefited from the public sector, but success is not always the case.”
In addition to startup growth and Microsoft setting up data centers
in Helsinki, Google has invested 450 million euros in the region, and
Japanese investors have recently plugged into Supercell, too.
Entrepreneurs are also working together. For example, Supercell CEO
Ilkka Paananen is on the board for gaming company GrandCru, whose
upcoming title Supernauts will enable players to build a new habitat on Earth once the ice caps melt. Favorable buzz around Supernauts could translate into Finland having another hit on its hands.
“We are a small country with 5.4 million people, so if someone
succeeds, it is great for all of us,” Stubb said. “These startups view
the world — not Finland — as their target market and competition.”
Startup Sauna
Following Rovio’s Vesterbacka success with Angry Birds in 2009, he
handed off the Slush conference to Startup Sauna, a grassroots
organization started by students at Aalto University in the suburbs of
Helsinki.
When a group of business and tech students took a class trip to MIT
several years ago, they were inspired by the startup community at the
school. With no ecosystem for startups in all of Finland, the students
asked Aalto for the keys to an old warehouse on campus for aspiring
entrepreneurs to meet. Rumor has it they never gave back the key and it
evolved into the startup breeding ground it is today.
In addition to offering a free working space with Wi-Fi and coffee
for anyone interested, Startup Sauna has a wildly successful seed
accelerator program. About 12 companies are selected twice a year for
its bootcamp program to receive personalized coaching from participating
entrepreneurs, including the chairman of Nokia and executives at Rovio,
F-Secure and Supercell. Lawyers and marketing managers are also on hand
to offer tips to participants.
“People always want to know what’s in it for the coaches, but many
just want to help a program they wish existed when they started years
ago,” said Natalie Gaudet, communications director at Startup Sauna.
“Many coaches are investors, too, and they get to see a lot of the
next-generation startups in the region before anyone else.”
The average Startup Sauna entrepreneur is between the ages of 30 and
35, typically those who completed their education and decided to try
something new after several years in the workforce.
Popular app Wild Chords, which teaches people how to play chords in a
game format, is among the successful startups to come out of the
program. The team demoed their product on the main stage at Slush this
year.
Education and AppCampus
Stubb also said teaching basic programming skills to young kids
in the classroom is on the country's radar. The move would follow in
the footsteps of neighboring country Estonia, which rolled out a program
last year at 20 schools to teach elementary students basic coding.
“It would be a great idea to have coding as a subject in school,” Stubb said.
“Kids today are growing up as natives to technology, and the sooner
they get going, the better. It starts with games and familiarizing
themselves with gadgets, and coding is a big part of that."
Finland is embracing coding education at the university level, too, via Aalto University's AppCampus
program outside Helsinki. The mobile app accelerator program is funded
by the school, along with Nokia and Microsoft, and is set up to spur app
development for Windows Phones.
Startups from various countries around the globe, as well as founders
of all ages, are now working with AppCampus to secure funding and
become successful in the Windows Phone app store. They put a business
card on a world map to mark the hometown of every participating startup
in the program.
"Everyone knows that gaming is actually good for neurology and the
brain," Stubb said. "Long gone are the days where parents tell you to
stop. We're really excited about how the gaming community has taken off
here and you can expect more from Finland very soon."
While Nokia's decline could have ushered in dark days for Finland,
some careful planning, a willingness to adapt, boosts in education and
some lucky breaks from Rovio and Supercell — the country is poised to
ride a new wave of tech influence.
"Huge things are happening here," Stubb said. "And it's still only heating up."
On Friday, Microsoft released its 3D Builder app, which allows Windows 8.1 users to print 3D objects, but not much else.
The simple, simplistic, free app from Microsoft provides a basic way to
print common 3D objects, as well as to import other files from SkyDrive
or elsewhere. But the degree of customization that the app allows is
small, so 3D Builder basically serves as an introduction to the world of
3D printing.
In fact, that’s Microsoft’s intention, with demonstrations of the MakerBot Replicator 2 slated for Microsoft’s retails stores this weekend. Microsoft customers can buy a new Windows 8.1 PC, as well as the $2199 MakerBot Replicator 2, both online as well as in the brick-and-mortar stores themselves.
One of the selling points of Windows 8.1 was its ability to print 3D objects,
a complement to traditional paper printing. Although Microsoft is
pitching 3D Builder as a consumer app, the bulk of spending on 3D
printing will come from businesses, which will account for $325 million
out of the $415 million that will be spent this year on 3D printing,
according to an October report from Gartner. However, 3D printers have made their way into Staples,
and MakerBot latched onto an endorsement of the technology from
President Obama during his State of the Union address, recently
encouraging U.S. citizens to crowd-fund an effort to 3D printers in
every high school in America. (MakerBot also announced a Windows 8.1
software driver on Thursday.)
MicrosoftMicrosoft’s 3D Builder includes some basic modification options.
Microsoft’s 3D Builder app could certainly be a part of that effort.
Frankly, there’s little to the app itself besides a library of
pre-selected objects, most of which seem to be built around small,
unpowered model trains of the “Thomas the Tank Engine” variety. After
selecting one, the user has the option of moving it around a 3D space,
increasing or decreasing the size to a particular width or height—and
not much else.
Users can also import models made elsewhere. Again, however, 3D Builder
isn’t really designed to modify the designs. It’s also not clear which
3D formats are supported.
On the other hand, some might be turned off by the perceived complexity
of 3D printing. If you have two grand to spend on a 3D printer but
aren’t really sure how to use it, 3D Builder might be a good place to
start.
In June 1977 Apple Computer shipped their first mass-market computer: the Apple II.
Unlike the Apple I, the Apple II was fully assembled and ready to use
with any display monitor. The version with 4K of memory cost $1298. It
had color, graphics, sound, expansion slots, game paddles, and a
built-in BASIC programming language.
What it didn’t have was a disk drive. Programs and data had to be
saved and loaded from cassette tape recorders, which were slow and
unreliable. The problem was that disks – even floppy disks – needed both
expensive hardware controllers and complex software.
Steve Wozniak solved the first problem. He
designed an incredibly clever floppy disk controller using only 8
integrated circuits, by doing in programmed logic what other controllers
did with hardware. With some
rudimentary software written by Woz and Randy Wigginton, it was
demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1978.
But where were they going to get the higher-level software to
organize and access programs and data on the disk? Apple only had about
15 employees, and none of them had both the skills and the time to work
on it.
The magician who pulled that rabbit out of the hat was Paul Laughton,
a contract programmer for Shepardson Microsystems, which was located in
the same Cupertino office park as Apple.
On April 10, 1978 Bob Shepardson and Steve Jobs signed a $13,000
one-page contract for a file manager, a BASIC interface, and utilities.
It specified that “Delivery will be May 15?, which was incredibly
aggressive. But, amazingly, “Apple II DOS version 3.1? was released in
June 1978.
Now that the extent of the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has been exposed
by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, it’s beholden on the public to
fight back or else find themselves “complicit” in the activities,
according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor
and philosopher Noam Chomsky.
The freedoms U.S. citizens have “weren’t granted by gifts from above,”
Chomsky said during a panel discussion Friday at MIT. “They were won by
popular struggle.”
While U.S. officials have long cited national security as a rationale
for domestic surveillance programs, that same argument has been used by
the “most monstrous systems” in history, such as the Stasi secret
police in the former East Germany, Chomsky said.
“The difference with the totalitarian states is the citizens couldn’t do
a lot about it,” in contrast to the U.S., he added. “If we do not
expose the plea of security and separate the parts that are valid from
the parts that are not valid, then we are complicit.”
He cited the still-in-development Trans-Pacific Partnership trade
agreement, which critics say could have far-reaching implications for
Internet use and intellectual property. Wikileaks recently posted a draft of the treaty’s chapter on intellectual property.
Now that the information is out there, “we can do something about [the proposed TPP],” Chomsky said.
What’s needed for sure “is a serious debate about what the lines should
be” when it comes to government surveillance, said investigative
reporter Barton Gellman, who has received NSA document leaks from
Snowden, leading to a series of stories this year in the Washington
Post. “Knowledge is power and it’s much easier to win if the other side
doesn’t know there’s a game.”
“We can be confident that any system of power is going to try to use the
best available technology to control and dominate and maximize their
power,” Chomsky said. “We can also be confident ... that they want to do
it in secret.”
But there’s a crucial difference between the U.S. activities and that of
the Stasi, Gellman said. “The Stasi was knowingly, deliberately, and
cautiously squashing dissent,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what we’re
seeing here at all.”
A smartphone is an excellent tracking device “from my location, to who I
communicate with, to what I search for,” he said while holding up his
personal device. “I am paying Verizon Wireless on the order of $1000 a
year for this.”
Meanwhile, although telcos are making money by selling phone users’
personal information to third parties, at the same time “the NSA could
not do part of its job as efficiently if the companies weren’t selling
and retaining [customer] data,” Gellman said.
Company disclosures and terms of service have limited benefit as well.
“Generally the terms of service are written to say we can do whatever we
want, in a lot of words,” he said. Even if a customer reads through
carefully and notes what pledges are being made, “you have no way of
monitoring what they do,” Gellman added.
Since publishing stories on the NSA surveillance programs,
Gellman has stepped up his personal privacy efforts significantly,
through “layered defenses” including “locked rooms, safes, and
air-gapped computers that never have and never will touch the ‘Net,” he
said. The extra steps are “a giant tax on my time,” Gellman added.
It’s not clear how many more revelations will come to light from the
materials Snowden gave Gellman and other journalists. Snowden reportedly
gave reporters up to 200,000 documents.
“The [NSA] documents are far from complete,” often providing clues to
things that end up being wrong after further investigation, Gellman
said.
