Month: January 2016

The floor extends in every direction as far as the eye can see, punctuated irregularly by oil barrels and pillars of rustic brick. The lighting is odd; bright white and purple, with hints of the London skyline through a distant window. For a brief moment, my vision is completely filled by a giant pair of shoes. But then the feet are gone! And the horizon is clear! I wish myself forwards and upwards... and I'm flying! FLYINGGG!!!

And then three seconds later I hit a barrel, a propeller flies off with a whiz-crunch, and I tumble gracelessly to the floor. The landing is hard, and somehow I'm flipped upside down. I lay there for a few minutes, neutered and useless, contemplating the poor life choices that led to this sad end.

Such is the brutality of first-person view (FPV) drone racing.

Cable TV industry lobby groups expressed their displeasure with a Federal Communications Commission plan to bring competition to the set-top box market, which could help consumers watch TV on different devices and thus avoid paying cable box rental fees.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed new rules that would force pay-TV companies to give third parties access to TV content, letting hardware makers build better set-top boxes. Customers would be able to watch all the TV channels they're already paying cable companies for, but on a device that they don't have to rent from them. The rules could also bring TV to tablets and other devices without need for a rented set-top box. The system would essentially replace CableCard with a software-based equivalent.

Cable companies hate the plan.

Apple has voluntarily recalled certain two-prong AC wall adapters because some of them could break and potentially give users an electrical shock if touched.

The affected AC adapters were sold between 2003 and 2015 with Mac and some iOS devices in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Argentina, and Brazil. Adapters sold to consumers in the US, UK, Canada, Japan, and China are not part of the recall and are safe for normal use, as are Apple's USB power adapters. Apple also says that users of its World Travel Adapter Kit may also be affected.

You can tell if your wall adapter needs to be exchanged if it has four or five characters, or no characters, on the inside slot where it attaches to an Apple power adapter. Apple provided detailed instructions on how to identify if your adapter is under recall and how you can get a new one from the company for free.

Even years after the disastrous launches of games like SimCity and Battlefield 4, EA's poor reputation among many PC gamers still hasn't recovered all that much. EA Senior Marketing Director for Origin Peter O’Reilly seems to realize this, telling trade magazine MCV recently that the company is on a "journey to regain the trust of the PC gamer."

That means "ensuring a great play experience from launch," O'Reilly said, and indeed, online games like Battlefield: Hardline and Star Wars Battlefront have launched without the widespread server trouble reported on some previous EA titles. But O'Reilly also pointed to a number of consumer-focused programs as part of EA's trust-building attempts on the PC. Those include no-questions-asked refunds for games on Origin within seven days of purchase, free Origin game downloads as part of the "On the House" program, and the recently launched Origin Access subscription program that gives PC gamers access to older titles for $5 a month. "We’re excited about the progress we’ve made but are always pushing ourselves to innovate on behalf of players," O'Reilly said of those efforts.

Regardless of the specifics, it's definitely a welcome message from EA, which has been fighting against poor opinions of its Origin service for years. The tenor reminded us a bit of Microsoft's Phil Spencer, who last June owned up to the failure of Games for Windows Live and promised a new focus on the PC with "Xbox on Windows 10" (an effort that has paid decent dividends so far).

Most of the smart clothing in the spotlight until now has been fitness-related: socks that monitor running strides, shirts that measure heart rate, and other similar devices. While fitness is an obvious avenue for intelligent garments, some scientists are focusing on a more simple approach to smart fabrics. A recent New Scientist article highlights a number of research groups developing smart clothing and fabrics that "adapt to the environment of the wearer's body" to control body temperature.

These early developments are essentially about comfort, the premise being that a smart shirt could help you stay warm in a freezing office and cool when you step outside of the office into blistering summer heat. The report notes that aside from keeping us covered, clothing "controls air circulation and alters the amount of heat escaping from the body"; researchers are figuring out how they can best manipulate that process to make our clothing work a little harder for us in any weather.

One of those research groups is taking inspiration from squid—yes, squid. A team from the University of California, Irvine headed by Alon Gorodetsky is trying to control radiative heat similarly to how cephalopods such as squid change colors by reflecting visible wavelengths of light. While the group won't give any specifics of its technique, they are developing a similar process for longer wavelengths that carry heat. The team has partnered with Under Armour on this project, which isn't a surprise considering that Under Armour has years of experience in the athletic clothing industry and is also getting into more connected devices with the recent release of its Gemini 2 smart sneakers and HealthBox all-in-one fitness tracking package.

If you’re not yet obsessed with crows, you’re behind the times. A flood of research on the birds keeps turning up astonishingly smart behavior. They use tools: in artificial captive situations, in the wild, and by exploiting urban features like traffic. They recognize human faces. They can solve complicated multi-step puzzles.

Despite all the ability, current research barely scratches the surface of the Internet’s love affair with these animals. Floods of anecdotes and videos attribute everything from gratitude to playfulness to the corvid family—colloquially known as crows. We can even watch them appearing to find entertainment in tormenting other animals, like these apparently mischievous (or sadistic) crows causing a cat fight.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that this playfulness tells us something important about crow intelligence—it seems intuitive to take it as a further sign of prodigious animal intellect. The problem is, animal behavior is notoriously tricky to interpret. We have a tendency to project our own minds onto animals, says Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford University. “We see animals doing things for which we don’t have appropriate explanations other than pretending we ourselves are doing it.”

LG is closing a security hole that makes it possible for attackers to steal chat histories and other sensitive data stored on an estimated 10 million G3 phones.

The vulnerability resides in an LG app called Smart Notice. It comes preinstalled on new LG G3 devices and displays a variety of notifications and suggestions, including recommendations to stay in touch with favorite contacts, saving recent callers' contact information, and birthday reminders. The app fails to validate data presented to users, making it possible for attackers to manipulate data such as contact information so that it executes malicious code on affected handsets.

"Using the vulnerability, an attacker can easily open the user device to data theft attack, extracting private information saved on the SD Card including WhatsApp data and private images; put the user in danger of phishing attack by misleading the end-user; and enable the installation of a malicious program on the device," researchers wrote in a blog post published Thursday. "We informed LG, which responded quickly to notice of the vulnerability and we encourage users to immediately upgrade their application to new Smart Notice release, which contains a patch."