High school student builds portable battery-powered x-ray machine
Did you build anything cool in high school? Maybe a sweet model volcano or a light bulb powered by a potato? That’s nice and all, but a Pakistani high school student recently built a portable x-ray machine. If that wasn’t impressive enough, portable x-ray machines didn’t exist before. Your parents are retroactively disappointed in your potato battery now.
At the age of 15, Adam Munich was chatting with some folks online and heard a pair of stories. One about rolling blackouts, and another about the unavailability of x-ray equipment in remote areas. This is how the idea of a battery-operated x-ray machine came to Munich. He spent the next two years learning about x-ray technology and building his device in a pair of old art cases. Read more...
Eugene Polley, inventor of the wireless TV remote, dies at 96
If it weren't for Eugene J. Polley, flipping TV channels would be an exhausting and tedious undertaking. Polley, after all, invented the world's first wireless TV remote. He died of natural causes on Sunday, at the age of 96.
According to a press release put out by Zenith — the company with which Polley started his 47-year engineering career in 1935 — the innovator earned 18 U.S. patents for his inventions, which include the "Flash-matic" remote control. This device, introduced in 1955, "used a flashlight-like device to activate photo cells on the television set to change channels." Read more...
This brilliant towel could automatically censor all your naughty pics
All the technology available nowadays makes us over-think things sometimes. Instead of simply covering up naughty bits before snapping photos, we jump through hoops to securely transfer the images, blur things out using software, or just plain worry day and night about what we did.
All of these headaches could be wiped away with a simple towel. (Or with some common sense — but we can't always rely on that.) Read more...
Apple being offered free rent just to open up stores
Apple Stores are increasingly seen as a sign of affluence, a sign that a neighborhood "has arrived." It turns out that some cities are more anxious to arrive than others, offering Apple sweetheart deals to open new stores — deals that often include Apple getting to move in rent-free.
A deal recently signed in Utah is bringing an Apple Store to the City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City. And according to independent sources, the unprecedented deal was sweet indeed: Apple was given five years' free rent to move in. Read more...
Sony’s Music Unlimited service will get its own iOS app on May 25
Sony's Music Unlimited service is poised to invade Apple's line of smartphones and tablets this Friday, May 25, with the release of the Music Unlimited iOS app. The app will push Sony's upstart mobile music offering to millions of new compatible devices, and offer iPhone and iPad owners another iTunes alternative. Read more...
lueful Scans The Apps On Your iPhone, Tells You Which Ones Are Doing Naughty Things With Your Data
Remember address book-gate? Locationgate? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the data we presumed to be ours alone was actually being stored, accessed and shared by others…in many cases, “others” being mobile app developers.
Well, leave it to a security firm to capitalize on the privacy scare trend. And by capitalize, I mean launch a $4 app that tells you what the apps on your phone are doing. Introducing Bitdefender’s Clueful. Read more...
Chrome trumps IE as world’s top browser
Chrome's average usage share for the week of May 14-20 was 32.8%, said StatCounter, an analytics company that tracks browser and operating system trends. For the same week, IE's share was 31.9%.
Although Chrome has beaten IE in StatCounter's tally before -- a day here, another there, this was the first time that Google's browser took the top spot for an entire week.
Mozilla's Firefox placed third with a share of 25.5%, while Apple's Safari and Opera Software's Opera brought up the rear with 7.1% and 1.7%, respectively. Read more...
Windows Vista infection rates climb, says Microsoft
Microsoft said last week that a skew toward more exploits on Windows Vista can be attributed to the demise of support for the operating system's first service pack.
Data from the company's newest security intelligence report showed that in the second half of 2011, Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was 17% more likely to be infected by malware than Windows XP SP3, the final upgrade to the nearly-11-year-old operating system.
That's counter to the usual trend, which holds that newer editions of Windows are more secure, and thus exploited at a lower rate, than older versions like XP. Some editions of Windows 7, for example, boast an infection rate half that of XP.
Tim Rains, the director of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, attributed the rise of successful attacks on Vista SP1 to the edition's retirement from security support. Read more...
Full circle: MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson becomes advisor for Facebook casino app
Even Tom from MySpace knows that Facebook’s app platform is a powerhouse, and has joined a company called RocketFrog as an advisor.
The company has launched what it calls the “largest free to play online casino app” on the Facebook platform. I’m not a social games kind of guy, but there’s no doubt that people love to play around on Facebook, just ask Zynga.
RocketFrog’s founder, Brett Calapp, has a past chock full of gaming, including a stint as the President of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour. Here’s what he said about the app’s release today: Read more...
Korea’s K-Pop music industry joins Facebook and Google+ to extend global reach
Have you heard of K-Pop?
Two years ago the answer would almost certainly be no, unless you were living in Korea and other parts of Asia, but today the Korean music genre is increasingly followed the world over, thanks TO its online reach, which just got extended further still.
The Korean pop (K-Pop) industry has taken two significant steps towards growing its already impressive online footprint after industry-wide content pages were established on both Facebook and Google+. These moves will help bringing stars, music, news and multimedia to millions of existing and potential new fans across the planet.
Social networks and the Internet are opening the world like never before and K-Pop, a genre of pop music from South Korea, is fast becoming an example of the international opportunity that the Web can offer. Read more...