Saturday, July 5, 2025

Awesome iPad Presentation Is Awesome [VIDEO]

Still don’t get why the iPad is the best tablet out there? Then check out this presentation by two Swedish magicians – their use of seven iPads, along with some old-fashioned trickery, should clear things up for you. Bucket loads of amazing are waiting for you – after the jump.

Photos On Lost Phone Reveal Chinese Gangster’s Lifestyle [PICS]

A series of violent photographs claiming to be leaked from a gangster’s mobile phone have become an online sensation. Attracting nearly 5million hits, the pics show a young (but portly) Chinese man showing off his love for stacks of cash, German sports cars, parading around topless and dishing out savage beatings. Full gallery inside.

The Pirate Bay To Launch Airborne Servers

Popular torrent hosting site, The Pirate Bay has released plans to host their server database in the clouds. Literally in the clouds, I mean; they want to fit flying micro-drones with super-small computers and connect them with long-range radio transmitters, maintaining a network of “Low-Orbit Server Stations.” Which would make police raids a little more tricky.

Volvo Introduces Pedestrian Airbag [VIDEO]

Well this is new, and sort of neat. For the new V40, Volvo is introducing the world’s first pedestrian airbag system, designed to reduce the severity of pedestrian injuries in a car-pedestrian collision. Alternatively it could double as a sweet new inflatable mattress on the hood of your car.

Ad Agency Turns 13 Homeless Men Into Wi-Fi Hotspots

Advertising agency BBH has come under fire for their turning 13 homeless men walking Wi-Fi hotspots at the recent SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The “Homeless Hotspots” sported shirts saying, “I’m a 4G hotspot,” with an access code for the network.

Google Announces ‘Google Play,’ Cloud-Based Media Hub

Another alternative to Apple’s iCloud popped up this week, with Google has announcing that it will be combining the Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore into a new cloud-based service called Google Play, allowing users to access all of their media across all of their Android devices.

iPad 3 Specifications Spotted In The Wild

It’s less than a week to go until the iPad 3 is unveiled, so everybody and their grandma is throwing out thoughts about what the new toy can do. Concrete stats are emerging though – Apple employees have been browsing the web with their personal iPad 3’s, turning up details about the new tablet on website server logs.

25 Arrested In Global “Anonymous” Crackdown

25 people have been arrested for alleged ties to hacktivist movement Anonymous in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain in the joint ‘Operation Unmask,’ which I’m sure has nothing to do with the INTERPOL website being taken down yesterday and everything to do with attacks against websites in Columbia and Chile dating from the middle of 2011.

Google to Release “Heads-Up Display” Glasses By End Of Year

Those of you who have been wanting Terminator-vision since the films first came out won’t have long to wait. The New York Times reports that Google is not only working on, but will be releasing “smart glasses” fitted with Android-based augmented reality software by the year’s end.

Face-Recognizing Billboard Only Displays Ad To Women

An intelligent billboard set up in London has facial recognition tech built in that lets it scan passersby for gender – if a woman stops to take a look, it plays a 40-second video clip. Dudes only get a link to the advertiser’s website. It’s like they’re trying to send a message or something.

Nevada Legalizes Self-Driving Cars

Hello, future! Nevada has become the first state to legalize self-driving cars, which are apparently pretty easy to get hold of in Nevada. Granted, the cars must have two humans inside, and be insured for around $1 million, but let’s focus on the part where people are allowed to have self-driving cars now.

NASA Unveils Stunning Future Aircraft Designs [PHOTOS]

Nobody has any idea where they’re planning on getting funding from – but like a kid with an extended birthday wish list, NASA has unveiled some amazing concepts of future, eco-friendly aircraft, which they’re calling “greener flying machines for the year 2025.” Assuming they’re still here then.

SpaceX Test-Fires ‘Super’ Rocket Engines [VIDEO]

Spaceflight start-up, SpaceX – those guys who want to put a person on Mars in the next decade or two – has been demonstrating the potency of its SuperDraco rockets at their test facility in Texas. Take a look at the fancily-named rockets in action after the jump.

NASA’s Recording The Dark Side Of The Moon [VIDEO]

People who like Pink Floyd references, rejoice, because NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has beamed back its first video of the dark side of the moon. Click through to see what that astronaut that everybody forgets about saw while Armstrong and Aldrin were hogging all the glory.

Google’s New ‘Emergency Alerts’ Feature

Google has been saving up a tonne of creepy private information about you lately, which is unfortunate, but the company’s philanthropic arm just launched a new crisis response project to win back our hearts and personal data: emergency alerts on Google Maps.

Posh Gauteng School To Make iPads Mandatory

With the news that Apple looks set to revolutionise school learning with its textbook initiative, comes another report that a Johannesburg private school is going to make iPads compulsory this year, at parents’ cost. How long until other schools follow suit?

‘Apple In Education’ Launches New Digital Educational Tools

As part of their ‘reinvention of the textbook,’ Apple yesterday unveiled three new applications for use in the digital educational under their Apple in Education program: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The tools are designed to allow for interactive textbooks, digital textbook creation, and open-access educational resources from top universities, respectively.

Brazilian Police Equipped With Facial Recognition Glasses For 2014

This is sort of like Robocop! Brazilian police forces are testing out glasses fitted out with cameras linked to a central computer network that stores a database of criminal suspects’ faces, so that they’ll be able to arrest people during the 2014 World Cup without having to ask them their names.

Mbeki Questions Twitter’s Social Usefulness, Twitter Flips Out A Little

Following his opening address for the International Knowledge Conference at the University of Stellenbosch Business School, former president, Thabo Mbeki voiced some concerns about Twitter as “a great conveyor of reliable knowledge,” pointing to Gaddafi’s overthrow as a consequence of “false knowledge,” rather than the social media. Mbeki immediately started trending on Twitter.

Samsung’s New “Smart Window” [VIDEO]

There have been plenty of tech announcements over the past few days, what with the Consumer Electronics Show going on in Las Vegas, each one claiming to be more exciting than the last – which gets tedious. So I mean it when I say that, Samsung’s new “Smart Window” is the most exciting thing to come out of CES 2012.

UK Student Faces Extradition To USA For Copyright Infringement

A UK judge ruled this week that Richard O’Dwyer, an English university student, can be extradited to the United States to face charges of copyright infringement – O’Dwyer being the former administrator of TVShack, a website that linked to pirated content. This sets a dangerous legal precedent for anybody who does anything fun on the internet.

How Much Facebook Is Worth And Other Interesting Facts [INFOGRAPHIC]

This year Facebook will go public and start to sell shares on the stock exchange. Thanks to all of us, the social network is now worth $100 billion – more than giants such as Google, Disney, Amazon, and McDonald’s. But who is going to pocket all this money? Check out this infographic, detailing which Facebook friends will be getting pieces of the pie, as well as some other interesting facts:

Pentagon Scientists Created A “Time Cloak” To Make Events Disappear

Five days into 2012 and we’ve already got fancy new technology. A team from Cornell University have developed a light-distortion device that can mask events as if they hadn’t happened; they managed to use light distortion to hide an event for 40 picoseconds. Which, granted, is 40 trillionths of a second, but the research is groundbreaking in the extreme.

Upcoming Apple Event To Revamp iBooks

Apple is holding a product event later this month in New York – and since the Christmas buy-a-palooza is just past, it’s looking unlikely that they’re going to be announcing any new hardware just yet. Instead, Apple seems set to refurbish iBooks, their eBook retail platform, with a couple of new publishing options.

Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of 2011

It’s the 29th of December, which means we are all now sick of Top 10 lists. There are Top 10 lists of Top 10 list. Except this particular Top 10 list is actually pretty informative, collating the year’s illegal torrent data to tell us which films people wanted to see but weren’t willing to pay for. #1 is really awful.

Your MP3 Player May Be Deafening You: Study

Peace and quiet can come at a premium, especially if you live and work in a busy urban environment. However, a new study shows that the biggest actual threat to our hearing is one we deliberately expose ourselves to every day.

Voice Synthesizer Resurrects Dead Singers’ Voices

Score one for creepy technology. Vocaloid, a voice-synthesis brand owned by Yamaha, has come up with a process by which to “resurrect” any singer’s voice for use in synthesized songs, without requiring the vocalist to build up a painstaking voice library first – so they could be doing that Kurt Cobain/Michael Jackson duet album pretty soon.

IBM Releases Predictions For Technology In 2017 [VIDEO]

IBM have released their annual predictions for the future of technology, via the IBM “5 in 5” project, which looks at five innovations which they figure will transform modern life within the next five years; these include mind-reading computers, human-generated electricity, and biometric scanning replacing passwords.

SETI Resumes Hunt For Aliens After Six Month Hiatus

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was put on hold for six months due to lack of funds – but, following donations from the public and the US Airforce, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in northern California is operational again. So man, we’re going to feel pretty stupid if aliens called at some point during those six months.