Technology

After the recent Vancouver riots, it became clear that the world is surveiling itself at an unprecedented scale. Angry citizens gave police one million photos and 1,000 hours of video footage to help them track down the rioters. If we aren’t living in a surveillance state run by the government, we’re certainly conducting a huge surveillance experiment on each other.

Which is what makes two new apps, CopRecorder and OpenWatch, and their Web component, OpenWatch.net, so interesting. They are the brainchildren of Rich Jones, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate who describes himself as pretty much a hacker to the core. Flush with cash and time from a few successful forays into the app market, nine months ago Jones decided to devote some of his time to developing what he calls a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures — via redwolf.newsvine.com

PossessedHand: Techniques for controlling human hands using electrical muscles stimuli from rkmtlab on Vimeo.

Want to learn a musical instrument, but can’t find the time to practise? A device now under development can take control of your hand and teach you how to play a tune. No spirits of dead musicians are involved.

PossessedHand, being developed jointly by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, also in Tokyo, electrically stimulates the muscles in the forearm that move your fingers. A belt worn around that part of the subject’s arm contains 28 electrode pads, which flex the joints between the three bones of each finger and the two bones of the thumb, and provide two wrist movements. Users were able to sense the movement of their hands that this produced, even with their eyes closed. The user’s fingers are controlled without the user’s mind, explains Emi Tamaki of the University of Tokyo, who led the research — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Dutch airline KLM says it plans to use recycled cooking oil on 200 flights between Paris and Amsterdam.

The fuel, biokerosene, is derived from used frying oil, which has to be tested to meet the same technical specifications as traditional kerosene — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The blueprint for a global code on cybercrime was agreed on, paving the way for international rules governing online copyright infringement, online fraud, child pornography and hacking

The US Navy wants to put powerful lasers on its ships to shoot down artillery shells and even cruise missiles at the speed of light (and really, who wouldn’t). But there are a few scientific details to sort out before sailors can deploy the beams. First we want to make sure the physics is right before throwing buckets of salt water over the thing, says Ed Pogue — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Ordinary Internet users frequently are scolded for choosing weak, easily-guessed passwords. New research suggests that hackers in the cyber underground are also likely to pick lame passwords for their favorite online forums — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Have you ever been followed around the Web for months by ads for a product that you considered (but decided against) buying from an online retailer? Have you seen ads on Facebook offering some product that a marketer thinks a person like you should need and want?

Many people in the Web advertising community seem to believe that consumers will appreciate this kind of personalized targeting, because we’ll only have to look at ads for stuff we’re interested in. For many of us, though, that isn’t the case at all — via redwolf.newsvine.com

US software giant Oracle has announced its acquisition of FatWire, whose software is used for developing corporate websites around the world.

Oracle said the acquisition was expected to be finalised mid-year. Financial details have not been released — via redwolf.newsvine.com

At least 4800 Australian websites have been lost with no chance of recovery following a break-in at Australian domain registrar and web host Distribute.IT.

The hack attack caused so much damage that four of the company’s servers were unrecoverable, the company said, leaving thousands of website owners in the lurch — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lately Tumblr’s been getting lots of attention from name bloggers like Steve Rubel (who closed all his existing blogs and moved exclusively to Tumblr), Rick Sanchez, Dan Patterson, and my friend here in San Diego Mitch Wagner. So when I began an effort to simplify my blog life, I considered switching this blog to Tumblr and making it my primary platform like Steve and Mitch did.

In the end I decided not to, for an important practical reason: the data you enter on Tumblr is locked in. While there are some hacky third-party tools that purport to do it, Tumblr itself does not offer an official export feature which lets its users move their data to another platform should they choose to do so — via redwolf.newsvine.com

A global internet body has voted to allow the creation of new website domain suffixes, the biggest change for the online world in years.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plans to dramatically increase the number of domain endings from the current 22.

Internet address names will end with almost any word and be in any language.

ICANN will begin taking applications next year, with corporations and cities expected to be among the first — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Everyone knows how to open the task manager: press Control + Alt + Delete and click Task Manager, right? Still, the entire point of using keyboard shortcuts is to avoid having to use the mouse. Press Control + Shift + Escape to bypass the menu that appears and go directly to the task manager — via Lifehacker

LibreOffice gained a fresh burst of momentum last week as the makers of productivity software not only released a new, stable update but also announced the participation of Google and other big-name sponsors in its brand-new advisory board.

Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest and the Free Software Foundation will all serve for an initial term of one year on the board to provide advice, guidance and proposals regarding the free and open source software. In that role, each sponsor has the right to one representative — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The day when we don’t have to plug in our consumer electronics is getting closer, thanks to a new startup named uBeam that has developed a safe way of beaming power to your devices.

Rather than using inductive charging, which has a very short effective range and usually requires that the charger and device be in close proximity to each other, uBeam uses an ultrasonic transducer to convert power from your wall socket into inaudible sound energy. On the device side, there’s a battery adapter that converts the sound energy back into power to charge your batteries. The ultrasonic frequency used is well above the range that can be heard by humans or dogs — via redwolf.newsvine.com