The Stingray: the mobile phone tracker the Government is keeping under wraps
A criminal court case in Arizona has revealed the U.S. Government's ability to track mobile phones using a portable device called the Stingray. But the lengths that have been striven to in this case to conceal the technology have been publicly disparate compared to your average Government cover-up.
Hollywood to BT: "Block The Pirate Bay."
A coalition of Movie, Music and and publishing companies have formally requested BT block internet access to The Pirate Bay voluntarily, before they send the boys around.
The group are called BPI, and supported by the rest of the UK creative industries, they asked Britain’s largest ISP to voluntarily deny public access The Pirate Bay. The resistance would seem futile, since it'd probably be too easy for the studios to get a court order to get BT to do it. But regardless of that, we hope they say no.
Alan Wake Sequel Confirmed For XBLA
Though long-rumoured and leaked in part in May, Remedy Entertainment today confirmed that an Alan Wake sequel is in the works. Titled Alan Wake’s Night Springs, somewhat surprisingly for such a high-profile IP, the follow-up to the Twin Peaks-inspired psychological thriller (that grew to be really boring after the first two levels) will not see the light of day at retail.
Worldwide Twitter and Facebook 'Attitudes' monitored by CIA
That tin-foil hat won't help you this time.
An in-depth report by Associated Press has revealed a specialized team in CIA's open source Centre are following "up to 5 million tweets per day." Alongside this, they're following Facebook status updates and other "open internet media."
Modern Warfare 3 scene causes controversy...surprised?
SPOILER ALERT.
First it was the mass genocide of civilians in the predecessor, and now it's the death of a child due to an exploding truck in Modern Warfare 3. We're sitting in anticipation for this one to raise the mass concern among the British press.
Bring 2.8 Hours Later to Nottingham and Lincoln
We hear a multitude of plans for urban regeneration: the cultural upgrades of whatever potential creative hubs we have within the two cities in which we writers reisde. But there is another simple option. Zombies.
World's first manned multicopter/flying human blender takes to the skies
Had to be quite a brave chap to do this. Four quadrocopters propelled a human into the skies, and into the aviation history books last week in Germany.
Plenty of fantastic achievements have been made with some copters, motion sensors, gyroscopes and some intuitive design and programming; but to make a craft which could be ridden is something that didn't really cross our mind, probably because of the vain possibility of a Mortal Kombat-esque fatality of dismemberment and further dismemberment of the aforementioned dismembered through the collection of propellors you see surrounding the partakee.
High-tech spider created for hazardous missions
Apple have created a head crab. Researchers have developed a new form of first scout, replacing the keen-nosed rescue dog with a rather scary looking robot-spider.
Apple confirms iOS5 battery problems, fix on the way in iOS 5.0.1
Apple have gone out and confirmed to All Things D that there is, infact, a battery draining issue with the recent release of iOS5.
"A small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices," Apple said in a statement. ""We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks."
Playstation Home relaunches
Playstation Home is to be receiving the culminatory results of a major overhaul today. We're looking to get genre-themed districts and freemium games...that will most probably still not be used.
Researchers retrieve 250GB of personal data with socialbot
Ever had those random adds from attractive (or extremely photoshopped) ladies wearing next to nothing, who have an extremely bare profile and don't talk to you? Chances are that's a Socialbot, and as researchers from the University of British Columbia have concluded, they prove extremely effective at infiltrating Facebook's circles of friends and harvesting data.
Tweephone mixes old-school with the new
Microblogging with a twist, 140-character debonairs can now enjoy the thrill of an "analogue" telephone, via the Tweephone, for your Tweeting pleasures: using a rotary dial phone to transmit your short diatribes.
HTC Sensation XL with Beats Audio available today. UK Pricing
The bohemoth that is the 4.7" Android bearing HTC Sensation XL, brother to the equally well sized Titan, has become available from all carriers here in sunny UK. Here's where to pick it up from, and how much it'll set you back.
How Windows killed the Courier tablet
Image courtesy of engadget.
CNET released a report about how Microsoft was presented with two competing tablet ideas, and their decision eventually became Windows 8, rather than the technologically infamous Courier.
For the uninitiated, the Courier was a dual-screen tablet, representing a notepad that captured the passionate inspiration of tech journalists across the globe in 2009. As you can see in the video below, it presented something that was much more for the creative consumer, showing options of use that exceed the ideas of content creation that are already present nowadays. So why was it killed off? This is what Jay Greene's report for CNet answers.
Blackberry shows us the future...and it looks boring
After Microsoft showed us some rather interesting concepts in their 'Minority Report' style of the future, Blackberry just have to be the 'future vision' equivalent of that awkward guy who makes any room an uncomfortable silence of boredom.
Twitter tells your stories in more than 140 characters
Twitter have released a new 'Twitter stories' site today, curating some of the most impactful stories told via the stream of tweets surrounding the particular topics on the service.
“Today we’re launching the first in a series of Twitter stories,” Twitter said in a blog post. "Read about a single Tweet that helped save a bookstore from going out of business; an athlete who took a hundred of his followers out to a crab dinner; and, Japanese fishermen who use Twitter to sell their catch before returning to shore. Each story reminds us of the humanity behind Tweets that make the world smaller.”
Supercut relaunches as the video remix picks up viral steam
Not aware of a Supercut? There's a very good chance you've already seen one before. A term coined by tech writer Andy Baio, it is a video that takes every instance of a phrase or action and puts them back-to-back to create a montage of mass repetition.
GarageBand released on iPhone and iPod Touch
Simply put, we'd feel a tablet interface would be the most practical that a touch version of GarageBand could get. Seems as if we were wrong, according to Apple who released a version for iPhone and iPod Touch today.
Apple's music app has let anybody from experienced musicians to teens who think they can play an instrument create and record their own music ever since its iPad release in March of this year (much earlier on OS X). Now GarageBand 1.1 is out as a universal app with support for small iOS screens.
New Humble Bundle out today
The third in Wolfire Games' Pay-what-you-want indie game selections released today, titled the Humble Voxatron Debut.
Just one game this time: Voxatron, a voxel-based platformer-shooter with open-source support for content generated by the user. The game has been released in a Minecraft-like alpha state, with those buying the game guaranteed access to all of developer Lexaloffle's future content updates.
Pete Townshend complains about music downloading
He didn't have a problem with child pornography; but with the amount he's paid for downloads? Thats where The Who's own Pete Townshend draws the line in the metaphorical sand.
Speaking at a music industry event last night, Townshend started to make a statement about Apple for their percentage share of income to artist, labelling the boys in Cupertino as a “digital vampire” and said if they do ”even one of the things on my wish-list [my inner artist] will offer to cut off his own balls.”