Category: Computers

Electronic voting machines are notoriously buggy and hackable. Even the manufacturers of DRE (direct recording electronic) voting talliers have admitted so much. Some states have even gone as far as to ban the touchscreen devices. While they may not be great at recording votes (or leaving a paper trail), it turns out their outdated PC-like innards are perfect for playing retro arcade games. This ...

After months of back and forth and hand wringing, it looks like the strange tale of the Lower Merion school district may finally be coming to a close. In advance of the new school year, U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger has announced that the federal government will not be filing charges against the district or its employees over the controversial use of tracking software on school-issued laptops ...

Walking the entire 1,200 mile length of Britain is no easy feat, but using Google Street View to "travel" the same stretch of land is just plain boring. Matthew Partridge, however, has embarked on this adventure, going pixel by pixel from Land's End to John O'Groats in ten days. Honestly, we'd rather go the actual distance than stare at a screen for 240 hours, but, hey, at least the bright line in ...

Never let it be said that computer hackers don't have a sense of humor. Masato Nakatsuji has been arrested by Tokyo authorities for authoring the Ika-tako virus, which replaces the files on a target computer with images of squid, octopi and sea urchins. The virus has infected somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 computers through the Winny file-sharing network. The malware disguises itself as a ...

Hey, amateur astronomers, listen to this: A couple of at-home space nuts recently discovered a pulsar with a screensaver that uses idle PC time to process data collected from telescopes. By using Einstein@Home to 'donate' a PC's processors to the pursuit of science, the program harnesses thousands of willing computers, rather than one supercomputer, to analyze data. This helps on-the-clock ...

Not too long ago, 22-year-old Sealtiel Chacon Zepeda, from Beaverton, Oregon, began cooking up a scheme to copy gift cards from local stores. He knew he couldn't just swipe the cards and run, since they would need to be activated by a cashier before he could use them. So, he decided to clone them instead -- at the direct expense of consumers. After performing 20 hours of online research, Zepeda ...

We've never carried them, but we sometimes wish that we had pocketwatches. You know, with a gold chain arched over the middle button of a sharp looking vest (which we've also never owned). It's a strange sentiment, particularly since most of us don't even wear wristwatches. (There's a clock on that cell phone for a reason.) A slightly less intense, but altogether similar sentiment cropped up when ...

Strolling around with your wheelchair-bound loved ones might one day be a whole lot less stressful, thanks to a new robotic wheelchair created in Japan. Designed by researchers at Saitama University's Human-Robot Interaction Center, the wheelchair uses distance sensors and built-in cameras to keep track of a pedestrian's position, allowing the chair to remain on the left-hand side of its targeted ...

It appears that color E Ink readers aren't as far from being commercially available as most have thought. E Ink Holdings (formally PVI), the group responsible for the screens housed in Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Readers, is leading the way by offering samples of its color panels to manufacturers. In addition to creating color-capable displays, the new screens are capacitive, meaning all their ...

We've all lost a high-tech gadget or two to that most low-tech of the natural elements: water. (Or, in the recent case of this writer's laptop, coffee.) Always miles ahead of us stateside folk, who have alternately used hair dryers and bowls of quick rice to dry out our devices, the Japanese have implemented the Dryer Box, a sort of clothes dryer for drowned gadgets. The copy-machine-sized ...

The appeal of paintball is lost on us, but that doesn't mean we don't recognize a cool robotic paintball turret when we see one. Thanks to Ubergizmo, we found this particular one, a DIY project by some nerdy paintball enthusiasts at Alter Robotics. It's a pan-and-tilt, robotic tripod turret, equipped with an electronic paintball gun (that looks infinitely cooler than the one we got from Walmart ...

This week, Microsoft hosted the final rounds of the Worldwide Competition on Microsoft Office, during which 50-odd young people gathered in Park City, Utah, and competed to prove which four were the most proficient in Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007, and Microsoft Excel 2003 and 2007, respectively. Those few dozen showed themselves to be the best of the best among a pool of 115,000 entrants. As part ...

Waiting for a college acceptance letter can be extremely stressful. But once you've finally been accepted (or rejected), it's all over, right? Apparently not, if you applied to the U.K. institution of Middlesex University. The college has confirmed that a computer glitch caused 2,500 acceptance letters to be sent out to applicants who had not actually been evaluated yet. That's two and a half ...

Apparently today is the day that everyone announces the products we knew were coming. After Motorola and Verizon drew early attention for announcing the extensively leaked Droid 2, Dell and AT&T finally announced the official availability of the Dell Streak. The five-inch Android powered tablet will go on "priority pre-sale" Thursday with general availability coming Friday. What can be ...

Robots are adept at many things, among them pouring beer and giving us nightmares. But oft overlooked is their ability to squeeze into tight spaces. Leeds University and the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt will be relying on a tiny bot, equipped with a drill, a camera and some lights, to weasel its way into tiny shafts and through doors in the Great Pyramid of Giza to discover what secrets ...