Facebook’s sufficiently chummy with advertisers that some people have gone and built their own social networks to escape Mark Zuckerberg’s clutches. For those who remain, however, it’s now going to be even harder to avoid people using your personal profile information to sell you things. The company has re-built and re-launched (former Microsoft ad platform) Atlas as a way of monitoring people’s online activity across every device that they own. In a blog post, Atlas chief Erik Johnson talks about “people-based marketing” that leaves behind cookies and instead knows what you’re doing on desktops, smartphones and tablets. That data, coupled with Facebook’s knowledge of your age, gender and preferences, will then be used to sell specific products — with the firm that handles Intel and Pepsi’s promotional work the first to sign on.
Remember the dronie? If not, it’s a self-taken photograph (sigh, selfie) from a UAV like the Parrot AR Drone 2.0 that provides a bit more creativity than your arm reach allows. Imagine that you can attach that drone to your wrist and launch it instantly, and you have some idea about how the Nixie works. Once aloft, it’s designed to detect your presence and fly around you, pointing its camera to film your exploits — ranging from tourism to mountain climbing, as the video below shows. The project is part of Intel’s Make it Wearable contest, and uses an Edison chip to track you and avoid obstacles. For now, it’s just a delicate prototype that can fly off your wrist and not do much else. But it’s scored a $50,000 finalist prize from Intel, meaning our dream of having aerial footage of all our hum-drum activities could finally come true — yes, we are that vain.
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Most invisibility cloaks require fairly exotic technology to work, such as fiber optics or light-altering metamaterials. That’s not very practical, especially since the illusion still tends to break when you move. The University of Rochester may have a far more realistic solution, however — it has developed a cloak that only needs run of the mill optical lenses to hide objects from view. The system really boils down to clever math. By positioning two pairs of lenses in the right order, researchers can bend light in a way that hides almost everything you put in the middle of this arrangement. The approach scales up with the size of the glass, and it works at angles of 15 degrees or more; you don’t need to look head-on to see the effect.
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Can a 6.1-inch smartphone ever be accepted in the mainstream? That was what Jonathan Fingas asked while reviewing Huawei’s Ascend Mate, and found the answer to be a resounding “no.” The handset offered a lot of things that did impress him, including a staggering battery life, big display and the company’s Emotion UI. On the downside, the old(er) internals, 3G-only modem and modest storage meant that the device had “niche proposition” stamped all over it. But, what about you, out there? Did you buy one? If so, what did you like, what did you hate and what, if anything, would you change? Head to the forum and spill your brains.
The staff changes, massive layoffs and the shutdown of its entire Boston office over the years make the One Laptop Per Child program sound like a huge failure. But this documentary by filmmaker Michael Kleiman shows that OLPC really did change some of its recipients’ lives, particularly those who’ve never heard of computers and the internet before the organization gave them laptops of their own. The documentary, called WEB, looks at the OLPC rollout in the poor areas of Peru, showing kids typing on their small laptops in dingy classrooms and teaching their parents how to use Google underneath trees. It’s been shown in several film festivals before, but it’s now available for download from iTunes, Google Play, Amazon Instant Video, Xbox Video, Sony Entertainment Network and Vudu.
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The leaves are starting to change color and the air is getting cooler, signaling that fall has finally arrived. You know what else has arrived? Feedback Loop! This week’s edition features the Engadget community discussing the benefits of homebuilt PCs, recommending affordable running headphones, sharing fun Raspberry Pi hacks and dishing on smartwatches. Head past the break for all this and more.
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China has a history of tightening its censorship of internet services during times of political upheaval, and that’s unfortunately happening again with massive pro-democracy protests underway in Hong Kong. Both monitoring sites and on-the-ground observers report that the country has blocked access to Instagram on the mainland, most likely to prevent images of the demonstrations from spreading beyond Hong Kong (where Instagram is still working). It’s potentially a big blow to free speech, as the photo sharing service was one of the few foreign social networks that operated unfettered in the area. We’ve reached out to Instagram for more details, but it’s safe to presume that China won’t lift its restrictions so long as the protests continue — and it won’t be surprising if this ultimately proves to be a permanent ban.
[Image credit: Alex Ogle/AFP/Getty Images]
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Don’t get too comfy just because companies are rolling out patches for the Shellshock security bug — as it turns out, even updated websites and devices remain at risk. Developers are reporting that they can still run any code they like (and thus hijack systems) through the bash command shell simply by using instructions that aren’t covered by existing safeguards. You can use a common variable like “cat” (concatenate) to bypass the defenses, for instance. The only surefire fix may be a fundamental change to how the shell handles variables, which could break legions of apps and services. You still don’t have much reason to worry about your home Mac or Linux PC, but it’s now considerably less likely that the sites and connected gadgets you use will will be truly immune to Shellshock-based attacks.
[Image credit: Robert Graham, Twitter]
SoftBank may have already bought both a major mobile game studio and one of the US’ largest carriers, but it apparently isn’t done expanding its turf just yet. Both Hollywood Reporter and the Wall Street Journal claim that the Japanese carrier is now in talks to buy DreamWorks Animation, the movie studio you likely know for How To Train Your Dragon and Shrek. Reportedly, SoftBank chief Masayoshi Son wants to wield exclusive content as a weapon against rival mobile networks. While the sources aren’t diving into specifics about the potential partnership, it wouldn’t be surprising if you could eventually buy Sprint phones that come bundled with DreamWorks’ latest flicks.
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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.
Could Apple’s new spaceship campus be the greenest building on the planet? It will be, according to CEO Tim Cook, who made the bold statement at a Climate Week NYC event last week. “It’ll be the center of innovation and it’s something that our employees want and that we want,” said Cook. In other tech news, a trio of 16-year-old Irish girls took the top prize at the Google Science Fair 2014 for developing a project that will combat the global food crisis. The project aims to provide a solution to low crop yields by pairing a nitrogen-fixing bacteria that naturally occurs in the soil with cereal crops it does not normally associate with, such as barley and oats. Speaking of Google, the search giant just ended its relationship with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a shadowy organization that writes industry-friendly bills for conservative legislators. The reason? Google Chairman Eric Schmidt says that the group is “literally lying” about climate change.
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