Volvo develops an invisible and highly reflective spray paint, Snapchat also goes transparent, tell your story for the library of congress through the Story Corp App, how to learn to program in Spanish class and much more this week in Geek News.
The Paper, a Shanghai-based news company, claimed that up to half of the 1,000 attendees were sourced by a recruiter and paid 30 yuan (US$4.80) for an hour of their time. The Chinese report — summarized in English by Want China Times — suggested that Samsung’s Beijing office vetted an initial 20 paid fans, but that number was later upped to 400-500.
Samsung called the report “totally groundless and bogus” in a statement issued this morning on its blog.
According to the report, Snapchat received just 375 information requests from US law enforcement agencies in the period from November 1, 2014 through February 28, 2015. By way of comparison, Facebook said it received more than 14,000 requests from US authorities between July and December 2014.
Swedish car company Volvo is helping nighttime cyclists defend themselves against cars with Life Paint, a spray-on reflective paint developed by Grey London in collaboration with reflective paint makers Albedo100 that uses special adhesives that are invisible in daylight but light up after dark in the glare of automobile headlights.
In a StoryCorps booth, an interview is conducted as a conversation between two participants who take turns asking each other questions. A trained staff member, however, helps things along. For example, if the conversation stalls, they will suggest new topics.
For people who don’t have access to a booth, the app takes the place of the StoryCorps staffer.
“It’s a human connection play. The app is a digital facilitator and as best as possible, we’re trying to approximate the experience with the app,” says StoryCorps founder Dave Isay.
The mission, dubbed SpaceX CRS-6 (Commercial Resupply Services-6) will also feature the next daring attempt by SpaceX to recover the Falcon 9 booster rocket through a precision guided soft landing onto an ocean-going barge.
SpaceX and NASA are now targeting blastoff of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft for Monday, April 13, just over a week from now
In the first trip across the United States ever made by an autonomous car, engineers from Delphi Automotive were surprised to learn that, in some cases, their vehicle behaved a lot like a human driver.
In a landmark ruling, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper is allowing a nurse named Ellanora Baidoo to serve her elusive husband with divorce papers via a Facebook message.
Baidoo, 26, “is granted permission serve defendant with the divorce summons using a private message through Facebook,” with her lawyer messaging Victor Sena Blood-Dzraku through her account, Cooper wrote.
Beginning with its next browser, currently code-named Spartan, Microsoft will have DNT disabled by default.
This news was announced by the software giant’s chief privacy officer, Brendon Lynch, in a blog post, where he blamed the company’s change of stance on “evolving” standards online and within the technology industry. While this could easily suggest that Microsoft is pandering to a stronger advertising lobby, or that people don’t care about privacy in the same way as they did a few years ago, Lynch claims that instead, disabling the feature is a more accurate reflection of web standards that are pioneered and championed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business. At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges. I’m writing in the hopes that many more will join this movement. From North Carolina to Nevada, these bills under consideration truly will hurt jobs, growth and the economic vibrancy of parts of the country where a 21st-century economy was once welcomed with open arms.
- Tim Cook
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, Op Ed piece in the Washington Post calls out states that are passing discriminatory laws. Arkansas and Indiana allow state employees to deny services to citizens if the service might go against their own religious views.
Using a Microsoft Reasearch Paper a Github user made a library to make your computer motion sense using the doppler effect with just a speaker and a mic!
The power of Bitcoin is giving your dusty old TI-89 calculator a second chance of being useful.
Matt Whitlock, who helped make one of the world’s first Bitcoin ATMs, is at it again. In a video posted on to Vimeo, he showed how using the calculator once only used for high school geometry and a 12-sided die makes a secure address for your Bitcoin account.
The ti 80 is a geek’s calculator.
Let’s say you want to 3D print a replica of an object in your home. The first step, of course, is capturing a detailed 3D scan — a process that’s currently accomplished to varying degrees of accuracy with a desktop unit or more expensive and bulky professional models. But with a new “camera sensor” designed by CalTech researchers under electrical engineer Ali Hajimiri, you may one day be able to record a 3D scan with nothing other than your smartphone.
The tiny chip, called a nanophotonic coherent imager, uses a form of LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) technology to capture height, width, and depth information from each pixel.
