Boston’s parks are getting a string of benches with built-in cellphone chargers. But it’s unclear at best whether it’s a financially viable proposition. The Soofa, described as an urban hub, has a built-in solar panel which provides the power for two USB ports for charging. (You need to bring your own charging cable.) Officials say […]
Goldman Sachs has asked a US court to force Google to remotely delete a message sent to the wrong address. The e-mail, sent last week, was meant to go to an address ending in gs.com, but mistakenly went to the same username but at gmail.com instead. That’s particularly unfortunate as the e-mail included “highly confidential […]
The Norwegian government says it will not repeat experiments with online voting. It said there wasn’t enough guarantee of security and a secret vote. The country used online voting as an option in 12 cities and towns as an experiment in 2011 and 2013 and has now reported on the experience. In the 2013 experiment, […]
Work to reconstruct one of the earliest computers has been boosted by the discovery of the original circuit diagrams. The EDSAC project had previously relied on photographs to put together components. As we covered a couple of years ago, the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator was arguably the first completed and fully operational machine to […]
The Supreme Court has made two key rulings on tech-related cases today. It’s ruled against Aereo, an online service that thought it found a loophole in broadcasting laws. And it’s ruled that the police do not generally have a right to search cellphones during a warrantless arrest. Aereo allows paying customers to access over-the-air broadcasts […]
Perhaps no technological failure is better known than that of the Dvorak keyboard. Since the early 1870s nearly every typewriter used a keyboard with a QWERTY layout, yet most studies show the Dvorak arrangement of keys to be faster. This videos probes the underlying reasons that this arrangement failed to make headway in the marketplace. […]
A British police official says around half the calls (incidents) with front-line officers involve comments made over social media. The revelation came from Alex Marshall (pictured), the head of the College of Policing, which oversees training of new officers. He was speaking on the BBC’s Law In Action radio show. According to Marshall, According to […]
After being away from his channel for almost 2 years, Bill Hammack, the engineer guy, is back with a new series of videos featuring various technological products that failed to grab hold of the market even though they were great devices. Here’s the story of how Sony’s Betamax lost to JVC’s VHS Cassette Recorder. In […]
Amazon has confirmed it’s releasing its own smartphone. It’s not quite the 3D spectacular originally rumored and another of its key features is as much about Amazon’s bottom line as user benefit. The 32GB edition of the Fire phone is available exclusively on AT&T for $199 with a service plan, or you can buy it without […]
A New York designer has created a dress that exposes her skin in proportion to the amount of data she has — knowingly or otherwise — exposed about herself online. Xuedi Chen says the project is designed to explore questions about how personal information is made public when somebody uses online services: “Since I have […]