Daily Roundup: Hacking in television, PlayStation Home and more!
Catch up on all of today's top stories in the Daily Roundup. Find out if the hacking portrayed in prime-time television is realistic, read about PlayStation Home shutting down and get the details on Intel's PC on a stick. Head past the break to read about these stories and others you might have missed.
High-tech TV: How realistic is the hacking in prime-time shows?
A group of five impeccably dressed high school girls are almost murdered dozens of times by the same, mysterious stalker and the police in their idyllic small town are either corrupt or too incompetent to care. How do the girls fight back? Hacking, of course. At least, that's one way they do it on Pretty Little Liars. "Hacking" is the deus ex machina in plenty of scenarios on Pretty Little Liars and other mainstream programs, allowing people to easily track, harass, defend and stalk each other 30 to 60 minutes at a time.
There's no longer a place like PlayStation Home
PlayStation Home, Sony's answer to the Second Life question no one asked, was never where the company's heart lived. Maybe its greasy, suppurating id lived in those gleaming neon halls, somewhere between the bowling alley full of dead-eyed polygon people and the virtual shopping mall. You know the PlayStation Home shopping mall I'm talking about. It's the one where you could spend very real money on an entirely fake golden statue of a robot lady with impossibly proportioned breasts.
Intel's PC on a stick is now available for pre-order
Like the idea of Intel's Compute Stick turning your TV into a full-fledged Linux or Windows PC? You can finally plunk down some cash to get one. Online stores (including Amazon and Newegg) have started taking pre-orders for the HDMI dongle, which is now expected to ship by late April rather than the originally planned March release.
Samsung fights fears of Galaxy S6 bending with a video
Sadly, the he-said-she-said disputes over bending smartphones aren't ending any time soon. Samsung has responded to SquareTrade's allegations that the Galaxy S6 Edge is easily bendable by posting a video that shows the official stress tests for both the Edge and the regular S6. As you might expect, both devices hold up in this company-sanctioned clip -- they can withstand up to 79 pounds of force at three different points, which is enough to snap five pencils in half.
Enjoy a terrifying 10,000 foot GoPro camera freefall
Got your dramamine and/or hallucinogenics? Either will work for the latest video starring a tough, but not-very-well-attached GoPro camera. Its owner lost it during a skydiving formation gone wrong, and it continued the rest of the 10,000 feet down without him, spinning crazily the whole way. But the camera and video survived and were picked up by a resident of Kristianstad, Sweden, who figured it had been sitting in a meadow "for several years."
The next Apple TV won't play 4K video
The long-rumored Apple TV update is expected to do many things, including run apps and stream a TV service, but there's one thing it isn't expected to do: play 4K video. A source for BuzzFeed News' John Paczkowski (who's historically accurate with such rumors) claims that Apple's upcoming media hub will stick to 1080p because 4K technology is "still in its infancy."
Caltech wants to equip phones with built-in 3D scanners
Wouldn't it be great if we can use phones to 3D scan every day objects for printing? A research team from Caltech has designed a cheap and tiny camera chip that could make that happen. Even better, the team claims it can take 3D scans so precise, it could lead to "replica[s] accurate to within microns of the original object[s]." The silicon chip called nanophotonic coherent imager (NCI) is less than a millimeter square, so it can fit within actual phones or cameras without the need for extra hardware.
