machines
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Researchers easily breached voting machines for the 2020 election
The voting machines that the US will use in the 2020 election are still vulnerable to hacks. A group of ethical hackers tested a bunch of those voting machines and election systems (most of which they bought on eBay). They were able to crack into every machine, The Washington Post reports. Their tests took place this summer at a Def Con cybersecurity conference, but the group visited Washington to share their findings yesterday.
Robots are learning to carefully peel lettuce leaves
Technology is designed to improve and streamline every facet of life, and that inevitably includes areas most people would never even think about. Such a lettuce peeling. A random issue for many, perhaps, but for the agriculture industry, a new development in this field is a big deal. Researchers from Cambridge University have developed the first robotic lettuce leaf peeling system, which not only demonstrates advances in automation, but addresses increasing food and labor demands.
This is the Modem World: The warm embrace of the machine
Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology. My glasses are about 5 years old. I realized last week that it's probably high time to replace them. Besides, I needed a new contacts prescription and, for all I know, my eyes have completely changed in those short five years. It's also important to mention that my glasses look like they're about 5 years old, so yeah, it was time. I pulled up Yelp and sought out an optometrist in the area who accepted my form of vision insurance. I made my appointment online. I received an email confirmation shortly after. The day before the appointment, I received a robo-call reminding me of the time and location.
MechWarrior Online shows off the Catapault
Picture this scene: You log into MechWarrior Online and you're in the most beautiful map. You don't even want to fight, just enjoy the world around you. Birds are singing, the sun is shining, and there are more than two dozen missiles screaming through the air directly into your 'Mech's head. As your machine detonates, you'll know that you just got served an express load of missiles by the Catapault, a heavy 'Mech designed solely for delivering missiles at long range. Even at 65 tons, the Catapault packs on only 10 tons of armor. That's to conserve weight for its powerful jump jets and twin LRM-15 launchers. If you're not quite down on the game slang, that means this beast of a machine can jump and then unload long-range missiles on targets all across the map at will. Want to see it in action? Click on past the break to view the preview trailer.
MechWarrior Online shows off the Hunchback
The Hunchback is not the prettiest machine in MechWarrior Online. It's not meant to be, and quite frankly, it doesn't need to be. This little 50-ton machine is all about taking hits and giving back as good as it gets. It's a classic design for showing off what a medium 'Mech can do, and it's also the subject of the newest video from the staff at Piranha Games. Solidly in the middle of the spectrum of weights, the Hunchback boasts a sizable amount of armor for its frame and a respectable speed as well. Its armaments might seem light at first, but the AC/20 mounted in its shoulder provides a great deal of punch, and the lasers on its arm and head can carve opponents up in short-range engagements. Take a look at the trailer just after the break to see the machine in action -- even if it's not pretty in stills, its performance more than makes up for looking a little ungainly.
Suzumo SushiBot pumps out 300 Kwik-E-Mart rolls per hour (video)
We tend to avoid scooping up sushi whenever there's no chef in sight -- at, say, a grocery store, or a gas station -- but we've always assumed there was a human cranking out maki somewhere behind the scenes. If Suzumo's SushiBot makes it to the production line, that may no longer be the case. The compact machine doesn't exude beauty in the traditional sense, but what it lacks in elegance it easily makes up with efficiency. The contraption can plop down rice clumps for nigiri at a rate of 3,600 per hour, and -- perhaps even more impressively -- it can construct one complete sushi roll every 12 seconds, with some human assistance to place fish on the rice. We tend to like the imperfect handmade feel of the traditional Japanese delight, and we're surely not alone, so don't expect to see one these pop up in your neighborhood Asian eatery. Supermarkets, hospitals and airline caterers may be more likely to pick up a SushiBot, however. Hungry? Intrigued? Roll past the break to see how it works.
DARPA's 'Avatar project' aims to give soldiers surrogate robots, make James Cameron proud
In a fevered mash up of blockbuster films directed by James Cameron, DARPA is looking to put soldier controlled bi-pedal robots on the battlefield. Think Terminator meets Avatar. The agency has set aside $7 million of it's $2.8 billion 2012 budget to develop an "Avatar program" that will "develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier's surrogate." DARPA isn't talking about simple remote control rigs, either -- these 'bots are being designed to clear rooms, and facilitate sentry control and combat casualty recovery. The new budget also sets aside $4.1 million to design laser countermeasures to protect military weapons, well, lasers -- ensuring that the future's robot soldiers will be nigh indestructible when they rebel against their human hosts.
Scientists develop blood swimming 'microspiders' to heal injuries, deliver drugs
Scientists at Penn State would like to release tiny spiders into your blood -- no, it's not the premise for a new horror movie, but rather, it's a medical breakthrough. The spider-like machines are less than a micrometer wide (just so you know, a red blood cell is around six to ten micrometers), and are designed to travel through veins delivering drugs and a little TLC to damaged areas -- not a totally new concept, per se, but even minor advancements can open up all sorts of new doors for troubled patients. Made of half gold, half silica, these microspiders are self-propelled by a molecule called the Grubbs catalyst, which scientists can control directionally using chemicals. Although still in the preliminary phases, lead researcher Ayusman Sen hopes to one day attach the creepy crawlers to nanobots, which could maneuver through the body to detect tumors, helping the immune system and scrubbing vessels clean of plaque. Not like that's doing anything to diffuse your arachnophobia, but hey...
New Bounty Hounds Online trailer shows off man versus machine
If you're not one of the lucky people who got in to our Bounty Hounds Online beta giveaway, you might be sitting around wishing for another dose of the game's visual style. It's certainly a rarity to see the sort of heavily mechanized futuristic setting that the game puts forth, after all. But you're in luck -- there's a new trailer available that shows off more of the gameplay as well as several of the game's mechanized companions. Highlighting several mercenaries going toe-to-toe with an enormous walking tank, the trailer shows off some of the game's promised action and versatility, complete with transforming animal companions and a whole lot of firepower. Players will be taking part in the clean-up operation on a planet at the heart of an interstellar war, with other mercenaries acting as simultaneous allies and threats. Check the trailer just past the break for a fresh helping of science fiction action in all its screaming explosive glory.
The Game Archaeologist jacks into The Matrix Online: Your memories
What can you trust when your memories are merely the by-product of intelligent machines tinkering with your brain? When you come right down to it, who's to say that our alleged recollections of The Matrix Online weren't just computer viruses uploaded into our cerebral cortexes -- and that the game never existed at all? Real or not, The Matrix Online is in no danger of being forgotten. Whether it's because of the meta setting, the too-hip-to-stay-on-cows fashion, or the interactive stories, MxO never fails to evoke passionate testimonies. After speaking with developer Ben Chamberlain last week, today we're going to turn the tables on the players themselves to see what they have to say. Was The Matrix Online really all that and a bag of computer chips? Was it merely a good-looking graphical chat room or something more? And how will it be remembered many years from now when we sit our grandchildren on our laps and tell them about how we took the blue pill? Or was it red... I can never remember!
Tenacious robot ashamed of creator's performance, shows mankind how it's done (video)
Looks like researchers have made another step towards taking Skynet live: giving robots the groundwork for gloating. A Swiss team of misguided geniuses have developed learning algorithms that allow robot-kind to learn from human mistakes. Earthlings guide the robot through a flawed attempt at completing a task, such as catapulting a ball into a paper basket; the machine then extrapolates its goal, what went wrong in the human-guided example, and how to succeed, via trial and error. Rather than presuming human demonstrations represent a job well done, this new algorithm assumes all human examples are failures, ultimately using their bad examples to help the 'bot one-up its creators. Thankfully, the new algorithm is only being used with a single hyper-learning appendage; heaven forbid it should ever learn how to use the robot-internet.
The Game Archaeologist jacks into The Matrix Online: The highlights
It's not every year that a movie comes along that captures the pop culture zeitgeist so powerfully and so quickly as The Matrix did. I recall lugging a few college friends along to see this in 1999 -- having heard only a few sparse details about it beforehand -- and coming out of the theater feeling as if we we'd been electrified. The bold mix of science fiction, martial arts, philosophy, action, and leather ensembles became the smash hit of the year, and a franchise was born. And while we had great hopes that this would be this generation's Star Wars, The Matrix ultimately proved to be a lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon, impossible to recapture once unleashed. Sequels, animated shorts, video games, comic books -- none rose to the height of the original film, and eventually the franchise petered out. During this period, an odd duck of an MMO was born: The Matrix Online. When you think about it, an online virtual world where people log in and fight against programs was a really short hop from the movie series. MxO, as it was abbreviated, was an audacious game with unique features, story-centric gameplay and a sci-fi bent in a field of fantasy competitors, and while it only lasted four years, it was enough to make a huge impression for its community. So by popular demand, this month we're going to revisit the 1s and 0s of The Matrix Online to see just how deep the rabbit hole (and well-worn cliche) goes -- and what made this game stand out!
Macworld Expo 2011: SuperSync sticks with what it knows
SuperSync had a nice booth at last week's Macworld Expo 2011 conference. In addition to a demo of the software on our livestream, we also chatted with the developer about how SuperSync (which allows you to share and view multiple iTunes libraries across PCs and platforms) was doing lately. The most recent version is 4.01, a bug fix release that also added the ability to browse video across libraries and support for multiple formats. SuperSync is not a cloud service; it's designed to control and view actual files across multiple computers rather than keep them up to date with a cloud server elsewhere. You can listen to music stored on other iTunes libraries with the app, but its main job is to keep everything current in all of the places it's installed on a network. Cloud syncing is something SuperSync is looking at, and backup storage is "one area we're going to keep looking at," according to the dev. For now, the purpose of SuperSync is to sync, not store. If Apple does announce a cloud-based iTunes solution this year, SuperSync will likely find a way to work outside of it. Finally, I asked if the developer was looking at releasing SuperSync in the Mac App Store. It's being considered, though there are a few obstacles. Licensing is one; SuperSync sells two-license packs for US$25, and those are meant to be installed on multiple computers, possibly including a Windows PC. It's unclear how that would work on Apple's Mac App Store platform. Plus, the app "uses a lot of Java, so I'm not sure if we would qualify" for approval in the store in the current build. Still, getting featured by Apple would give the app a big advantage (a statement we heard from multiple developers last week), so it's a possibility, remote as it may be.
Report: Foxconn making 1.5 iPhones per second
137,000 iPhones per day. That's how many manufacturer Foxconn is reportedly making these days, its chairman tells the press. That's an amazing figure adding up to 50 million iPhones every single year, even as Apple struggles to keep enough hardware in stock. And the process isn't easy, either -- chairman Terry Gou says that the company found out it needed a certain machining rig usually designed only for prototyping in order to stay in line with Apple's strict manufacturing standards. Foxconn ended up buying over 1,000 of the machines at $20k each, even while other manufacturing companies are buying just one. It's crazy to think about the scale of the operation over there -- not just the equipment, but the workers and organization required to churn out that kind of product. And sadly, it appears the pressure is still on for the company, as we've seen multiple times before. Apple is setting records over here on this side of the world with the iPhone's sales numbers, and it's sometimes easy to forget that behind all of that, there's an industrial machine churning out product by the millions. [via HardMac]
Twitter-powered robotic popcorn machine: media snacker deluxe
Reading people's annoying "I'm eating such-and-such" tweets gets pretty tiring (though we're just as guilty as the next guy when we have a particularly impressive petit four). Someone with even more time on their hands than us had taken it upon themselves to make a little contraption that, it could be argued, increases Twitter's usefulness just a little. Popcorn Tweets (as it's called) was built using Lego's Mindstorm NXT and is powered by Labview software. Triggered by a #popcorn tweet, the machine's motor is driven by a belt which turns an Archimedes' screw, which in turn moves a kernal of unpopped corn from the hopper to the popper. Of course, you could always just get a bag of Orville Redenbacher's microwave corn, but then... where's the fun in that? The semi-annoying video is after the break.
EATR robots are coming, this isn't funny anymore
Oh sure, we joke about rogue AI all the time, and we're aware that we'll probably pollute ourselves to death well before the robots get us, but who really thinks flesh-eating machines are a good idea? The (patently evil) scientists behind the EATR project -- no fair, they're making their own jokes now too -- have reached a new milestone in the development of the reconnaissance bot, successfully coupling a steam generator with a compact biomass furnace. It is now therefore possible for an autonomous machine to forage for and refuel itself with biomatter, otherwise known as soft, pulsating, yummy humans. They call it fuel versatility, as gasoline, diesel, and solar power may also be used if available, yet we'll offer no prizes for predicting which energy source these chainsaw-equipped robots will prefer. [Via Switched]
A tale of geek purgatory
What's it like being stuck in the Japanese equivalence of a Korean cybercafe? Apparently, it's like hell, or at least it was for one gamer who wrote an article on Eurogamer discussing his several-hours within just such a place. We began reading the article with a twinge of inner pain as the place is described in such a way that would make anyone feel claustrophobic. Not very far into it though, you'll learn about some of the oddities of Japanese MMO players and their tendancy to be really, well, obsessive compulsive.We're not gonna lie, the typical Japanese MMO game and player scares the living daylights out of us -- mostly because they seem like machines. And we all know what happens when machines start posing as humans, right? The entire world is either bombed, or the human race is enslaved and sent back into time repeatedly until a paradox destorys time itself. Bad stuff.
This is what loving geeks looks like
Who doesn't love geeks, really? But do you love them enough to play a game about building Rube Goldberg machines in order to defeat bullies and impress the ladies? Well then, you should check out the upcoming DS title I Love Geeks. You might be wondering what a game filled with Rube Goldberg puzzles even looks like (we were). Well, we're answering that question for you right here, right now, with some gallery screens to check out.To a history major like this blogger, I Love Geeks looks a bit daunting in its concepts. Hopefully our love for geeks will be enough to overcome any challenges the game has to throw at us. Who knew that geeks could be so intimidating?%Gallery-27588%
Geeks love The Incredible Machine
Oddly enough, Midway's Mechanic Master won't be the only Incredible Machine knockoff coming to the American DS. I Love Geeks is a localized version of Clever DS, the Rube Goldberg-building game based on the German TV show of the same name. The American version, published by CDV, will have a new story from ... Marc Ecko and his team? When we think "geek," we definitely think of hip-hop-influenced fashion designer Marc Ecko.Geeks has some storyline about assisting four scientists to solve puzzles while also dealing with high school bullies or something, but basically it's 100 puzzles requiring machines built out of specific parts to solve various simple problems. Awesome!
Mechanic Master looks incredible
Midway has announced a new DS game that should grab the attention of any fan of Dynamix's classic The Incredible Machine series. Mechanic Master from Most Wanted Entertainment follows the same format: solve simple puzzles by stringing together household objects into Rube Goldberg machines. The touchscreen-based game, formerly called Contraptions, also features some items that didn't quite make it into The Incredible Machine, like robots and portals.In addition to 100 premade puzzles, you'll have the ability to assemble your own machines and puzzles and share them over Wi-Fi. There have been a couple other Incredible Machine-alikes on the DS, but this one has one very important difference: it's coming out in October in the U.S.
