Author: Kyle VanHemert

Online retail is nothing new, but now brick and mortar stores want to get in on the high-tech action. The New York Times has a disquieting look at new technologies that will make you shop ’til your signal drops.

Take, for example, Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, which recently implemented a system called ScanLife that allows shoppers to find more information on products from their smart phones. So far, so good. But ScanLife also lets shoppers buy those products from their phones, even when seen in passing in a display window, even when the store is closed. Impulse buying just got a whole lot more impulsive.

Sure, ScanLife will certainly make physical shopping more convenient, but you have to wonder if it’s going to make shopping too convenient.

Whereas ScanLife could make it dangerously easy for you to spend your money, another system called Presence, developed by IBM, could make it downright annoying to do so. Presence tracks you as you walk through the store and reminds you of things you might have forgotten you wanted to buy. By way of example, the Times article describes a trip to the supermarket in which Presence beams coupons to your phone in real time as you walk through the aisles and suggests items that would go well with the one you just put in your cart.

Of course, shoppers will have the option of using these new systems; no one is going to force you to augment your shopping. But at the same time, the internet age has a way of sweeping people up into using new technologies, even when the headaches equal the benefits. Presence could let you pinpoint an item’s location in an unfamiliar grocery store, but would this capability be worth it if it came at the price of shopping with an overbearing digital assistant?

The article mentions Crate & Barrel and Walmart specifically as companies who are interested in these types of systems, but you can be sure that all major retailers are considering software that let you use your gadgets to spend more money on their products. Still, I imagine that many people will be content keep on window shopping the old-school way, without their phones and without their credit cards. [New York Times]

Yesterday the Department of Defense released a memo outlining the government’s first official policy for social media access by military personnel. Somewhat surprisingly, it gives them unrestricted access to blog, Tweet, poke and ping just like everyone else.

Effectively immediately, Department of Defense personnel across the board, including civilian employees and troops alike, have full access to popular new media sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest.

Before the new policy was announced, appropriate internet usage was determined individual commanders, many of whom barred those in their charge from posting on blogs or accessing social media networks.

Of course, there are still some measures in place to ensure that new media activity doesn’t take up bandwidth when it’s limited or compromise mission security—”cleaning my rifle on the john, lol!” is a good troop overshare; “cleaning my rifle before we storm this Taliban bunker in Marjah, lol!” is a bad troop overshare—but the Pentagon’s new policy gives the OK for uses both personal and official.

It’s always heartening when our government shows itself to be forward-thinking on matters of the internet, and allowing DoD employees to use the internet to its full, inane extent is definitely a step in the right direction. There’s no word on the Pentagon’s official Farmville policy at this time, however. [Defense.gov via BusinessWeek and Fast Company]

No one likes getting stuck in traffic, but some roadblocks are better than others. A few of the best: an exceptionally cute string of ducklings; an ice cream truck with a flat tire; a stunning spread of 800 LED-equipped books.

Earlier this week, the books blocked traffic on Water Street in Brooklyn, New York. They were installed by the Spanish design team Luzinterruptus to promote reading, though I’d imagine in reality they just promoted a lot of confused gawking.

The designers explained:

we want literature to seize the streets and become the conqueror of public spaces, freely offering to those who walk by a space free of traffic which for a few hours of the night will succumb to the modest power of the written word.

The line between enticing people to read and forcing them to do so by physically impeding their travel is pretty thin here, but the idea is pretty spectacular nonetheless. [Designboom]

Yesterday we heard that a CDMA version of the Nexus One was approved by the FCC, and now Neowin has word from an anonymous Google employee that the Google phone will land on Verizon on March 23. That’s the day the CTIA wireless convention kicks off and it’s less than a month away; Perhaps a bit sooner than we’d expected, but certainly plausible. [Neowin]

If you want peace and quiet, current technologies require a compromise: settle for thick, unsightly foam or use thinner panels that don’t block bass. A new technology developed in Hong Kong, however, is both super thin and super effective.

The researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Kowloon have made their noise-canceling strides with the simplest of materials: latex and plastic.

The latex is stretched over a grid of plastic squares that’s only 3mm thick, with a small piece of plastic in the middle of each square. Depending on the weight of that plastic button, the panel can be tuned to cancel out a different frequency. Five of these panels stacked together effectively canceled 70 to 550 hertz and was still only as thick as a ceramic tile.

Technological progress results in a lot of noise—think stereos, airplanes, trucks, and the rest—so it’s good to hear that some researchers are hard at work developing technologies that offer an increasingly rare commodity: silence. [PopSci]

On March 18, at the Baselworld watch show in Switzerland, a vaporous French company called Celsius X-VI-II will unveil the Papillon, a $300,000 mobile phone that is packed with the most advanced micro-mechanics of any gadget ever created.

All of this according to a recent profile in PCMag, one that frankly raises more questions than it answers. In the piece, Celsius co-founder Alejandro Ricart offers a vague picture of his team’s ambition, citing high-end Swiss watches as the inspiration for his company’s ultra-luxury, mechanical mobile phone.

“We want to take the useful functions of the cell phone and try to re-think them, and re-create them in a mechanical way,” he explained. One such suggested mechanism is a kinetic hinge that powers the phone when it’s flipped open and closed shut.

Sascha Segan, PCMag’s reporter, seems pretty enthralled by the whole business, describing the device as a “hand-made art-watch with more than 600 mechanical components, many of which are visible to the naked eye.”

Papillon is French for “butterfly,” an insect that apparently inspired the design of the phone and, when you come to think of it, is sort of a strange little creature in its own right. As you can see, a butterfly floats fleetingly through the teaser clip for the phone.

All of this is quite bizarre and potentially very dumb, like something out of a Dan Brown novel*, and it certainly feels like it could all blow away in a cloud of vapor. The x-ray shown above is the only image of the phone available. But in a genre of gadget that is almost categorically uninteresting to us, this ultra high-end device has piqued our curiosity. [Celsius X VI II via PCMag]

*If Celsius’s shadowy forces silence me for making all of this public, or for ripping the weird promo video from their site without permission, just FOLLOW THE SIGNS.

I spend all day online, but sometimes I like to pretend that I’m doing something exciting out there in the real world. Vectorial Elevation let me control 20 gigantic spotlights in Vancouver. I almost forget I was in my sweatpants.

The site is one component of a telerobotic art installation that includes twenty spotlights scattered along both sides of Vancouver’s English Bay. After you position them in any configuration you please, you can view your handiwork from the feeds of four webcams located at various points nearby.

As the internet is comprised largely of nerds who seek this same illusion, you might have to wait in the queue for a while to take control. But it’s worth it: the spotlights are visible for nearly ten miles, so if you’re stuck at home tonight it could be your best bet for human interaction. Interaction that doesn’t involve chatroulette or your level 60 paladin, anyway. [Vectorial Vancouver via BoingBong]

Music and technology aren’t unfamiliar bedfellows, but the i-Tab offers a unique method for enhancing your guitar with gadgetry: clamp it on. Like a TomTom for tunes, the electronic songbook prompts players with chords and lyrics for thousands of songs.

For hundreds of years guitarists have mastered their instrument with patience and practice. But this is 2010—who has time to practice? The i-Tab accelerates the learning process by offering thousands of dynamic tabs, scrolling chords at any tempo while you stumble your way through the song.

The device has a 5″ touch screen—using your guitar pick as stylus is encouraged—and 4GB of memory to hold the songs, which can be downloaded through a tab store. The company claims there will be 5000 tunes available at launch.

On some songs you can accompany your noodling with backing tracks that can be played over speakers or headphones. And you’ll probably need them—having the i-Tab clamped to your guitar isn’t likely to win you many bandmates. Sure it’ll fast-track your fingerpicking, but at what price.

Well, the price of $199 and looking like a dweeb, as it turns out. Pre-orders are slated to be filled first week in March. [i-Tab via Oh Gizmo]

In today’s Remainders: news that’s breaking. Boxee Beta is available on Apple TV; Symbian^4 rears its ugly head; analysts analyze things and predict cheaper iPhones; Carly Simon reveals who was so vain; and a nation-sized iceberg breaks free in Antarctica.

Boxee On Your Apple Boxy
According to the Boxee blog, Boxee Beta is now available on Apple TV. If you had the Alpha version installed you can just update the Launcher, but if you’re going in fresh you’ll need to go through the atvusb-creator and then follow these instructions. H.264 playback is improved but still doesn’t have the benefit of hardware acceleration. More bad news: no Crystal HD support, yet, though the forums are already clamoring so there’s always hope for the next update. [Engadget]

IBM Improvements
At the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle—sounds like a ton of fun, doesn’t it?—IBM announced a new algorithm that allows machines to process data at crazyfast speeds, reportedly reducing the cost of the dealing with gigantic sets of data by an order of two magnitudes. In a test, the new algorithm crunched through 9TB of data—a process that would normally take about a day—in about the time it’d take to watch one episode of Seinfeld sans commercials. Fast! IBM’s being tight-lipped with the details so no one’s quite sure how or where the improvements were made, but they seem pretty darn excited about it in their press release. So fast, so furious. [Seattle Times]

Symbian…Fore!
Symbian^3 isn’t even supposed to show up until sometime in the fall, but today videos showing a development version of Symbian^4 cropped up and they are none too exciting. You get some transition animations, some largely uninspired widgets, a droopy Dali clock and not much else. Don’t worry too much, though—Symbian^4 won’t be cropping up in its final version for another year or so. That leaves plenty of time for improvement. [SlashGear]

So Vain
Today, one of the most enduring questions in all of pop music came to a close. The subject of Carly Simon’s 1972 song “You’re So Vain” has been a topic of intense speculation since the song’s release, and ever since it came to light that Deep Throat was that one dude, there might not have been a higher profile case of mystery identity. Well, in a rerecorded version of the song, Simon answered the riddle…backwards. Playing the new record in reverse reveals the name of the vain individual to be David. As in David Geffen, the rich, bald fellow who headed Simon’s label, Elecktra, back in the early 70s. Apparently Simon felt the need to immortalize Geffen in song because the exec was giving Joni Mitchell, a labelmate, more attention. So anyway now it’s settled, and no one will think the song is about them again. [The Awl]

Burr!
Oh shit. An iceberg the size of Luxembourg, which, for those who don’t have a handle on their European geography, is about a third larger than Rhode Island, broke free of Antarctica and is now floating about on the southern pole of our planet. The thousand square mile ice cube could have all sorts of consequences down the line, depending on how it moves in the open water. One of them involves messing up the habitat of a huge colony of Emperor penguins that live nearby. Penguins are just about the cutest thing Antarctica has going for it and icebergs are probably among the worst, so this development is unsettling, to say the least. [Times Online]

Netvertible
In an announcement that no one was waiting for, Viliv confirmed the price of their S10 Blade netvertible: $699. Not exceptionally cheap for an Atom-powered, folding Windows 7 netbook with a touch screen. Also, you have to ask yourself: do you really want to be carrying around something that’s proudly marketed as a “netvertible?” Like the type of cars it’s styled after, I imagine the Blade will look nice but lack performance when the going gets tough. [Engadget]

Wow
A study commissioned by the Australian government on the risk of crime in virtual games was recently completed. As games like World of Warcraft and Second Life continue to thrive, and as their real world economies continue to grow, the AU Institute of Criminology thought it was about time to start setting up some guidelines for keeping virtual activity lawful. One particular, unusual aspect of the games that was given a close look: virtual rape. Apparently a Second Life rape in 2007 required Belgian police forces to patrol the online world to prevent further incidents, and several other instances have left authorities unsure of how to respond. Welcome to 2010, my friends. [Slashdot]

Analysis
Analysts, who are hardly ever wrong, are saying that come June Apple is going to announce new iPhones that not only have new features but are cheaper, as well. Analysts are traditionally reliable on these sorts of matters and there is plenty of evidence that Apple’s new iPhone will indeed be cheaper, perhaps even free. Oh wait a moment, I had that confused. No, actually, these are just the idle musings of a Morgan Stanley analyst and there is no evidence that these things will come to pass in June. Sorry about that! [Apple Insider]

In today’s Remainders: Empires. Apple tends to theirs at their annual shareholders meeting; Verizon reinforces their cellular empire for Spring Break action; and the Galactic Empire’s graphic design team faces off with Ole Miss’s new rebel mascot. And more!

It’s a Mascot!
Ole Miss has been without a mascot since 2003, when its Colonel Reb was deemed offensive. A campus-wide vote was initiated to determine the new one, and the University has gravitated towards a Rebel of a different nature: Admiral Ackbar! Star Wars fans shouldn’t get too excited; the Associated Student Body President said that the campaign is only “comic relief.” Too bad, the thought of Red Squadron-replica football helmets running around on ESPN had me pretty excited. [Washington Post]

We All Live In An Autonomous Submarine
Today PopSci shares a report on Gulper, an autonomous submarine that can plan its own experiments. “Cool,” you say, but in reality it’s not quite as exciting as it sounds—Gulper basically just makes small decisions within the confines of a preprogrammed task to get things done more efficiently. Submarines have been zipping around on their own for a while now, so it’s gonna take a little bit more autonomy to impress us. [PopSci]

Framed
The “Fancy Alpha” offers you the chance to disguise your unsightly HDTV antenna…as an unsightly picture frame. When there are so many striking, well-designed antennas on the market, why bother? [CrunchGear]

Spring Break Service
Pass the beer bong to Verizon—today the carrier sent out a press release confirming that their Florida network is ready for the Spring Break sexting onslaught:

When droves of college students from around the country hit Florida’s spring break hot spots this year, they can count on the Verizon Wireless 3G network to handle their millions of voice calls, text and picture messages, downloads and more to stay in touch with friends at the next beach party or family back home.

Apparently service wasn’t quite up to snuff last spring break, so in the meantime they spent $240 million on improving the network. Sign of the times if there ever was one. [The Onion PR Newswire]

Hummer Stalls
All over the world, pockets of the environmentally-friendly are partying like the end of Return of the Jedi. What’s the cause for all the celebration? The shuttering of Hummer, of course. The brand, which has long been the most visible signal of everything wrong with our gas-guzzling SUV automotive culture, was supposed to be sold to a Chinese company but the deal fell apart. Eco-friendly and Ewoks alike: cheer on. [CNN]

Spotty Sales
For a while it seemed like the powers that be had agreed to let this Spotify thing happen, but a recent study is sure to make the Brothers Warner and their big-wig cousins raise an eyebrow. It found that on-demand streaming music sites, like Spotify, decreased paid downloads 13 percent. That’s bad enough, but when you look at it in the context of streaming internet radio’s influence on paid downloads—it can boost them up to 41%—Spotify’s future with the big labels looks even dimmer. [CNET]

Shareholders
Apple’s annual shareholder meeting was today, and it didn’t generate much in the way of explosive news. Here’s what was discussed: Apple is sitting on a gigantic pile of cash, something to the tune of $40 billion (this we knew); Apple plans to build 25 stores in China (this we didn’t); some people are pushing for a more environmentally-friendly Apple (a greener Apple, if you will); and one shareholder thinks there should be women on the board (Tipper Gore was suggested). I told you it wasn’t explosive. [Brainstrom Tech]

Loose Lips
Artist Cliff Chang created some adverts for the Galactic Empire in the style of World War II propaganda posters, and, as you can see, they are quite wonderful. I’m sure Palpatine had pro-Empire posters up in every spaceport, but I can’t imagine the Empire’s graphic design team had a style this impressive. [New Launches]

Did you know that your run of the mill keyboard is basically a gigantic apartment complex for bacteria? Gross, no? Thankfully there’s Cleankeys, a keyboard that bulldozes that shit and replaces it with a sleek, sterile touch-sensitive slab.

Wiping a standard keyboard with a disinfecting cloth kills about 5% of bacteria. Cleankeys claims the same test kills 99% of bacteria on their keyboard, simply because they have nowhere to hide.

The wireless keyboard trades actual keys for touch-sensitive ones, so in exchange for a much more sanitary experience you’ll be giving up that satisfying clickity-clack you’ve grown accustomed to. It’s intended for use at hospitals where keyboard-germs are a serious issue, though I’d imagine it might pique the interest of regular old germaphobes too.

The Cleankeys keyboard includes a trackpad for clicking about and uses patent-pending technology to keep it from registering keystrokes when you’re just resting your hands on the thing. That way your doctor doesn’t accidentally diagnose you with alsdfjasgyboxicyuixccccccccc.

A molded model costs $400 and a glass version will run you $50 more. No one said your campaign against germs was gonna be cheap. [Clean Keys Inc]

Microsoft’s Beijing office filed a patent yesterday for an unusual little device with two distinct functions: one side is an inductive charging pad, for, say, a mouse. The other features a tiny built-in display for displaying headlines or sports scores.

Sometimes mash-ups are just right, creating something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes, well, they just plain remain the sum of those parts. This mashed-up peripheral falls somewhere in between.

Though the tiny screen doesn’t look like it’ll be a great boon to your data intake, it should suffice for signaling new Tweets or scrolling the occasional news item. Also nifty is that the device doesn’t hog twice the power: a built-in accelerometer detects which side is in use and reduce the juice pumping to the opposite face.

After Microsoft’s patent showed up on the internet yesterday, people were quick to connect it with months-old photographs of a prototype device given away at Microsoft Research Asia’s 10th Anniversary celebration. Its name: the uPad. Ha!

So the name won’t stick, and it’s not exactly a multi-function powerhouse, but at least Microsoft’s looking to make an inductive charging pad that’s a little bit more than just an inductive charging pad. [Engadget]

In today’s Remainders: the upcoming. The Spring Design E-Reader, soon to be available for presale; 4chan’s mainstream embrace, as signaled by their Jeopardy mention; an idiotic Mall Cop’s impending termination; a backlash to RFID gravestones, and more.

Oh Alex?
We thought the Spring Design Alex ebook reader was a viable threat to the Nook when we got a hands on at CES, but those of you who were waiting patiently for its February 22 preorder date will have to wait a little bit longer. The company’s website is now saying that you’ll be able to claim yours sometime in the first week of March. The last we heard, Alex will go for $359. [SlashGear]

Oh Alex?
I love Jeopardy. I also love Alex Trebek, and I’ve sort of forced myself into this fantasy that he, personally, is the one coming up with all of the answers he puts forward to the Jeopardy contestants every night. So I’m always tickled when something unexpected comes out of his mouth, and last night’s 4chan clue definitely falls into the “unexpected” category. Though after Moot’s TED talk, I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that the internet’s favorite rabble-rousers are hitting the mainstream. What are Lulz, Alex? [Yfrog via Laughing Squid]

Bored Board
If you just can’t keep your fingers off your smartphone, this new USB keyboard from Matias might be the one for you—it features a snug little nook above the arrow keys where your iPhone can hang out while you’re doing some less mobile computing. But before you get ahead of yourself, the keyboard doesn’t actually interact with your phone in any meaningful way: no docking, no syncing, no charging. Basically the Matias keyboard cuddles up to your smartphone all night long without giving it any real lovin’. And that’s a shame. [GeekyGadgets]

Graveyard Tech
There are bad ideas and then there are tasteless ideas, and this one flirts with the latter. RosettaStone is a system that looks to implant tombstones with RFID chips so that particular graves can be located more easily and epitaphs read wirelessly. I’m all about new technology making our lives more effective and more efficient, but in this case I’d certainly prefer the old-school hardware. True, tombstones don’t last forever, but you can bet your ass that RFID won’t either. [SlashGear]

SSD and Y-O-U
We’ve explained in some detail why you should be craving an SSD, but for those of you who prefer pictures to words, check out the bit of this MacWorld video on SSDs in the MacBook Pro that starts at 3:36: a split screen comparison showing a regular old MacBook opening ten applications simultaneously versus and SSD-equipped MacBook doing the same task. As you can likely imagine, the SSD MacBook tears through that shit like Grease Lightnin’ while the standard MacBook is left in the dust, dock icons bouncin’. [MacWorld]

Oh Mall Cop
Oh Mall Cop, you’ve really outdone yourself this time. In your ongoing quest to purge the mall of all wrongdoing, you found a man who was taking pictures of a small child and accused him of being a pedophile. You threatened to arrest him for creating a disturbance, and you demanded that he delete the relevant picture off his camera. But wait, the accused was actually the child’s father. Oh Mall Cop. [BoingBoing]

Felicity
Before Star Trek or Alias or Lost, the esteemed JJ Abrams worked on a little show called Felicity. Now I didn’t watch this show, but I’ve always been a little intrigued by it, mostly from reading about its bizarro fourth season which introduced time travel into the otherwise totally normal teen drama. Apparently that time travel involved jumping to sometime in the second quarter of 2010, because the Felicity characters, as seen in this clip, are totally overwhelmed by the huge selection of computers they have to choose from, including the iPad. Parenthetically, if anyone actually watched Felicity and can explain what exactly that time travel business is all about, feel free to report in the comments. [Macenstein]

Downfall‘s Downfall
If you’ve been waiting patiently for the Wall Street Journal to write a thousand word bit about the “Hitler getting angry about things” YouTube meme, well, today’s your lucky day. In a lengthy entry in the Arts & Entertainment section, the writer traces the precedent, the influence, and the current state of the popular Downfall reworkings, a few of which we’ve featured here on Giz over the years. If you were ever wondering how to determine the exact moment at which an Internet phenomenon has run its course, I’d say in this case it’s right. about. now. [WSJ]

Before Twitter existed, the term “tweeter” didn’t describe a person but rather a thing—the part of the speaker that reproduced high frequencies. Philips’ new MCi900 and MCD900 hi-fi stereos let theirs hang out for the world to see.

Before you get too excited, take note the pretty new systems were announced by Philips’ Spanish division and will likely never make it to American soil. That’s too bad, because there’s a lot to long for:

The MCi900 and MCD900 have CD players and USB ports for taking in your tunes and a nice big color display for navigating through them. The MCi900 model has Philips’ Streamium technology which lets you listen to Internet radio or stream songs wirelessly from your computer, and it also includes a 160GB hard drive for storing all that music on board.

But the systems’ most striking features are their SoundSphere speakers, which have bodies made out of a single piece of aluminum and include the unique floating tweeter design which supposedly delivers a more natural sound.

There’s no word on how much they’ll cost yet, but that’s probably for the best. Even if they were in your price range, you wouldn’t be able to get your hands on them anyway. [Engadget]

We love figuring out how things work, but in the case of this video—a bizarre musical performance involving disembodied holographic heads—it’s probably better to just behold. OK, fine, speculate how they did it in the comments. [Make]

If you have a pair of hard-soled shoes, two pressure-sensitive LED tiles, and some baby mama drama from which you need to extricate yourself, let this Instructable be your guide and recreate the special-FX steps from Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”

Admittedly, I’m not sure how easy it would be to do any sort of dancing with a gigantic LED tile attached to each foot. But when you’re standing still, and being viewed from the knee down, you will be the spitting image of the King of Pop.

The Instructable covers all the bases, from assembling the light-up squares to spray-painting the shoes just so. Be forewarned, though, these imitation shoes will make you just as irresistible to women as Jackson was (circa 1983):

You will get a lot of attention from people, people will dance around you on the dance floor, and you will feel a bit shallow, but you love it!

The best chat up line possible is to ask someone to join you on your dance floor so they stand/dance on your tiles, which puts them basically on top of you. Enjoy! Do not use these shoes for evil!

So there it is, plain and simple: don’t go around breaking young girls’ hearts. [Instructables]

In today’s Remainders: solutions! Solutions for distilling water vapor into drinkable water; keeping your lunch warm with only a USB port; beaming an entire Springsteen album to your phone in under 10 seconds, and more.

Wossy
Jonathan Ross, a UK television personality, isn’t the first person you’d expect to deliver the latest news on Microsoft’s Project Natal, but we’ll take what we can get. Apparently he’s had some time to play around with the system and likes what it has to offer:

OK. Before bed. Natal on X Box impressive. Not quite there yet i think but tye have til october and if they get it right…skys the limit.

Of course we’ve known that the sky is the limit with Natal, but the Tweet also serves to confirm what we’ve heard before in terms of release date—Microsoft is shooting for a Fall launch, sometime in October or shortly thereafter. Get ready to look silly. [Engadget]

Intel Intel
In an annual filing with the SEC, Intel revealed that they, too, were the target of advanced cyber attacks early this year. The relevant section of the report read:

We regularly face attempts by others to gain unauthorized access through the Internet to our information technology systems by, for example, masquerading as authorized users or surreptitious introduction of software. These attempts, which might be the result of industrial or other espionage, or actions by hackers seeking to harm the company, its products, or end users, are sometimes successful. One recent and sophisticated incident occurred in January 2010 around the same time as the recently publicized security incident reported by Google.

A NYTimes source confirmed that they were not only at the “same time” but were in fact part of the same wave of attacks that struck Google back in January. No need to feel sheepish, Intel, plenty of companies got attacked in that last go around. [NYTimes]

No Wires Nokia
Nokia’s no stranger to concepts, and the newest video from their Nokia Research Center fits the usual bill: pretty exciting and only partially explained. The Explore and Share concept shows a system in which a portable device—in this case a Nokia N900—interacts with a retail kiosk wirelessly by being placed on a small “writer.” Here’s where the magic happens. The kiosk registers the n900 almost instantly, and, using a “new radio technology,” is able to beam an entire Bruce Springsteen album to the device in under ten seconds. That’s fast! Faster than NFC and Bluetooth 3.0, as Engadget points out. Concepts have the tendency to, you know, stay conceptual, but this type of snappy, functional wireless technology is something we’d be happy to see more of in the future. And the Boss? More of him in the future, too, please. [Engadget]

Net Some Water
Dropnet, a concept designed by Imke Hoehler, is a system of large polypropylene nets that snatch droplets from water vapor clouds and distill them into potable water. They not only provide low-infrastructure areas with drinkable water but also lend the hillsides on which they’re installed an exotic Avataresque vibe, so they’re doubly fine by me. [DesignBoom]

Lunchtime
Apparently Thanko’s last USB-powered lunchbox was enough of a hit to warrant an upgrade—two, in fact—and today they’ve delivered, piping hot to our desks, two new “Hot Lunch Bag” devices. You have the compact model, which is basically a rehash of the older design, but now there is also the “super slim,” a more space-efficient USB-powered hot lunch solution that looks like a pencil case and slips conveniently into your laptop bag. Because if there’s any word I’d use to describe keeping my lunch plugged in to my laptop, it’s convenient. [CrunchGear]

Details continue to trickle out about Lower Merion School District, their MacBook loan program, and the unsavory security practices they used to keep those computers safe. The latest: the school-supplied MacBooks were required for classes and students could not use their own personal machines in their place. Worse yet, it was impossible to disable the laptops’ iSight cameras and attempting to circumvent the school’s security software was grounds for expulsion. Yeeps.

All of this information comes courtesy of two security researchers, “Stryde” and Aaron Rhodes, who have pored over the relevant LMSD materials and even gone so far as to reverse-engineer LANRev, the snooping software Lower Merion installed on its computers.

Of course, the people behind LANRev are now trying to distance themselves from the school district as much as possible—”We discourage any customer from taking theft recovery into their own hands,” their head of marketing explained—even though Mike Perbix, Lower Merion’s network technician, was featured prominently in a LANRev promotional video from 2008.

Of course, not everyone’s taking the matter so darn seriously. A parody t-shirt, pictured above, is now making the rounds, which you can find on Zazzle. [StrydeHax via BoingBoing]