UR Tech
UR Tech
UR Tech: Password perils
Well, the numbers are in. The winner of this year’s most popular computer password is the incredibly secure and unguessable combination 123456. I wish I was kidding. I’m not. Everyone’s favorite six numbers are followed closely by “password,” “qwerty” and “1234678.” Slightly less popular favorites include “baseball” (no. 8) “letmein” (13) and relative newcomer “batman” […]
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UR Tech: Moonshots–Business or charity?
The tech industry is nothing if not obsessed with big spending. Multibillion dollar purchases of startup companies and peripheral technologies have abounded over the last few years, making headlines with their stories of eccentric CEOs and explosive industries, all in the skeptical tone of a non-geek reporter silently questioning how any company selling text messages […]
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UR Tech: At Pirate Bay, the ship has sunk
It appears the ship has sailed. Or sunk, as it were. On Tuesday morning, the server rooms of the massive peer-to-peer torrent site The Pirate Bay were raided by Swedish police, and the site has been down ever since. Long toted as the “most resilient website on the internet,” the Pirate Bay has a long […]
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UR Tech: Globalizaing internet
Getting internet to a country that barely has running water can be a tough problem. Cell phones have proven to be less of one – even in the most underdeveloped nations, cell ownership is rapidly expanding for communications and basic networking tasks. A similar expansion of internet access to poor regions has been targeted by […]
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UR Tech: Hacking, easy as pi
I find trying to explain my work at family reunions to be a weird affair. Some relative or other will inevitably ask about my hobbies, and then the conversation usually goes something like this: “Oh, I do a lot of work with the Raspberry Pi.” They look at me quizically. “The raspberry…. pie.” “Yeah, that. […]
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UR Tech: Better with brain power
When you ask which is the better thinking machine, a brain or a computer, it stands to reason you’ll get different answers depending on whom you ask. For a biologist, the question is obvious. The brain is a miracle of evolution, with over 100 billion neurons and another hundred trillion connections working in parallel to […]
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UR Tech: Bridging the Uncanny Valley
You’ve probably heard of the Uncanny Valley effect. You may have seen it personally in animated films such as “The Polar Express” or “Mars Needs Moms,” which repulsed viewers around the world with unnatural marionettes posing as human beings. You may have found examples in an embarrassingly huge range of videogames, where a generation of […]
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UR Tech: Artificial Intelligence, smarter than you think
It’s a standard Terminator rip-off. A swarm of tiny glittering spiders, explained early in the film by a naive scientist as a means of deconstructing sewer clogs, have gone rogue. Like a swarm of ants, the tiny robots move in eerie concert to achieve tasks impossible for the individual: opening doors, flooding through vents, and […]
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UR Tech: The securities and insecurities of government surveillance
In many ways, last year’s NSA leak was a tipping point in the public perception of conflict between personal privacy and national security. Sentiments against government overwatch programs had persisted for years, of course, spurred on by the Patriot Act and whispers of government wiretaps on U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism. But it wasn’t until […]
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UR Tech: That ‘one weird trick’ behind flashy headlines
This week’s column was supposed to be on technological telepathy. A few weeks back there was a story in the news about a neural link that had been established between a study group split between India and France, where the words “hola” and “ciao” had been transmitted digitally from one subject’s brain to another. Headlines […]
