Tech News

Have You Been Buying CDs This Whole Time?

How many CDs did you buy in the last 15 years? Because if you bought some, and you bought them from Amazon they’re about to show up in your Amazon music cloud. But, uh… has anyone been buying them? Starting today, Amazon is offering free digital copies of CDs purchased since 1998, plus new ones…

The Five Best Phones of CES 2013

Compared to years past, CES 2013 was pretty light on phones. The focus was more on health/fitness gadgets and 4K UHD TVs. But among the few phones at the show, we some good ones. Here are the top five. ZTE Grand S The hardware of the ZTE Grand S is really lovely. It’s extremely thin…

Leave Our Awesome Dinosaur Stampedes Alone

For years, people were perfectly happy believing that the series of fossilized footprints in Australia’s Lark Quarry was all that remained of an epic dinosaur stampede. Then Science happened. According to dream-killing researchers from the University of Queensland, the tracks were actually being misread for years; these fossils aren’t from a sudden prehistoric exodus but…

Foursquare just added detailed check-in pages for mobile web users—your adoring fans can now hunt you down with ease.

The Gadgets of the Future From the Electrical Shows of Yesterday

Postcard from the Chicago Electrical Show circa 1908 [Source: Novak Archive] The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which concluded last week in Las Vegas, is where the (supposed) future of consumer technology gets displayed. But before this annual show debuted in 1967, where could you go to find the most futuristic gadgets and appliances? The answer…

Apple’s App Store Is Finally Cracking Down on the Screenshot Scam

After years of complaints, scams, and careless screening tactics, Apple’s App Store is finally starting to figure itself out. The latest update should stop developers from using misleading screenshots by locking them into place once the app gets approved. As one of the most widespread app store hoaxes, developers would upload actual screenshots to gain…

13 Design Trends For 2013

What better way to start the year than to make predictions – some obvious, some not so obvious – as to what trends will become more widely used in the design community. Each year seems to bring new ideas to the community and once they gain enough traction, they eventually become the norm (we’re looking…

Hack Turns Cisco’s Desk Phone Into a Spying Device

Cisco’s internet phones—which sit on thousands of desks around the world—have been shown to be easily hacked and turned into remote spying devices. The official announcement comes two whole weeks after Cisco first found out about the problem. The exploit was discovered by Ang Cui and Salvatore Solfo, a pair of computer scientists from Columbia…

Looks Like People Are Buying Lumias After All

Nokia had higher than expected Lumia sales for its fourth quarter thanks to the release of the Lumia 900 last spring and 920 in September. The company sold 4.4 million handsets, up from 2.9 million in Q3. For perspective, though, Apple sold about 27 million iPhones in the third quarter of 2012, and Nokia is…

Amazon to Provide CD Buyers With Cloud-Based MP3s For Free (Update: It’s Just Launched!)

CNET is reporting that Amazon is planning to launch a reward scheme for CD buyers. When they purchase music in its physical form, they’ll also receive a digital copy, which they’ll be able to listen to via Amazon’s cloud music service. Update: The service is now live! See below for more details Codenamed “Auto Rip”,…

What Is This? (Answer)

It is in fact, none other than that famous mathematical constant Pi. The image is a “walk” made out of the first 100 billion digits of pi, in base 4. Starting at the origin, each digit forced a point to move in one of four directions: a 0 made the point move right, a 1…

Convert an Old Game Boy Into an Android Gamepad

If for some reason you still have an original Game Boy lying around, the time has surely come to throw it out—or, perhaps, convert it into an Android gamepad to relive that retro gaming feel. That’s exactly what Chad Boughton decided to do, and he describes the process on Instructables: Using a Wii remote as…

Anonymous Wants DDoS Recognised as an Official Form of Protest

The Anonymous hacking collective has petitioned the White House, using the US government’s open forum to ask for DDoS attacks to be registered as an official form of complaint – and requesting the convictions of previous DDoS attackers be wiped from their records. The petition does make some sense. Anon claims that a DDoS attack…

What Is This?

This ragged cloud of color looks messy and unstructured—but in fact it’s a rare and unusual view of one of the most fundamental things in science. Can you work out what it is? Sadly for you, we’re going to let you puzzle over the answer for a little while. To stop you all going round…

Forget Pantone, Here’s Beertone

Who cares what color the walls are when there’s beer in front of you? That’s exactly what the guys between Beertone thought, when they decided to put together a color chart that takes you on a journey through the entire spectrum of beer. Beertone explains: The bright beers will start the guide ending with the…

WSJ: Schmidt Is Giving North Korea What For

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Eric Schmidt isn’t being backward at coming forward during his trip to North Korea. In fact, he’s been challenging officials over global Internet access, nuclear-development, and US detainees. https://gizmodo.com/eric-schmidt-actually-landed-in-north-korea-now-what-5973865 The Journal reports that Schmidt was keen to point out the economic disadvantages that a censored internet brings: “As…

Polaroid’s New Android Tablets Might Give Nexus Some Stiff Competition

Polaroid has announced a new pair of Android tablets at CES. Their most obvious selling point is super-low pricing—but will their performance be able to stand up to the competition? There are two new tablets—predictably, a 7-incher (M7) and a 10-incher (M10)—and when we say price is a big draw here, we really mean it.…

This Picture Makes Manhattan Look Like a Video Game

This isn’t a computer simulation of New York. In fact, it’s a 3D panorama that was stitched together from multiple shots taken during a helicopter ride—and the result is beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that when photographer Sergey Semonov submitted the image to the Epson International Photographic Pano Awards, it took first prize in the…

Apple Cuts the Price of Thunderbolt Cables

Apple has decided to cut the price of its exorbitantly priced Thunderbolt cables. Its 2-meter cable has fallen in price from a painful $50 to an only-slightly-more-palatable $40. It has also started selling a new, shorter Thunderbolt cable—measuring 0.5 meters—which costs $30. Less reason to buy those cheap knock-off cables, at least. [9to5mac]

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile will all offer RIM’s new BB10 devices—the first of which will be announced January 30th.