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January 25 2012
To Thwart Hackers, New Security Software Makes Hacking Tedious
Mykonos’s motto is two-fold.
When you think of protecting a website from hackers, the first thing that comes to mind is probably blocking them out. But what if you just let them on a wild-goose chase, feeding them nuggets of false information and leading them down dead-ends until they get fed up and go do something else?
That’s the strategy behind Mykonos Software‘s security program, which takes a “step right in, let me fetch you a cup of tea and bore you to tears” approach to protection. The tool identifies individuals who are running common searches for security weaknesses on a site, logs their information, and continues to play them for suckers by dribbling out a breadcrumb trail that appears to yield passwords and other tasty vulnerabilities, but ultimately leads nowhere. CEO David Koretz explained to Tom Simonite at Tech Review the various ways in which the software plays with attackers:
A scan that might usually take five hours could take 30, Koretz says. Other tactics include offering up dummy password files, which can help track an attacker when he or she tries to use them. “We’ll let them break the encryption and present a false login ...
January 04 2012
Microsoft Patents a Way to Tell You Where Not To Go
Anyone who’s journeyed on foot through a strange city can confirm that there’s a lot maps don’t show. For instance, whether it would be a really bad idea to wander through certain neighborhoods with an expensive camera around your neck. Or whether there’s a low-lying neighborhood that will be about 3 degrees cooler than it is everywhere else. Those kinds of things.
Though you won’t find that variety of information on Google Maps’ walking directions, you might soon see it on Bing Maps. Microsoft has just received a patent on a method for incorporating information like violent crime statistics into walking directions, so users could choose a specific rate of crime that they are personally comfortable with when planning a route (bike gangs, OK, murders, no). Other layers of information, like temperature measurements or falling-apart sidewalks, could also make appearances.
A tool like that will have plenty of users, though you know people are going to be disgruntled when their favorite neighborhoods get slapped with a D for dangerous (prepare yourself for an Internet freakout, Microsoft). What we’re really looking forward to, though, is a layer that routes you past all the grocery stores with free ...
January 03 2012
The Suit That Makes You Feel 75 Years Old
And reeeach for the shredded wheat…
Pregnancy suit, meet age suit. Just as scientists in Japan made a suit full of balloons, warm water, and accelerometers to give men a sense of what pregnancy feels like, scientists at MIT have put together a suit that simulates being in one’s mid-70s. But it’s a little easier to see the applications with this one. By 2030, 20% of the American population will be over the age of 65, and if you think these folks are going to willingly weather a world designed by and for hyperactive 26-year-old yoga enthusiasts, well, you’ve got another think coming. By putting on this suit, architects, store designers, and other professionals preoccupied the how people interact with the physical world with can get a sense of old age is like, and design accordingly.
And what does old age feel like? According the folks at MIT’s Age Lab, where the suit was developed, like having giant rubber bands keeping your limbs from fully extending, braces that make your arms stiff, a helmet that makes your spine curve uncomfortably, and glasses that make small print hard to read, among other impairments. Just ...
December 27 2011
Hacktivists: Doin’ It For the Lulz Since 1903
Marconi and assistants erecting a radio antenna.
They call themselves hacktivists. Or they say they’re doing it just for the lulz: Some hackers take over sites, swipe users’ information, and then post their exploits online just to make the point that hey, you losers aren’t as safe as you thought you were. Better fix that gaping hole in your electronic chain link fence.
It may seem like the kind of public embarrassment only possible in the networked age (at least, Sony probably remembers the era of the Walkman a lot more fondly than this last mortifying year of being hacked again and again), but as Paul Marks writes in New Scientist, it ain’t necessarily so. Just ask Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless telegraph.
In 1903, Marconi’s assistants in London were prepping for a big demo of their wireless telegraph (aka long-range radio), just like any tech businessmen in the history of technology—setting up the brass lantern projector, getting the telegraph up and running, letting the crowd get nice and excited, you know, the whole shebang. Then, while they’re waiting for their test message to come in from the boss, who’s camped out ...
December 14 2011
Got Wrinkles? Smear on the Hottest New Fashion Toxin…Snake Venom!
Worried about wrinkles, laugh lines, or crow’s-feet adding years to your wizened countenance? Worry no longer, friend—now you can apply synthetic viper venom to your face… for a price. The product, called Syn-Ake, contains a peptide that mimics the effects of Waglerin-1, a toxin found in the venom of the temple pit viper. It works by temporarily paralyzing facial muscles, binding to receptors (called nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) on the muscles and preventing them from being stimulated and contracting. This has the effect of reducing certain small wrinkles in the short term, according to the sole available study on Syn-Ake, performed by the company that markets it, Switzerland-based Pentapharm. And now, according to the Daily Mail, you can buy a tiny bottle of it for only $60 to gingerly bless your wrinkly visage.
It’s the same basic principle as Botox, except that Botox usually involves injection, lasts longer, and is generally more invasive. Both products work by incapacitating a few of the muscles you use to smile, frown, and laugh, which after years of use and tightening create wrinkles by drawing your skin together into folds the way drapes gather along a ...
December 06 2011
Woolly Mammoth Cloned Within Five Years? We’ll Believe It When We Ride It
Japan’s Kyodo News reports that Russian and Japanese scientists will start a project early next year to clone the woolly mammoth. The researchers also confirmed that a well-preserved mammoth thigh bone found in August contains remarkably well-preserved marrow cells.
The team, including researchers from a Siberian mammoth museum and Japan’s Kinki University, plan to extract an undamaged nucleus from the extinct animal’s bone marrow and insert it into the egg of an African elephant, a related animal; if all goes well the elephant could then give birth to a baby mammoth. The team has worked toward cloning the beast for more than a decade but until August, hadn’t found a sufficiently intact source of mammoth DNA (although they did create a copy of mammoth hemoglobin).
What could possibly go wrong? Assuming scientists can extract an undamaged nuclei from tissue that’s been frozen for more than 10,000 years, they then need to successfully insert it into an African elephant’s egg. This won’t be simple, considering that even procuring elephant ova is a challenge, said Japanese researcher Akira Iritani. And the cloning success rate for (non-extinct) animals like cattle is only 30 percent. The cloning technique Iritani plans to ...
November 30 2011
The App That Looks Both Ways for You
The average city street these days sports quite a number of people gazing down into their phones as they walk, unable to tear their eyes from a text or email, or gabbing away to their second cousin while checking their manicure. If you are among those who prefer to walk upright, watching for oncoming semis, you may have noticed that these people don’t look at walk signals to tell when to cross; instead, they wait until their peripheral vision picks up a phoneless pedestrian making a move for it. I am frequently in that pedestrian, and am not above making occasional false starts to watch people jerk like fish on a line. Sorry, folks.
But! A day is coming when these phone addicts may no longer need to watch you from the corner of their eyes to gauge when it’s safe to cross. Scientists at Dartmouth and University of Bologna have built an app that will alert these pedestrians when collision with an oncoming vehicle is imminent with a helpful series of vibrations and chirrups.
The app, called WalkSafe, uses the phone’s built-in camera to watch traffic and apply vision learning algorithms to identify car-like objects, going on to identify the ...
November 29 2011
The Greatest Threats to da Vinci’s “The Last Supper”: Milan’s Dirty Air & Visitors’ Oily Skin
Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” has survived since the late 1400s on a wall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie Church in Milan, weathering centuries of change and intrigue, such as a World War II bombing. Worried about soiling from air pollution in the city, one of Western Europe’s most heavily polluted, curators installed a ventilation and filtration system to protect it in 2009. The system worked well at reducing levels of fine and coarse particulate matter within the church (according to a new study), which should save the painting from worst effects of air pollution.But a significant threat remains: fatty lipids and organic compounds, such as those emitted from the skin of the 1,000 people that visit the painting each day.
Researchers found elevated levels of lipids and organic compounds (including squalane) inside the chapel, compared to outside. These compounds can combine with soot and stick to and soil the painting, says University of Southern California researcher Nancy Daher. These organic compounds come from visitor’s skin, fire retardants, cleaners, and even wax used in earlier restorations of the painting itself. The researchers recommend finding a way to reduce airborne levels of these chemicals, ...
November 10 2011
Angry Birds TMI FTW: Better Gameplay Through Physics
Why just do this, when you can do…
…this, too?
Cranky flightless birds and their green porcine enemies are on every screen these days. But despite the game’s apparent simplicity, it pays to have an expert unpack the fundamental physics of the Angry Birds universe (better gameplay through physics, and all that). That expert is physics prof and graph maker extraordinaire Rhett Allain, whose rationale is summed up thusly in his first Angry Birds post:
But what about the physics? Do the birds have a constant vertical acceleration? Do they have constant horizontal velocity? Let’s find out, shall we? Oh, why would I do this? Why can’t I just play the dumb game and move on. That is not how I roll. I will analyze this, and you can’t stop me.
His latest offering over at Wired delves into what, exactly, is up with those yellow birds, which you can use to smash the piggies’ wooden structures. Turns out they have some iiiinteresting acceleration properties it would behoove you to grok…dig out your high school calculus and check it out.
Images courtesy of Rhett Allain and Wired
October 26 2011
Computer Scientists Crack “Unbreakable” Code, Find Minutes of 250-Year-Old Secret Society
“Curiosity is inherited with mankind. Frequently we want to know something only because it needs to be kept secret.” Astute psychology on the part of this secret society scribe.
With the most powerful computers ever known <insert maniacal laugh>, you’d think that modern codebreakers would have utterly smashed our forefathers’ puny ciphers. Well…no. There are quite a number of antique documents that remain mysterious, despite cryptologists’ best efforts. Code breaking still relies on good guesses and flashes of insight more than brute force.
But brute force and clever statistical analyses can help you unravel whether that guess was right in the blink of an eye, and that’s what let University of Southern California computer scientists and their collaborators unravel the text of a slender brocade-bound manuscript that had kept its secrets since the 18th century. The first words they deciphered? “Ceremonies of Initiation.”
Starting out, the team had no idea what language the enciphered text was. The carefully inscribed gobbledegook included Greek and Roman letters and abstract symbols, and for a long time the team worked on just the Roman letters, but that yielded nothing. As their analysis found that German was, by a hair, the most likely of the 80 languages they’d tested—the team’s primary focus, not incidentally, is automated translation—they tried to see whether the abstract symbols could be standing in for German letters. This gave them their first successes, and in short order they had most of the text deciphered, revealing it to be the rules and rituals of a German secret society of the mid-1700s. A German secret society of the mid-1700s with some very weird fixations.
Potential inductees must attempt to read a blank sheet of paper, and when they fail, they will have hair from their eyebrows plucked by the master of ceremonies. Members must cover their eyes with aprons or their hands during certain ceremonies. The group describes themselves as freemasons, and the rituals make use of mallets, compasses, epees, and other paraphernalia (and lots and lots of candles). A black carpet inscribed with occult signs is spread on the floor during rituals. You know, the whole DaVinci Code drill–except for real. Read the whole thing for yourself here.
Secret societies were all the rage in Europe in the 1700s, but by their own design we have very little information about their political machinations. So while the aprons, eyes, and etc. are titillating, what’s likely to interest historians most is a passage discussing the rights of man. “This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies,” one of the USC computer scientists said in a release. “Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered.”
And there are plenty more unbroken codes out there to be attacked. The team hopes to tackle the Voynich Manuscript (aptly called “the white whale of the code-breaking world” by the NYTimes), the Zodiac killer‘s encrypted messages, and the Kryptos code on a sculpture on the CIA’s grounds—just for starters. Breaking ciphers, apparently, is a good way to procrastinate on developing sophisticated machine translation.
Image courtesy of University of Southern California and Uppsala University
Japan’s Defense Ministry Would Like to Introduce You To Their Little Friend
Just chillin’…before tearing off at incredible speed.
What’s black, spherical, and can run you down at 40 mph? Japan’s mini Death Star, of course.
The hovering drone was demonstrated at a tech expo in Japan recently, zipping around like a hummingbird and showing off its stability, which is maintained by three gyroscopes. Even if it hits a wall or is whacked by a bystander, the thing hardly pauses.
The drone’s possible uses include reconnaissance and rescue, the presenter for the Defense Ministry remarked. The whole thing weighs just 350 grams and was built from commercially available parts at a cost of about $1400.
You heard me—commercially available parts. So what are you waiting for?
[via PopSci]
September 30 2011
Dizzy Discus Throwers, Horny Beer-Bottle Beetles, and the Wasabi Alarm Clock: the 2011 Ig Nobels
Those classy folks at the Annals of Improbable Research are at it again. Last night, they announced the 2011 winners of some of the most coveted awards in science: the Ig Nobels.
You should watch last night’s ceremony in its entirety, but here are (drumroll) the winners:
- First off, in Physiology…from the Cold-Blooded Cognition Lab at the University of Vienna, Anna Wilkinson, Natalie Sebanz, Isabella Mandle, and Ludwig Huber for their paper No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise, published this year in Current Zoology. As it turns out, if one tortoise is yawning, its buddies won’t join in. Not even if you show them movies of yawning tortoises.
- In Chemistry…Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami for determining what concentration of airborne wasabi can awaken sleeping people in case of emergency. They are the inventors of the wasabi alarm, described in US patent application 2010/0308995 A1.
- In Medicine…Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe and Luk Warlop, and Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff for illuminating how an intense need to pee can affect your decision-making capabilities in their papers Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains and The Effect of Acute Increase in Urge to Void on Cognitive Function in Healthy Adults.
- In Psychology…Karl Halvor Teigen for his work in contemplation of the human sigh and its purpose in his paper “Is a Sigh ‘Just a Sigh’? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task.”
- In Literature…John Perry for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, summed up by the Ignobel site as: “To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.” See more in his article How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done.
- In Biology…Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for their work observing that a certain species of beetle will attempt to mate with a specific variety of Australian beer bottles, called “stubbies.” See Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females (Coleoptera) for more.
- In Physics…Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne, Bruno Ragaru, and Herman Kingma for elucidating the cause of dizziness in discus throwers in their paper Dizziness in Discus Throwers is Related to Motion Sickness Generated While Spinning.
- In Mathematics…summed up best by the Ignobel site: “Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.”
- The Peace Prize…Arturas Zuokos, mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for his well-publicized solution for dealing with illegally parked Mercedes. In his words: “It seems that a tank is the best solution.”
- The Public Safety Prize…John Senders for his series of groundbreaking 1967 safety experiments in which a person driving at high speed is repeatedly blinded by a visor flipping down over his face. And it’s all here on video.
Congratulations to the winners! We hope you’ll enjoy your Periodic Table table trophies. Our own experiments with half-drunk cups of coffee and the native fauna of magazine offices were not enough to garner nomination this time around, but we’ll just try harder.
September 28 2011
Newsflash! Scientists Can Use WiFi to Count Your Breaths and Spy on You
I sense a disturbance in the Force…
Swimming through a sea of wireless radio waves is de rigeur these days (in fact, you have to move to West Virginia if you think you’re allergic to them). But your body leaves a wake in that sea, and watching it can let observers count your breaths per minute, says a researcher who surrounded himself with twenty wireless units to test the idea. Cute, right? But it also means someone on the sidewalk can tell from disturbances in the wireless where you are in your house, and track you as you move from room to room. A little less cute.
The paper, which hasn’t been published yet and is available on the ArXiv, looked to see whether the wireless wake the authors had noticed in previous experiments could be used a medical setting to keep tabs on surgical patients, who occasionally stop breathing after procedures under general anesthesia. Computer scientist Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed surrounded by transmitters on the same frequency as WiFi and found that after 30 seconds of calibration, the setup could estimate his breaths per minute with an error of just 0.3 breaths.
Current methods of breath monitoring are already very reliable, though, according to an outside engineer interviewed by New Scientist. But the phenomenon could have use in surveillance. Especially since the team has previously found that a body’s disruption of wireless waves is detectable through walls, making it possible to track people’s movements from outside. It had seemed that keeping still might foil outside observers, but given that a breath appears to be enough movement to be detectable, that escape is no longer possible. Yay?
Image courtesy of kaoticsnow / flickr
September 23 2011
After One Colon-Embedded Bread Clip Too Many, Doctors Provide Design Analysis, Call for Reform
If you swallowed pony beads when you were a kid, you are not alone. So many teeny plastic dooboppies are just crying out to be ingested…and frankly, doctors are tired of all those irresponsible designs. After finding a bread clip in the colon of a patient, several docs have outlined the clips’ “evolutionary heritage” and “species” classification in a new article in BMJ Case Reports, in hopes of prompting someone, anyone, to make one that isn’t the perfect shape for lodging in the digestive nether regions.
The researchers, drawing on several members’ longstanding membership in the illustrious Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, have given each type of bread clip a handy-dandy Latin name. The bread clip genus (?) is Occlupanidae, presumably for its occluding capabilities, while the species names refer to the relative toothiness—one-toothed, two-toothed, etc.—of the types. They also provide a detailed phylogenetic chart showing the evolution from the smooth proto-bread clip to the many-tined versions adorning our bags today.
Twenty case reports of ingested bread clips exist in the literature, they note; surely this detailed description can help elucidate which types pose the greatest threat and inform subsequent public health response. That’s not the largest sample size in the world, but they get points for creativity.
Although omnipresent in the United States, bread clips are apparently not everywhere: On the HORG site, one correspondent notes that in Edinburgh, bread bags appear to be closed with bits of tape. And far from sharing the HORGers’ chagrin that Occlupanidae are not there represented, we see an opportunity for further scientific work. Viscosidae, anyone?
[via Geekologie]
September 21 2011
The Typewriter That Will Mix You a Drink After a Long Day At the Keyboard
Making a living as a writer is tough, but if you can drink your words, everything will start looking up. A maker going by the handle Morskoiboy has built a typewriter with syringes for keys that does just that: each syringe sucks up a different fluid for each letter, runs the fluid through a microfluidic-style screen to display the letter, then drains the fluid, which can be any booze or mixer you like, into a glass.
He gives a detailed explanation of how it works on his blog, but here’s the crux: When you push down on a key/syringe, a fluid—let’s say absinthe for A—is drawn up from a bottle. It’s then pumped into several thin plastic tubes, the number of which varies according to the shape of the letter (more on that in the next paragraph), and is routed to the screen.
The screen basically works like the display on your digital alarm clock. It has fourteen different compartments on it that, when just the right arrangements are filled with fluid, can display any letter. To use the example of a digital clock, lighting up the six sections around the edge of the display gives you a “0″. Lighting up just the two vertical sections on the right side of the display gives you a “1″. Here, the number of tubes for each letter corresponds to the number of compartments that must be filled to create its shape. For A, that’s seven.
Each of the tubes is routed to the correct section by a kind of switchboard, which you can see in action at 2:20 in the above video. The fluid then flows down the screen, displaying the letter (which, let’s face it, is not the most important part of this bespoke process), and drains out via a faucet into your glass. Cheers!
Any cocktails thus mixed, however, will have to be very carefully designed. A martini with equal parts gin and vermouth is unpleasant, to say the least. And not all fluids you might like to include will have the same surface tension and other physical qualities, so the syringes won’t always pull up the same amount. But that’s nitpicking. Let’s face it—we’re jealous.
[via BoingBoing]
September 19 2011
Your Bare Feet Betray You, Scientists Say. So Don’t Take Off Your Shoes.
That’s walking dangerously—better slip on your flip-flops to avoid the cops.
Your walk is surprisingly distinctive, and it’s not just the way you waggle your fanny: it’s how your feet touch the ground. Just a few steps is enough for a program to recognize you 99% of the time, report scientists who had more than a hundred people leave their prints on sensors. The goal? Identifying people through carpet, of course. In case you can’t get to their fingerprints or retinas and so on.
The team had their subjects stroll for five steps and got their software observe how people distributed their weight over the soles of their feet. Once the software had been trained, it was able to link a set of prints to the correct individual 99.6% of the time. This in and of itself isn’t a shocker: Many studies have shown that people’s walks are good identifiers. Using camera arrays or sensors on the floor, previous researchers have trained programs to recognize individuals up to 99% of the time. But those studies never involved more than 10 or 11 people, so it wasn’t clear whether this level of accuracy was possible with a larger population.
But there is one rather large fly in the ointment. This only works with no shoes on. And not only that, the results might change if people were walking faster or slower or were tired or stressed. Like when they’re in an airport, or on the run from the FBI. Since one of the proposed applications for this work is identifying people “discreetly” in “security settings,” you’ve got to wonder how they’d plan to get people to take off their shoes and walk naturally.
Maybe you could use it to identify that secret yogi who’s been creeping into your studio after hours. Five steps across the perfectly sprung hardwood floor and bam—you nab them mid-vinyasa.
Reference: Pataky et al. Gait recognition: highly unique dynamic plantar pressure patterns among 104 individuals. Published online before print September 7, 2011, doi: 10.1098/rsif.2011.0430 J. R. Soc. Interface
[via New Scientist]
Image courtesy of Unlisted Sightings / flickr
September 14 2011
WiFi Giving You a Rash? Move to West Virginia.
Green Bank, WV: Home to a giant telescope and a bunch of people who think they’re allergic to electromagnetic waves.
There’s a quiet, hilly place in West Virginia that’s home to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, as well as radio arrays belonging to Navy intelligence and, purportedly, the NSA. And in one of those weird geographic quirks that you just can’t make up, the isolated area has also attracted a band of people who are convinced that radiation from WiFi and cell phone signals, forbidden there so as not to interfere with the arrays, is giving them rashes, splitting headaches, and chronic pain that make life in the outside world unlivable. It’s there, in the National Radio Quiet Zone, that these folks can find relief.
You might think of them as the WiFi refugees.
A whopping five percent of Americans believe they’ve got something called electromagnetic hypersensitivity—aka, a physical reaction to electromagnetic radiation from common devices like TV, phones, and routers. For most of us, that kind of thing falls squarely in “look at my tinfoil hat!” territory, and experiments don’t support the the theory. But some of the folks’ symptoms, if not the perceived cause, are at least real, according to the World Health Organization factsheet on the condition. The tiny town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is home to several sufferers whom the BBC recently interviewed in a video. Their stories are heartfelt, but pretty darn strange. One of them explains tearfully that her move to the radio quiet zone means that she no longer has to live in a giant metal Faraday cage. Whoa.
What with the NSA, the astronomers, and the WiFi refugees, community dinners in the quiet zone must be something else. But as Sweden is currently the only country that recognizes electromagnetic hypersensitivity as a real syndrome, West Virginia is just about the only convenient place for that five percent to camp out.
Image courtesy of b3nscott / flickr
September 08 2011
Arctic Blimps and Stealth Snowmobiles. Is There Something You’d Like to Share With Us, Canada?
If You Build a Ghost Town in the Desert, the Geeks Will Come
September 02 2011
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: What’s Happening in Afghanistan Right Now?
New York Times R&D Lab: Retail and the “magic mirror” from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.
You weren’t thinking tablets and smart phones would stay cool forever, were you? They’ll go the way of the Apple Newton and the Commodore soon enough, and the New York Times will be prepared, reports Neiman Labs. The ol’ Gray Lady is preparing for the next great revolution: bathroom mirrors.
In this video taken at the paper’s R&D labs, Megan Graber of Neiman watches NYT Creative Technologist Brian House put the bathroom mirror 2.0 (codenamed “the magic mirror”) through its paces, showing how the device can respond to voice commands and even take note of RFID-tagged medicine bottles resting nearby, pulling up coupons from manufacturers and prescription information a la Internet of Things. Like the giant-iPad-style table top they’re also working on at the lab, the mirror can show you the Times front page, the latest videos, and so on while you’re brushing your teeth or having breakfast.
Some newshounds will no doubt thrill at having the latest info right there in the bathroom. Myself, I’m not sure about the wisdom of seeing the morning’s civil wars, famines, and ...
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