--
Welcome to Cyber Dump 24, your weekly look at what's happening in this insane age of technology that we live in. As always, all source links mentioned are below.
- Youtube link
- Archive.org mirror
- Torrent
- Keybase mirror
DRONES
North Dakota has become the first place in the US where police are legally allowed to arm drones, though they'll be limited to non-lethal options like tear gas, tasers, rubber bullets, and pepper spray. Great.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/north-dakota-becomes-first-us-state-to-legalise-use-of-armed-drones-by-police-10492397.html
In other drone news, ProDrone have released the PD6B-AW-ARM, a drone complete with 2 gripping claws. This thing can lift loads of up to 10kg. Hide your pets and small children.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/13/the-scariest-drone-yet-clawed-robot-takes-to-the-sky-and-takes-off-with-a-chair
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6kaU2sgPqo
NEURAL NETWORKS
Google's Deepmind unveiled Wavenet, a neural network that can learn from any audio input, analyze the raw waves, and then create sounds based on those characteristics. This means it can dynamically create synthetic voices that are better than text-to-speech system we have today, and it can change genders and accents on the fly. This is insane. Here are some clips.
https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/
WEARABLES
Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a fabric that can simultaneously harvest energy from the sun, and motion. In their tests, a 4 by 5cm piece charged a 2mF capacitor to 2volts in one minute.
http://www.news.gatech.edu/2016/09/13/new-fabric-uses-sun-and-wind-power-devices
COMPUTING
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced this week that they had sold their 10millionth Raspberry Pi. Hats off to the team, what an amazing achievement.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/ten-millionth-raspberry-pi-new-kit/
VIRTUAL REALITY
People looking to buy houses can now view them in virtual reality thanks to Transported's new platform. I think this kind of system would be great for all sorts, like airbnb, museums, even viewing stuff on ebay in 3D before you buy.
http://www.transported.co
In other VR news, Manus VR showed off their hand tracking system which trains NASA astronauts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSrD5SWOfk8
Gleechi also announced their own hand tracking system, VirtualGrasp. They say “The software makes it possible to interact with all objects in a scene using any type of hand design without any manual animation needed”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEKn_COI-GQ
http://www.gleechi.com
ROBOTICS
Researchers at Brussels University have carried out the first experiment of their CyberLegs robotic prosthesis, in preparation for the 2016 cybathlon, which is held next month in Switzerland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrwm6iMXhgM
http://www.brubotics.eu/cybathlon/cybathlon
BITCOIN
Peter Todd announced the alpha release of Open Timestamps, which aims to bring scalable, trustless, and distributed timestamping using the Bitcoin blockchain. This could be the start of humans having an objective, unalterable record of history.
https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement
In other news, Genesis Mining made a video of them sending bitcoin into the stratosphere, and performing a transaction while it was up on the edge of space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnSYVo_5dXM
VIDEOS
WorkingNation released an interesting video on the challenge of automation, and how it will transform the jobs market all over the world. Something we'll all have to deal with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opdc8hQN0ew
The next video is an interview between YCombinator's Sam Altman, and Elon Musk. They talk about how to build the future, and Musk's thoughts on what are the most important things technologists should be working on right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0
THIS WEEK ON NODE
Lot's happening this week. Over on the site we had two new articles, the first being a look into the world of drone racing. The next is a new interview with the leader of the potentially world changing DIY EMdrive project.
http://n-o-d-e.net/drone_racing.html
http://n-o-d-e.net/emdrive2.html
We also launched Dead Drop, a new series all about news in computer security and internet freedom. I'll be uploading a new one this week. I also made a video about OpenDime, the real world version of scifi cred sticks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmX_tic8D8o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypQHc3EQVfE
--
BY NODE