Month: October 2016

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Samsung is bringing six of its Korean mobile accessories to the rest of the world next month. Among the first products Samsung plans to sell will be a “Wireless Speaker Bottle.” The speaker looks sort of like a water canteen and is motion controlled. If someone puts it in a “pouring” position, the speaker’s lighting will change. If someone shakes it, it’ll change colors.

The company’s also going to sell a pretty cool wireless tray charger that can charge two devices at once, or three if a cable’s plugged in too. This is probably the most useful thing Samsung is selling because at least in photos, it looks discrete enough to put on a desk.

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Toyota is jumping into the increasingly crowded car-sharing market, and it’s doing it with a flair for innovation that helps explain why it’s the world’s biggest auto seller. The company invented a Bluetooth-enabled device called the Smart Key Box that allows users to unlock and start the engine of a car using just their smartphone.

Here’s how it will work: a vehicle owner who wants to make some money on the side lending their car to other people can install the Smart Key Box on their dashboard, no modification needed. The car-share customer is sent a code via an app to access the box. When the smartphone is brought near the vehicle, the codes are authenticated via Bluetooth — Toyota calls it a “handshake” — similar to regular smart…

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Sunday night, a group called the Shadow Brokers released a new cache of data purporting to be taken from the NSA in a Medium post titled “Trick or Treat.” Alongside other data, the new release reveals 108 IP addresses apparently compromised by the NSA as part of its operations. The majority of the nodes are located overseas, including compromises in China, Russia, India, or Pakistan, presumably to make it difficult for targets to attribute any attack launched through the network.

Most of the nodes themselves are several years old, but they could still be valuable to researchers looking to trace the NSA’s past activities. By running these IP addresses against server logs, possible targets could discover they had been targeted by the…

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On the evening of Saturday, August 27th, 2011, the volunteer fire department in Prattsville, New York held its annual clambake. The event has not historically been associated with temperance, but that year, the festivities broke up early. Prattsville is a sleepy town of fewer than 1,000 residents in the northern Catskill Mountains, about 100 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. It’s leaf-peeping country, not tropical storm country. But a hurricane was moving up the East Coast, and Sunday’s forecast called for rain. Meteorologists had predicted that the Catskills would get a peripheral spray, rather than the storm’s brunt, which was slated for New York City and Long Island. Still, Tom Olson, who was then fire chief, intended to be ready….

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More often than we like to admit, I think, vacations are frustrating affairs: full of missed opportunities, nagging worries, and sunburn. Occasionally, though, the gods of travel smile upon us, and some serendipitous and magical event take places that reaffirms the need to leave your home and country and go a’roaming. Just such an event happened to Marcin Wichary (lead designer and typographer at Medium), who, while looking for the Dali Museum on holiday in Spain, stumbled across a magical, little-known shrine to the typewriter.

What happened next is described in a series of tweets (a truncated version of which we’ve embedded below), but to understand the impact of Wichary’s story you should understand that this is a man who loves…

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Microsoft’s Surface Dial was the surprise announcement at the company’s hardware event last week. It’s designed as another input device to compliment the mouse / keyboard, touch, and stylus. In drawing apps like Sketchable or Sketchpad you’ll be able to use it to generate a radial menu that lets you quickly change color or brush options, but Windows itself will mostly support basic zooming and volume controls at launch.

Not every app will have a rich amount of Surface Dial support when the device is launched on November 10th for $99, but Microsoft has provided a list of apps with some support for the device. On existing PCs and laptops you’ll be able to use the Dial on a desk to adjust options, and the Surface Studio will support…

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Microsoft’s unveiling of VR headsets for Windows 10 got overshadowed by the company’s Surface Studio hardware last week, but new details are set to be announced soon. In an interview with Polygon, HoloLens chief Alex Kipman revealed that Microsoft will detail its VR headsets at an event in December. Microsoft is planning to hold two WinHEC events in December, one on December 8th-9th, and another on December 14th-15th.

Microsoft will detail hardware plans for its VR headsets at both events, and they’re both designed primarily for hardware makers to better understand the software plans for Windows Holographic. Microsoft has partnered with HP, Lenovo, Dell, Acer, and Asus to produce VR headsets that plug into Windows 10 PCs and provide the…

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