Technology

Many digital eyes and ears are on us as we move about our daily lives. Surveillance cameras watch us on the street and smart devices listen for us in our homes. What if some of that watching happened through an expressive simulacrum of a human eye? Researcher Marc Teyssier took it upon himself to craft such a device, giving a webcam synthetic flesh and a moving eyeball, complete with brow and lashes. Observe: the Eyecam. Hello.Image: Marc Teyssier You can see it in action – blinking, glancing, emoting – in the video below, which also commands us to use our imaginations: Imagine Eyecam waking up on its own. Imagine Eyecam observing every one of your steps. Imagine Eyecam always being there … … even when you don’t want it to be there! [embedded content] If you can get past the un...

You might still be reeling from the news that personal information from 533 million Facebook accounts has been made freely available online. But now there’s another huge batch of people’s data floating around the web — including data from LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network confirmed. And the potential scope of the leak is huge: an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles, according to CyberNews. In a purported sample of two million of the profiles for sale, LinkedIn members’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, and more were visible, CyberNews found. LinkedIn, however, says the data includes information from many places and wasn’t all scraped from the professional-focused social network. “No private mem...

Proctorio, a piece of exam surveillance software designed to keep students from cheating while taking tests, relies on open-source software that has a history of racial bias issues, according to a report by Motherboard. The issue was discovered by a student who figured out how the software did facial detection, and discovered that it fails to recognize black faces over half the time. Proctorio, and other programs like it, is designed to keep an eye on students while they’re taking tests. However, many students of color have reported that they have issues getting the software to see their faces — sometimes having to resort to extreme measures to get the software to recognize them. This could potentially cause the students problems: Proctorio will flag them to instructors if it doesn’t...

Hello, yes, it has come to my attention that Matt Gaetz left his Venmo feed public and The Daily Beast has used this public feed to report a salacious story about his transactions. Yeah, you read that right. His Venmo feed was public. A public Venmo feed, especially one with questionable transactions, is a powerful way to amass personal information People have been warning about Venmo’s public feeds for quite some time. You can figure out a lot about a person by monitoring their financial transactions through Venmo! In Gaetz’s case, we found out he sent money — $900, in two transactions— to Joel Greenberg, who is accused of sex trafficking. The morning after Gaetz sent money, Greenberg sent three young women sums of money that totaled… $900. I didn’t think this need to be said, but h...

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s company focused on developing brain-machine interfaces, has posted a video to YouTube that appears to show a monkey navigating an on-screen cursor using only its mind. Pager, a 9-year-old macaque monkey, had a Neuralink implanted about six weeks before the video was shot, the video’s unnamed narrator says. He was first taught to play video games with a joystick for a banana smoothie reward, delivered through a metal straw. While he was doing this, the Neuralink device recorded information about which neurons were firing — learning, essentially, to predict hand movements by recording which regions fired. After learning the patterns, the joystick Pager used to play was disconnected from the computer. The monkey appears to go on playing the game using only his mind — pl...

Ordering delivery through an app like DoorDash or GrubHub saves the trouble of cooking and lets you be a little picky — you can order from your favorite restaurant. But imagine receiving your food, sitting down to eat, and it tasting… different. And then, following your gut, you learn that you’ve been duped by a fake, an imposter restaurant that stole its name. For many people ordering from two Japanese restaurants in San Francisco, that exact thing may have happened, The San Francisco Chronicle reports. One restaurant, now styled as an izakaya called Chome, originally opened for delivery and takeout in the former location of Blowfish Sushi. Except it didn’t bother to change the name, awning, or logo at the start. Chome, operating as if it were Blowfish Sushi, served sushi to people ...

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has begun publicly tallying votes for a proposed Amazon workers’ union in Alabama, which would be the first of its kind nationwide. The count, conducted over Zoom, may not include all potentially eligible ballots, but it will offer an early look at the results. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) announced yesterday that 3,215 ballots were received from the roughly 5,800 workers at BHM1, a fulfillment center located in Bessemer, Alabama. Amazon workers at Bessemer cast their ballots by mail in February and March, and the official counting process began on March 30th. Representatives can challenge individual workers’ eligibility to vote, and those ballots won’t be counted during this tally — but they could be deemed eligible lat...

Verizon said Thursday it is working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to recall 2.5 million hotspot devices after an investigation found the devices’ lithium-ion batteries could overheat and pose fire and burn hazards. The Ellipsis Jetpack mobile hotspot models MHS900L, MHS900LS, and MHS900LPP were imported by Franklin Wireless Corp. and sold between April 2017 and March of this year, according to the CPSC. The model numbers are all for the same device but vary depending on how the customer purchased the device — through a consumer prepaid or postpaid plan. “The safety of our customers is our highest priority,” Verizon said in a statement. “We are taking the situation very seriously, and we are working diligently to determine the cause of the issues with the supplier and t...

I love it when companies go public. I am never more excited than when I get to read a mandatory S-1 filing for the first time. Anything could be in there! Maybe the company has wildly more people using its products than I would have guessed. Maybe the company is surprisingly profitable. Maybe the company is WeWork! Anyway, there is a new Robinhood regulatory oopsie in the news, and it’s made me even more eager to find out what’s lurking in that document. If I do not get the Robinhood S-1 soon, I will die. The company has confidentially filed to go public, but what fun is confidentiality? There might be some juicy shit in there! Start-up sloppiness Here’s the shape of the new thing: Robinhood allows customers to trade fractions of a share — something that makes it easier for ordinary invest...

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children — the 2005 CGI spinoff film that dared to ask “What if the already incredible, intricate story of Final Fantasy VII was made even more confusing?” — is getting a 4K HDR remaster this summer. The newly updated version of the film is due to arrive on June 8th, setting up a week of narrative whiplash for Final Fantasy fans who will also get to enjoy the PS5 upgrade of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade on June 10th. One might think Advent Children would be a good next step for fans who have only played the modern Final Fantasy VII Remake as a way of preparing for future remade installments. That instinct, I can assure you, would be wrong. The film is actually a pseudo-sequel to the original Final Fantasy VII game’s epic and occasionally bewildering story, a...

Trevor DeHaas is auctioning his 2017 tweet of the “dinner” he received at Fyre Fest as an NFT. But unlike the Fest itself, the tweeted photo of the limp cheese slice on wheat bread with some greens and a sad tomato in a styrofoam container isn’t a grift; as first reported by Axios, DeHaas is hoping to raise $80,000 which he plans to put toward his medical bills. “With how hot the NFT market is right now I figured I’d give it a shot and could hopefully raise enough money that I wouldn’t need to rely on a GoFundMe to pay for my medical expenses,” DeHaas said in an email to The Verge. “The last thing I want is to guilt trip someone into buying the NFT and copyright to pay for my medical expenses but I would like the auction winner to know that their money would be going to a good cause.” The ...

Square Enix has released a 16-minute trailer for the Final Fantasy VII Remake Orchestral World Tour, and if you’re a fan of the game’s fantastic soundtrack, I highly recommend watching this video from beginning to end. Watching the songs performed by a live orchestra brought a huge smile to my face. The trailer features three songs: a medley of the game’s opening, including the bombastic title fanfare that still gives me goosebumps; “Stand Up,” the song used during the Honeybee Inn dance scene; and a medley of the classic battle theme, “Let the Battles Begin!” More than 100 musicians perform the arrangements. If you want to try to catch a show for yourself, you can see the schedule of upcoming performances on the tour’s website. Sadly, the tour isn’t currently scheduled to take place anywh...