Items tagged with lasers
It's bad enough we have to worry about sharks with frickin' laser beams attached, but now we have to be vigilant against the threat lasers present to smart home speakers and other devices with digital assistants. How so? Security researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and at the University of Michigan warn that relatively cheap laser points can be modded to inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice assistants. This method of hacking affects all of the popular voice assistants, including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Facebook Portal. "The implications of injecting unauthorized voice commands vary in severity based on the type of commands that...
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As I sit here on a rainy weekend, putting Samsung’s new Galaxy S9+ flagship Android smartphone through its benchmark paces, I impressed with what I’m seeing performance-wise so far. However, working and living with the phone for the past week has brought to my attention true standout features and functionality that the mainstream user will immediately appreciate, and it starts with the camera array that Samsung built for what is shaping up to be a highly-refined beast of smartphone. In our preview look at the Galaxy S9 and S9+ we gave a high-level overview of the devices and the wealth of new camera technology on board, from Samsung’s Dual Aperture lens to its multi-shot noise...
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Facebook is on a mission to bring Internet connectivity to remote regions of the world as part of its Internet.org initiative. There are different ways to do that, though one of the more technological interesting ones is the creation of a full scale aircraft armed with a laser that can transmit data at 10 gigabits per second. Not only is that ten times faster than any previous system, it's also highly accurate -- it can connect with a point the size of a dime from over 10 miles away. That's important, because the aircraft, called Aquila, would be flying above conventional air traffic for up to three months at a time. "This effort is important because 10 percent of the world’s population lives...
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Researchers in Japan announced this week that they have developed a functional 2-petawatt laser beam system. The tests appear to confirm that Japan create the world’s most powerful laser beam, which generated massive power in pico-second bursts. The Laser for Fast Ignition Experiments (LFEX) at Osaka University isn’t small enough for a storm trooper’s blaster – yet. At the moment, it’s a set of four massive, green-and-white devices that stand taller than a human and are together slightly longer than a football field. Image credit: The Asahi Shimbun. Laser shark image credit: ThinkGeek“With heated competition in the world to improve the performance of lasers, our goal now is to increase our output...
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As if our name didn’t already express this, we absolutely love HOT hardware. And mixing hot hardware with frickin’ lasers is almost too much to handle. So imagine our delight we came across this news from defense contractor Lockheed Martin, which is working on ground-based weapon that can disable enemy equipment and vehicles from long-range distances. How far you might ask? How does one-mile sound to you? The Advanced Test High Energy Asset, better known as ATHENA, is currently in the prototype phase, but the 30-kilowatt laser weapon system demonstrated earlier this week that it is capable of disabling a vehicle from over a mile away. The vehicle in question, which appears to be a 1980s...
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We’d bet that when Mark Zuckerberg drunkenly dashed off the original Facebook precursor in his dorm room, he never imagined that within a decade he’d be actively trying to connect two-thirds of the world to the Internet and working with NASA to do so, but that is indeed what has transpired. Zuckerberg announced that Internet.org, the organization comprising Facebook and many other Internet companies, is “working on ways to beam internet to people from the sky” by building drones, satellites, and lasers in the new Facebook Connectivity Lab. Different population densities require different solutions. For example, in low population densities, the team is looking to satellites....
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Outside of Hollywood, lasers mounted on sharks is a technology that may never be realized. But in hard drives? The mad scientists at TDK on working on this very thing, and once completed, it has the potential to more than double the capacity of today's hard drives. This isn't a theoretical technology that's still years or decades away, but one that will manifest in shipping drives by late next year, according to reports. The mechanical hard drive sitting in your rig at home utilizes rotating platters. In order to read and write data to and from the platters, a magnetic head gets as close as it can with crashing into them. It's pretty remarkable when you get into the science of it all, but also...
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If there's anything cooler than laser beams, I haven't seen them. You can buy better hardware than Captain Kirk had from Amazon.com these days. You'll have to get your own green space babes, but Cool Tools has a roundup on the available models of green colored laser beams pointers for sale, cheap, right now. Why green? At night this AAA battery powered green laser pointer can seemingly touch the stars millions of miles away. Compared to a red laser pointer, the green beam remains visible and penetrates the air much farther. Because of its particular spectrum you see the beam and not just the end dot. Also, it's about 50...
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