Tech Sightings, June 24, 2014

Posted June 24th, 2014 at 2:25 pm (UTC-4)
Leave a comment

Nineteen Year-Old Dies After Abuse in Chinese ‘Internet Rehab’

In China, where Internet addiction is now categorized as a mental illness, a 19-year-old student recently died at a so-called Internet-addiction recovery camp in Henan province. The girl was allegedly struck and kicked repeatedly. An autopsy showed she died from skull injuries and brain damage.

‘Bionic Eye’ Lets Blind Man ‘See’ Again

Argus II, also known as the “bionic eye,” is a pair of glasses equipped with a small video camera that transmits the images it captures to a tiny prosthesis surgically implanted on the surface of the retina. Captured images are wirelessly transmitted to electrodes on the artificial retina to be  converted to electrical pulses.

Eerily Lifelike Androids Join Tokyo Tech Museum Staff

Kodomoroid and Otonaroid, hyper-realistic droids that look like a girl and a woman, have landed jobs at a prestigious technology center in Tokyo. The androids are powered by compressed air and servomotors and controlled remotely to move their parts and lip sync.

False Stoned Virus Detections in Bitcoin Files Widespread

Researcher Didier Stevens has confirmed that Symantec, Sophos, Trend Micro and other notable vendors have reported anti-virus false positive detections in Bitcoin files. The detection of the Stoned virus, created in 1987, appears to be a prank by someone who associated the virus signature with Bitcoin transactions.

Forget Bitcoin: There’s a Better Model for Mobile Money

Launched in 2007 by Kenya’s Safaricom telecommunications company, M-Pesa is a mobile service that allows anyone to send and receive money instantly through their cellphones. Since then, M-Pesa has become synonymous with money and now accounts for 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Beware Flappy Bird Clones Carrying Malware

Computer security company McAfee says almost 80 percent of the Flappy Bird clones they looked at contained malware. The most malicious programs detected were those that often made calls to numbers that charge by the minute without user permission.

Four Questions to Ask Before You Give a New App Access to Your Personal Data

Ask yourself these four questions before installing the latest hot app and running the risk of having an insecure or hacked item on your smartphone.

Aida Akl
Aida Akl is a journalist working on VOA's English Webdesk. She has written on a wide range of topics, although her more recent contributions have focused on technology. She has covered both domestic and international events since the mid-1980s as a VOA reporter and international broadcaster.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *