News

That's not because Apple promises an easier, more secure way of making a smartphone-based retail transaction. Nor is it because CurrentC wants to harvest data on you and provide behavior-bending coupons, incentives and special deals, while cutting out the middleman credit card processing industry. If you think those three sentences are complicated, it gets worse. Paying by smartphone -- which seems like a new and cool convenience -- is just the start of an unavoidable new in-person retail experience.

Read More

One of the great challenges of neuroscience is to understand the short-term working memory in the human brain. At the same time, computer scientists would dearly love to reproduce the same kind of memory in silico.

Read More

Over the next few months, Starwood (which owns those three chains) will upgrade 150 of its hotels to allow keyless, smartphone entry to some 30,000 rooms worldwide. Hilton, which is a much larger hotel chain, plans to roll out a similar system next year. Keyless entry via smartphone is obviously more convenient than using a magnetic swipe card (which is easily lost or demagnetized), and probably a lot more secure, too, considering how easy it was to hack conventional Onity locks. Did I mention that keyless entry also means you can skip the check-in desk and go straight to your room, too?

Read More

There isn’t much space between your ears, but what’s in there can do many things that a computer of the same size never could. Your brain is also vastly more energy efficient at interpreting the world visually or understanding speech than any computer system. That’s why academic and corporate labs have been experimenting with “neuromorphic” chips modeled on features seen in brains. These chips have networks of “neurons” that communicate in spikes of electricity (see “Thinking in Silicon”). They can be significantly more energy-efficient than conventional chips, and some can even automatically reprogram themselves to learn new skills.

Read More

Facebook.com is one of the most frequently accessed URLs in the world, but on Friday the social network unveiled a new one: facebookcorewwwi.onion. That address serves up a version of Facebook’s service accessible only via the Tor anonymity software. Tor users include dissidents trying to avoid censorship, criminals, and U.S. government workers who need to escape scrutiny from foreign security services.

Read More