boingboing.net / .boingboing-net-technology

The Pentagon wants its own narco sub. The US Marine Corps and defense contractor Leidos have been testing a stealthy uncrewed surface vessel they call the Sea Specter -- openly crediting cartel-built semisubmersibles as the design inspiration.

Pollan's new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, goes after a favorite Silicon Valley assumption: that if you build a machine complex enough, awareness will eventually boot up inside it. In a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, he ...

Three states are now trying to make 3D printers police themselves. Washington's HB 2321 requires printers to ship with anti-gun software so effective that even users with "significant technical skill" can't circumvent it -- on machines that run ...

Apple employees have a nickname for the company's latest gadget: the "eyes and ears" of the iPhone. It's a disc packed with two cameras and three microphones -- you clip it to your collar or wear it around your neck, and it watches and listens to the ...

Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff wants to "zero out crime in neighborhoods," and the lost-dog finder was just the first step. In a leaked internal email from October, Siminoff told employees that Search Party -- Ring's on-by-default feature that networks ...

Lego discontinued Mindstorms at the end of 2022. Here's what replaced it: a custom chip smaller than a pencil eraser inside a standard-sized 2-by-4 brick. The SMART Brick houses an LED array, accelerometer, light and sound sensors, a miniature ...

Earbuds are tiny chemical delivery systems pressed against your skin. A new study by the ToxFREE LIFE for All project tested 81 pairs of headphones -- both in-ear and over-ear -- and found hazardous substances in every single pair, The Guardian ...

The US government spent decades funding the development of tools like Tor, which helps millions of people route around censorship and surveillance in countries like Iran, China, Cuba, and North Korea. As of mid-2024, about 35% of the Tor Project's $7 ...

Gouache applied by airbrush -- that was the secret behind the impossibly smooth, vivid covers Robert Tinney produced for Byte magazine across 80-plus issues from 1975 into the late 1980s. Each one took roughly a week to finish after phone calls with ...

Scott Shambaugh maintains matplotlib, a Python plotting library downloaded about 130 million times a month. Like many open source projects, matplotlib now requires human review of all submissions after a surge in low-quality AI-generated code. When ...