Author: Ty Dunitz

Honestly, it should come as no surprise that Facebook isn’t exactly a snuggly blanket of impenetrable security when it comes to feeling safe on the internet. Perpetually beset with accusations of compromising users’ privacy, Facebook has spent much of its time in the last several months repairing its relationship with its users. But maybe privacy isn’t all we should be worried about. According to security firm BitDefender, approximately 20% of Facebook users’ news feeds are infected with malware. Delicious. BitDefender says it gathered the data via an app called Safego, installed by 14,000…

Maybe the Jenga Pistol I posted earlier today didn’t tickle your fancy. Maybe your fancy has nerve damage. Maybe you’re a real rough-n-tumble. Maybe you prefer a more violent brand of DIY fun. Chillax! I’ve still got you covered, there. Check this business out. If you ever owned a slingshot as a kid, you know how damn difficult they can be to achieve any degree of accuracy. The obvious solution? A laser, naturally. Internet guy-who-makes-stuff KipKay has also come to this conclusion, and in this video, gives you a quick rundown of how to make a laser-guided slingshot of your very own. A laser diode…

Anyone who knows me knows that Jenga holds a special place in my heart. I adore the game and – not to toot my own kazoo or anything – but I’m kinda awesome at it. There is, of course, no way I’ll ever be able to prove this to you, but take my word for it. Jenga and I are tight, yo. Anyway, pursuant to Jenga being totally wicked – and my wickedness at it – check out this equally wicked device by Matthias Wandel: the Jenga Pistol, which you’d probably want to use in a match against a player such as myself. Even single central blocks are no match for the pistol, which unceremoniously deletes blocks from the pile faster…

Surely you’ve seen your share of Kinect hacks in the last little while – hell, even last week I posted a couple here on Techi. Microsoft was originally not down with this, and implied potential legal action against anyone modifying their device. But it seems they’ve now had a change of heart, claming Kinect was always ‘open by design’, and that they’re happy to have folks write all sorts of drivers for all manner of Kinect-based ballyhoo. “What has happened,” says Microsoft’s Alex Kipman to NPR, “is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn’t…

Okay, ‘released’ isn’t exactly the right word. But the now-mythic white iPhone 4 has been spotted in China, and it can be yours for the bargain price of up to 8000 Yuan ($1204) for the 16GB model. I don’t even wanna know how much the 64GB goes for. But considering China’s reputation as the land of knock-offs, can this be the real thing? Well, you be the judge. The boxes are marked ‘for internal use only’, and from the pictures, they’re certainly more real than any Chinese counterfeit version I’ve ever seen, by a large margin. Frankly, I’m willing to believe this is the real deal. It’s just being sold by…

Alright, so maybe I’m being a little cheeky by claiming that this robot is the most fun you could have with Kinect, but quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, it sure beats some of the arm-waving minigames I’ve seen so far. MIT student Phillip Roebbel has hooked up a newly-hacked Xbox Kinect to an iRobot to create the coolest thing that I’m gonna see today – and with any luck, the coolest thing you’ll see, too. By giving the Kinect – which can already and judge terrain and distance – the ability to look and wander around, Roebbel has given it the ability to map its surroundings in 360 degrees, allowing it…

Many of you in the know have seen these pumpkins before. Those of you know what these pumpkins mean. They symbolize theft, infringement, and moreover, complete idiocy. The rest of you may or may not remember, a couple of weeks ago, the tale of Cook’s Source – a magazine specializing in the plagiarism of writers the world over fun recipes and stuff. Either way, let me whisper all of you a sweet earful of rad: due to the Internet’s apparently vaster knowledge of the copyright of intellectual property than Cook’s Source editor Judith Griggs, Cook’s Source (which Grigg’s erroneously spells without…

If you happened to find yourself at Tokyo Designer’s Week this year, you surely saw iProject25 – a just-shy-of-completely-monstrous display made of 25 iPads, resulting in one hell of a large interactive screen. The use of iPads to make an omniPad is hardly why I, for one, am impressed. We were always destined to eventually see a YouTube video of someone doing exactly this. Where I’m impressed, frankly, is in the concept. Commissioned by Japan’s Environmental Ministry, iProject25 is meant to be a metaphor for the human race’s impact on the harmony of nature. Created by musician TaQ (of Dance Dance…

Now this is an odd bug, if I’ve ever heard of one. Apparently, thousands of female Facebook users have been attempting to log on, only to find their accounts deactivated. Spooky. And this has been going on for a few days, too. Said Facebook user Valerie L to Huffington Post of the bug: “It said my Gmail address was not associated with any Facebook account.” How… suspicious, considering the feud between Google and Facebook of late. “I just tried to get onto my Facebook account with my Gmail email address,” adds Marian B. “[It's] the only one I have used since I got on Facebook …and it said I could not.”…

I’m gonna spare you the obvious ‘eyes in the back of your head’ joke, except for this sentence, where I make reference to the joke I didn’t just make. But I swear, that’s it. The ‘guy’ to which the headline is referring is Mr. Wafaa Bilal, an assistant profressor of photography at NYU, and the ‘art’ in question is the installation “The 3rd I” at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. Bilal will have a camera implanted in the back of his head for an entire year, in order to beam images to Qatar. For real. Frankly, I don’t see why he couldn’t have just rigged some sort of stylish accoutrement to wear – cheap,…