Researchers at the University of Essex have developed a robotic fish to analyse pollution levels in the open waters, such as ports. Not only is it completely autonomous, but to help it do its job, they have also given it the looks and behaviour of a normal fish. Communicating via Wi-Fi, the fish also know when they are running low on power and automatically return to their base.
Tag Archive: technology
NASA plans to land yet another robotic vehicle on our neighbour planet. This one, however, will be nuclear powered and not rely on solar enery. Watch NASA’s video outlining a day in the life of the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory):
If you are a little bit like me, you probably hate to have gazillions of different user logins for all the different website you use on the internet. If you are a little bit more like me, then you definitely hate passwords. There is a solution for the former problem. It’s called OpenID and allows for a single sign-on for every website that supports it.
I am 100% behind this initiative, but it currently has one main drawback: hardly any websites support it. Out of the ones I regularly visit, only Dopplr and Jiwai.de (a Chinese Twitter-clone) support it. Unfortunately, neither do Facebook nor Jaiku. While OpenID solves problem no. 1, it doesn’t really solve the problem with much-hated passwords.
But thanks to the Mac Geek Gab podcast, I got introduced to the solution to both problems: myvidoop.com. It’s an OpenID solution, that uses concepts instead of passwords. When you sign up, instead of choosing a traditional string as password, you can choose between concepts, such as people, food, cats, dogs, computers, etc. When you then log in it pops up a grid of random pictures in a random oder, that represent the concepts you have chosen. For example, if you chose computers, cats and dogs, you would have type in the letters visible in the corner of each of these pictures to log in.
This approach is not just secure from any kind of brute force hacking but also kills the necessity for a password! Cool, isn’t it?
Fascinating and scary at the same time. BigDog, as this monster is called, is 1m tall and 2m wide and was developed by Boston Dynamics, a robots company with funding from the US military. Is this the beginning of the end à la Terminator?