He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings "loaner" devices, which he erases before he leaves the US and wipes clean the minute he returns . In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi , never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery , for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, "Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop." -
Travel precautions in the age of digital espionage.
posted by Artw
on Feb 13, 2012 -
125 comments
Gizmo - using news footage from the 1920s to the 1950s, Howard Smith created an amusing 1977 documentary about contraptions made by the inventors, technophiles, and eccentrics of yesteryear. The last 7 minutes is Letterman interviewing Smith.
(Google video, 1 hr., 19 min. Via beans beans good for your heart)
posted by madamjujujive
on Apr 24, 2007 -
10 comments
Sketch-A-Move Draw a straight line on top of the car, lift the pen and the car shoots off in a straight line. Draw a circle on the car and the car starts wildly spinning around. Draw a complicated squiggle and the car spirals in and out. Quicktime Video
Link#1 and
Link#2
posted by Hands of Manos
on Feb 9, 2005 -
35 comments
A handheld device that translates simple spoken phrases. "American troops in Afghanistan are using a revolutionary device that instantly translates soldiers' voices into native languages.
. . . The soldier speaks into the machine, which recognizes the words and translates them into another language." Simple phrases only — and a long way from a
Star Trek universal translator — but kindling for the science-fiction-addled imagination nonetheless.
posted by mcwetboy
on Jun 10, 2002 -
11 comments
What's inside? Surely this is a man thing. We get something with screws in it and have to take it to pieces.
this man bought a
gamecube.
He says that it still works.
There are a few pages of pictures here so be warned..
I thank you.
posted by Spoon
on Nov 30, 2001 -
13 comments
iWalk : Apple's new device is rumored to be a PDA/MP3 Player with a color screen and airport functionality. Never heard of spymac.com before, but this looks pretty legit. (contains photo)
posted by jragon
on Oct 23, 2001 -
72 comments
PDA physical therapy. Handspring's new module uses Electronic Muscle Stimulation (EMS) for muscle stimulation/relaxation after a hard day's work. Will this be the new yuppie toy? Imagine people walking around with two white pads glued to their face confronting quizzical stares with an angry, "What?"
posted by skallas
on Oct 2, 2001 -
9 comments
In a perfect world , this would be in mass production. In black. With an espresso machine. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this earlier; most good, respectable geeks that I know would most likely kill for one of these.
posted by nickd
on Jan 13, 2001 -
7 comments
Convergence baby! Sony has released a Minidisc Player/Recorder, MP3 player with USB connectivity, and PalmOS PDA, all wedged into one small unit. Wow, that's enough buzzwords to kill a horse...
posted by mathowie
on Apr 4, 2000 -
4 comments
It's a DVD Player, it's a CD player, it's an mp3 player, it's a karaoke machine! ... okay, so I probably won't use the karaoke part, but at $179.95, I had to grab the APEX AD600A DVD player. It's even got a supersecret menu so that you can change region settings... not that I would *do* that, but... you know... if you've got friends visiting from Taiwan or something...
You'll note I didn't post the link until my order was confirmed. I'm all about sharing the love, but not at the risk of having the love backordered.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe
on Feb 23, 2000 -
9 comments
According to this system requirements page, all of Microsoft's fancy-shmancy new cordless-intelli-wheely-eye-mouse products need 30 MB of available hard disk space! For installing a mouse driver? Is this just code bloat, or another nefarious scheme to infiltrate our personal data? Cleverly disguised mouse drivers that secretly send password files and system configurations to Redmond. On the up side, the Mac version of the software only requires 15 MB of disk space.
posted by grant
on Dec 13, 1999 -
0 comments
Palm Buddy lets you view and install files on your Palm using a slick Finder-like window. It also does file conversion, but doesn't sync. Nice. Here's
a screen shot.
posted by grant
on Nov 22, 1999 -
1 comment
