pigeons

The 404 669: Where we Access Main Computer File (podcast)

Welcome to another week of The 404 Podcast! We're running through several stories on today's episode, including OnStar reading you Facebook updates in the car, Cablevision and Time Warner teaming up to offer "free" public Wi-Fi in NYC parks, carrier pigeons beating the Internet, Americans increasingly distracted by the Internet, a useless product appropriately called the "Textee," and a nerdy new Tumblr that looks at how the Internet and hacking culture are portrayed in film!

Our first story in the rundown is a shameless plug for AccessMainComputerFile, a new blog that pokes fun at images of hacker culture and embellished UI in popular movies like "Independence Day," "Richie Rich," "Terminator 2," and more. Submissions are also welcome, so send over your YouTube links!

Facebook is already a ubiquitous part of daily Interlife, but now OnStar is testing a service that connects your car to the social network as well. The system uses voice recognition and even interprets Web-slang like LOL as "laughing out loud," and drivers can also record audio as status updates without taking their hands off the wheel.

Additionally, if you have an Android-powered phone with Bluetooth, OnStar can receive your text messages and translate them to audio and from there, you can use voice commands to send a reply (like "yes" or "can't talk--driving"). OnStar hopes to have an similar app available for the iPhone soon, but in the meantime iPhone users can download OnStar's MyLink App that shows you service information, tire pressure, and even offers the capability to lock your doors remotely from anywhere in the world.

New York's two main cable providers are teaming up to offer free wireless Internet in select New York City public parks. Before you head out, though, we should mention that Time Warner and Cablevision promise only three free 10-minute sessions per month; after that, you'll be charged $0.99 a day to get on the network. It sounds like a classic bait-and-switch scenario, and we can't see people jumping to pay for public Internet when truly free wireless access is already available in thousands of hot spots around the city.

Everyone complains about sluggish Internet, but a CTO of a U.K. ISP put his own pathetic broadband speeds to the test...against a carrier pigeon. The only thing more bizarre than the test setup is the result: the pigeons were able to deliver the 100MB of video by MicroSD Card faster than it took to upload the clip to YouTube. The stunt is a half-joke, but it makes a good point about the necessity for Net neutrality.

No voice-mails today, so it's up to you to call us up at 1-866-404-CNET and help out the show! You can also hit us up on Twitter or just e-mail us at the404(at)cnet(dot)com!

Episode 669 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

BOL 1060: PigeonNet beats DSL in South Africa

A 4GB file can traverse 60 miles in 2 hours by pigeon, but that gets you only 4 percent of the file over the South African Internet. We also keep you up to date on new Android phones from Motorola as well as open-source map info from TomTom.

Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) EPISODE 1060

Motorola’s Android phone at Mobilize http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10344891-265.html?

Obligatory Apple recap http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10348169-37.html http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/in-qa-steve-jobs-snipes-at-amazon-and-praises-ice-cream/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/09/somebody-has-to-say-it-its-time-for-itunes-lite/… Read more

Ghost Pigeon masks your supersecret identity

During the day, we're mild-mannered tech bloggers, wearing glasses and looking moody in our vast, yet innocuous, Crave penthouse. But at night, we fight crime. We take on the persona of a creature of the night--black, terrible, shadowy. We become the Ghost Pigeon.

To protect our loved ones, we have to keep our secret identity super-duper seekrit. That means hiding our calls and texts to the police commissioner, especially when we send him MMS messages with videos of us collaring a miscreant.

Luckily, just for people like us there's Sonaworks' Ghost Pigeon software, a secret-phone-within-a-phone that will hide your texts, MMS messages, and calls. It's available now in the U.K. and a bunch of other countries, including Estonia, Bulgaria, Norway, Nigeria, and Cyprus, but apparently it hasn't made its way to the U.S. yet.

Ghost Pigeon is invisible on the phone--there's no icon in the menu. Instead, you launch the application by typing in a password. Here at Crave UK, we installed Ghost Pigeon on our 8GB Nokia N95, and although it's visible in the list of installed apps, its name is well disguised.

We could hide contacts, so that we only saw them from within Ghost Pigeon, not in our normal list of contacts. The phone rang normally for incoming calls from hidden --or "pigeonated"--contacts, but they were only stored in Ghost Pigeon's call logs and weren't visible in the normal call log.

Similarly, our phone alerted us to incoming texts from a hidden contact, but the texts didn't show up in our normal in-box, only in the Ghost Pigeon in-box. … Read more

Domain Pigeon now finds open Twitter names

Domain Pigeon, the domain finding service that lets you search and browse unclaimed domains, now does the same thing for Twitter usernames. It shows you which names are unclaimed, and puts some of the most recent or popular additions on the front page, where you're able to see which ones other users are clicking on.

As with domain names you can filter down the results to see only names with three or four letters, although to do so you must be a paid, registered user of the site. Those users can also see a larger, and more complete index … Read more

Domain Pigeon helps you find unclaimed URLs

There are far too many domain search and purchasing tools, but I haven't found one that does it like Domain Pigeon. The service tracks domains that are still available and puts them in an index that can be searched and sorted in all manner of ways.

Domain Pigeon's secret sauce, however, is that it shows you what other users have been looking at, right down to how many have clicked on any specific domain name. Domains that have gotten more attention darken in color, with the heavy hitters bubbling up to the top.

To encourage registration (which costs … Read more

Got birds? Put that shotgun down

There's no two ways about it: Bird droppings are dirty business. And people who spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning them off their property may understandably wish they had a "Falco" robotic raptor to limit the avian population, but that would probably be overkill (though that may sound good). Still, there's a more appropriate technological response to the problem in the "BirdXPeller Pro."

This device repels winged rats with sounds that deceive them into thinking that a predator is in the vicinity, according to SlashGear, covering an area as large as an acre. … Read more

Borg birds fly right--and left

Alfred Hitchcock must be kicking himself. Scientists from the Robot Engineering Technology Research Centre at Shandong University in China have installed a computer chip into a pigeon's brain, allowing the bird to be remote controlled.

The chip is connected to the brain with hair-thin electrodes implanted in key brain locations. Scientists then use a computer to order the bird to fly right or left and up or down.

The research is "military and intelligence" related, paralleling similar work by scientists with "Swiss Army homing pigeons" and sharks by the US Navy.

The Chinese scientists have … Read more