Kloepfer's smart gun works on the basis of a fingerprint reader. Press your dabs against the grip and ping! After a small delay for authentication you can blat away to your heart's content. The reader is set into the grip, so your fingers bear against it as you hold the firearm normally, and is powered by a battery.

Unfortunately, the main obstacle to smart guns is consumer willingness to adopt the technology; without that, all the good intentions and product demonstrations in the world won't get it to take off. Governmental regulation is likely to be ignored and sidestepped, particularly in a country with tens of millions of non-smart guns already in circulation.

Some 24 hours after the Department of Justice indicted six Volkswagen employees for their alleged roles in the a cheating diesel scandal, the Environmental Protection Agency has accused Fiat Chrysler of the same kind of thing.

Since exposing VW’s cheating, the EPA has pledged to crack down on similar cases, and the resulting nosiness led to these new charges.

"Consumers want these devices to be secure, so we're asking for creativity from the public -- the tinkerers, thinkers and entrepreneurs -- to help them keep device software up to date."

"The tool would, at a minimum, help protect consumers from security vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software," reads a description of the challenge.

The company initially demanded more money than the idiot box was worth to repair the TV and relented offering instructions for resetting the telly after Cauthon took to Twitter to express his displeasure.

With the TV powered off, place one finger on the settings symbol then another finger on the channel down symbol. Remove finger from settings, then from channel down, and navigate using volume keys to the wipe data/ factory reset option.

The apps, which include Truecaller, Sync.me and CM Security, ask users to upload their phone's contact lists when they install them. That means they end up with huge databases - one app claims to have two billion numbers while another claims more than a billion.

The security blogger Graham Cluley, whose mobile number is stored by one of the apps, says everyone needs to be more careful about what they share: "If you upload your address book, you're not just putting your own privacy at risk - but the privacy of everybody else in that address book.

The latest Apple Inc. smartphones that run on Verizon Communications Inc.’s network are technically capable of downloading data faster than those from AT&T Inc. Yet in testing, the two phones perform about the same, according to researchers at Twin Prime Inc. and Cellular Insights.

Sacrificing performance in return for cheaper components may not go down well with Apple users.

Security researchers have discovered that third-party firmware included with over 2.8 million low-end Android smartphones allows attackers to compromise Over-the-Air (OTA) update operations and execute commands on the target's phone with root privileges.

The binary responsible for the firmware OTA update operations also includes code to hide its presence from the Android OS, along with two other binaries and their processes. A developer looking at active Android processes won't be able to tell when there's an update coming to his phone.

The Internet of Things is mostly a hype bubble, with real-world spending and deployments being just a fraction of their predicted level, according to a report by analysts IDTechEx.

"It is probably now physically impossible to deploy the big figures for nodes by 2020," warns the report, which can be downloaded for a fee at the IDTechX website.

So what, exactly, is this superteam of designers, engineers and manufacturing experts working on? Nobody outside of Menlo Park knows for sure, but the hires -- and at least one under-the-radar acquisition -- seem to indicate two things: it's mobile, and it may be modular.

All of Facebook's new expertise could go towards anything else that uses mobile processors, radios and the Android OS -- such as headsets, tablets, watches, smart home and other internet-of-things devices. Or something entirely new.

The gold drone will set you back a pretty penny with a price tag of almost $25,000 (£19,999.97, AU$32,000). You could buy a couple dozen of the regular Phantoms for that price.

There's a small chance it will impress people: "See that shiny dot in the sky? That's my drone. It's gold-plated. I'm special." It's the perfect way to show the world you have money to burn.