IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack has reverse-engineered a pacemaker transmitter to make it possible to deliver deadly electric shocks to pacemakers within 30 feet and rewrite their firmware.

In reverse-engineering the terminals – which communicate with the pacemakers – he discovered no obfuscation efforts and even found usernames and passwords for what appeared to be the manufacturer’s development server.

Foxconn is denying that an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 workers at one of its factories in Zhengzhou, China, went on strike yesterday, as reported by China Labor Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group based in New York.

The statement is contrary to a news release from China Labor Watch, which stated that Foxconn raised overly strict demands on product quality workers without providing training for the corresponding skills, resulting in a "widespread work stoppage":

Based in Berkeley, California, this tiny startup is built on an idea that’s as unorthodox as Fong’s education. LightSail aims to store the world’s excess energy in giant tanks of compressed air. The goal is to plug these tanks into wind and solar farms, so that they can squirrel away energy for times when it’s most needed, much like reservoirs store rain water.

Is this doable? According to Samir Succar, a researcher at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute, compressed air storage could indeed improve the efficiency of wind and solar farms and other less-than-predictable energy sources.

Costing only £16, the tiny computer has been designed to inspire anyone, especially children, to get started with computer programming.

Delivery of the first batch of production machines has been delayed twice - once because the wrong component was soldered on to circuit boards and a second time thanks to confusion about electromagnetic testing.

The Pi is built around the Arm chip that is used in the vast majority of mobile phones. It runs one version of the Linux operating system and uses SD cards as its storage medium.

'This is some of the best driving I've ever done,' Steve Mahan said the other day. Mahan was behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius tooling the small California town of Morgan Hill in late January, a routine trip to pick up the dry cleaning and drop by the Taco Bell drive-in for a snack. He also happens to be 95 percent blind.

Google announced the self-driving car project in 2010. It relies upon laser range finders, radar sensors, and video cameras to navigate the road ahead, in order to make driving safer, more enjoyable and more efficient — and clearly more accessible.

By 2015, Munster suggested, the iPad market will expand to some 176 million units. He also believes that Apple will release a “sub-$300 iPad” sometime in 2013.

The new iPad (Apple has so far declined to give it an official name along the lines of “iPad HD” or “iPad 3”) features a high-resolution Retina display, an improved camera and processor and comparable battery life to its predecessors.

Wal-Mart this week ushered in a high-profile outing of Hollywood's UltraViolet scheme for digital streaming of movies and TV. And it's the same old song it ever was: complicated, restrictive DRM with a big side helping of "pay me again."

Those of us who remember FairPlay, Microsoft PlaysForSure, and all the other music DRM battles of the past 14 years or so (yes, it's been 14 years) spotted UltraViolet's true nature right out of the gate. From the consumer perspective, DRM only ever does one thing: drive people crazy.

Apple yesterday bumped up the download limit for content over a cell connection to a healthy 50 megabytes. Previously, iOS users were restricted to downloading items no larger than 20MB unless they did so over Wi-Fi.

But when I attempted to grab a 100MB app, a message told me that the item was over 50MB, requiring me to use a Wi-Fi network or iTunes on my PC to download it.

HTC previously took pains to lock down the bootloaders on its Android devices, preventing users from rooting them to install custom operating system builds. After some backlash, HTC recanted, and Peter Chou, HTC's CEO, said in May that the company would no longer be locking the bootloaders.

Of course, "allowing" is different than "supporting." HTC warns customers that unlocking their devices may mean they're no longer covered under warranty. The company also notes that unlocking the devices may cause unintended side effects, including overheating.

Researchers at Japan’s Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology have developed a seat that can identify the user by the shape and heft of their buttocks.

One of the advantages of the technology, according to the team, is that it’s less awkward than other forms of biometric technology.