Kyt Dotson
Latest from Kyt Dotson
With Warrantless NSA Wiretapping Renewed by Congress Internet Users Rethink Privacy
Recently, the United States Congress renewed the warrantless wiretapping powers of the NSA in the FISA Amendments Act by a 73 to 23 vote. The law had been set to expire shortly, but it has been duly resurrected amidst a great deal of controversy and ill feelings on the subject in regards to how agents ...
Google Augmented Reality Stars of 2012: Glass and Ingress
Ever since the impromptu fashion show at Google I/O 2012, Google Glass—the augmented reality spectacles produced by the world’s Internet search megagiant—we’ve been sitting on the edge of our seats to see where this product might go. A little bit goofy looking, for all its stylish affectations, but then again the first Bluetooth headsets didn’t ...
The State of Augmented Reality in 2012: Heads Up, Metadata, and Mapping
Cameras. They’re everywhere and in everything, usually as a person on the street we connect cameras with the idea that someone is watching us—but in our hands, they have a secondary purpose: they allow us to record and translate our own experience through a device. That’s a long way of saying, “My smartphone can use ...
3D Printing Has a Lot to Look Forward to in 2013: The Physible and Beyond
For the year of 2012, we’ve been looking at what’s been going on in the realm of 3D printing—that last-mile for enterprise and consumers to prototype or print their own “things.” Right now, the industry is relegated to the fringe of expectation but sits right on the cusp of becoming the next-big-thing for providing not ...
‘Twas the Morning of Christmas and Steam Had an Outage
Fortunately, for most gamers, this issue was over almost as soon as it was noticed. Today—of all days Christmas day when many e-gifts, some video games, will be unwrapped—the digital distribution network of Valve’s extremely popular Steam had a worldwide outage causing much frustration. Reports from users in the Steam forums reveal that at approximately ...
Elcomsoft’s Forensic Decryption Software Moves the Needle for Practical Cryptography
Cryptography is the go-to defense for cybersecurity, it’s essentially the strongbox of the computing era—and just like a strongbox it’s not designed to keep the contents perfectly safe from all perpetrators, it’s designed to resist their attempts to get at it. It’s still possible for the Hole In The Wall gang to derail your train, ...
Video: 2012 Has Been An Amazing Year for Video Games
The year of 2012 has seen a lot of industries go through a great deal of change and the state of the art is always shifting. Video games are no exception and 2012 has been an amazing year for looking at what it is to make video games, what it is to be a gamer, ...
Reports of Bitcoin’s Criminal Potential Have Been Exaggerated by CNN Fortune
Yesterday, CNN Fortune published an article by Cyrus Sanati about Bitcoin entitled “Bitcoin looks primed for money laundering.” In what could be best described as an odd screed against Bitcoin and its potential financial impact on the world, it delves into places that paint the cryptocurrency as a boogeyman while at the same time reporting ...
Salinas Police Department Uses ShareFile to Make Reports Smarter, Easier, and More Secure
When we look at technology that affects governments we generally think of the US federal government—a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy that crosses state lines and needs to communicate with itself constantly—but often we forget that small cities and even police departments are no less in need of upgrades. So when I went to speak with the ...
How a Robot That Plays Angry Birds Can Aid Development and Quality Assurance
This story starts in an interesting place: the quest to produce a robot that plays Angry Birds; but it ends in a place very familiar with anyone who has ever worked in product testing: a robot that does the tedious task of pressing every button combination on a physical UI. Recently, I spoke with Jason ...