The system, called “Wi-Vi,” is based on a concept similar to radar and sonar imaging. But in contrast to radar and sonar, it transmits a low-power Wi-Fi signal and uses its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall.

As a Wi-Fi signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of the signal penetrates through it, reflecting off any humans on the other side. However, only a tiny fraction of the signal makes it through to the other room, with the rest being reflected by the wall, or by other objects. “So we had to come up with a technology that could cancel out all these other reflections, and keep only those from the moving human body,” Katabi says.

The X-ray vision device uses the same wireless antenna that helps connect your laptop to the Internet at Starbucks, so it could potentially be built into your mobile phone in the future. This means it probably will, so enjoy your baths in private while you can.

Via Tech News Daily

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The line that tech journalism should never have crossed? Mocking Napster co-founder and Facebook investor Sean Parker's $4.5 million wedding in a redwood grove on the Monterey Peninsula.

If you've been following this story, you are probably familiar with Alexis Madrigal's initial rant condemning the wedding, based on a report by the California Coastal Commission, and the undeniable fact that Parker will shell out an additional $2.5 million from his own pocket to deal with permit violations and excise the ghost of any possible impropriety. You may also have found time to wade through Sean Parker's 10,000 word defense, in TechCrunch, of the sacredness of weddings, his own credentials as an environmentalist, and the pitiable state of Internet journalism.

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The maker of "FarmVille" and other games said Monday that Pincus, who founded Zynga Inc. and named it after his American bulldog in 2007, will stay on as chairman and chief product officer.

Mattrick, 49, has served as the president of Microsoft's entertainment business, which includes the Xbox, since 2010. He's been with Microsoft for six years.

Mattrick faces a difficult task. Zynga's stock is down sharply since the company's 2011 initial public offering at $10 per share. Its games have waned in popularity and it announced in June that it was cutting 520 jobs, or about 18 percent of its workforce, to save money.

Pincus seems to think his successor is up to the task. In a statement, Pincus praised Mattrick as "one of the top executives in the overall entertainment business."

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Tribune currently owns 23 TV stations and cable network WGN America, along with the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers. It says the deal will make it the country's largest commercial TV station owner with 42 stations.

Tribune Co. said it expects the deal to boost its profits immediately and result in more than $100 million in annual cost savings within five years. Local TV's holdings include stations in Denver, Cleveland, St. Louis and other major cities.

Meanwhile, the Chicago company said the increased scale will help it maximize its national and local advertising sales, while also giving it a larger footprint to distribute its video and digital content.

"This is a transformational acquisition for Tribune - it makes us the No. 1 local TV affiliate group in America, expands the distribution platform for our high-quality video content, and extends the reach of our digital products to new audiences across the country,"  Tribune Co. President and CEO Peter Liguori said in a statement.

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So much drama! So much scrambling for alternatives at the last minute! So much nostalgia for those days when everyone had a blog and every post was brilliant and the future seemed so bright ... Wait, did that actually happen? Maybe I'm getting carried away.

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Facing threatened investigations and sanctions from Europe, U.S. intelligence officials plan to discuss the new allegations — reported in Sunday's editions of the German newsweekly Der Spiegel — directly with EU officials.

But "as a matter of policy, we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations," concluded a statement issued Sunday from the national intelligence director's office.

It was the latest backlash in a nearly month-long global debate over the reach of U.S. surveillance that aims to prevent terror attacks. The two programs, both run by the National Security Agency, pick up millions of telephone and Internet records that are routed through American networks each day. Reports about the programs have raised sharp concerns about whether they violate public privacy rights at home and abroad.

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The new app is an odd bird. It includes the basic search functionality that we require from a search engine, but then layers a rudimentary story recommendation service on top. Just now, Duck Duck Go suggested a short news squib about a two-headed turtle named Thelma and Louise, a Wall Street Journal article warning against letting your children grow up to be tennis pros, and a story about Indiana basketball player Victor Oladipo wearing Google Glass to the NBA draft.

In an announcement of the new app, Duck Duck Go declared that the stories had "proven social value" and were generated by "by leveraging hand-selected, crowd-sourced, curated feeds." As explained by Duck Duck Go founder Gabriel Weinberg, what that basically means is that Duck Duck Go scoops up stories that reach the top of "most emailed" or "most shared" lists at sites like Reddit or the WSJ or Business Insider.

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Some common vaccines that prevent such diseases as diphtheria, whooping cough and meningitis contain thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that fights bacteria and fungi. Thimerosal is also used in the production of certain vaccines, which retain trace amounts of the compound.

Ethylmercury, the form of the element used in thimerosal, is known to be toxic at high doses. And during the treaty negotiations representatives from several nations and advocacy groups argued that it should be phased out.

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What concerns the executives is the one uncertain element that Southwest, the largest domestic carrier in the United States and one of the best run and most profitable airlines in the world, cannot control. And that, of course, is the weather.

Weather delays are not only infuriating for travelers stewing in airports eating bad pizza—they also cost the airlines more than $1 billion a year. Revenues evaporate with every plane grounded by snow or hurricanes, and are siphoned by jets flying around thunderstorms. Southwest won’t release an exact dollar amount, but they say weather delays make up a considerable part of annual revenue loss.

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From Der Spiegel, translated to English by Google Translate:

In a "top secret" classified NSA paper in September 2010 describes how the intelligence attacked the EU's diplomatic representation in Washington.

Thus, not only bugs were installed in the building in the U.S. capital, but also the internal computer network was infiltrated. In this way, the Americans not only get access to meetings at the premises of the EU , but also to e-mails and internal documents on the computers.

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Sherry Kelly, a resident of nearby LaSalle, first noticed the noise a year and a half later, in the winter of 2011. An accountant with young children, she would stay up late catching up on work while her family was in bed and the house was quiet. “You think, is there something wrong with my hearing?” she says. “You look outside the window because it sounds like a truck idling. If there was a teenager in a sports car parked outside with his music on and the windows up -- it sounds like that.” But she was reluctant to mention the noise to anyone else. “For me, being a professional, you don’t want to step up and have people be, ‘Oh, she’s the crazy one who hears a hum.’”

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But Vi Hart's ambitions do not always fit into small sizes. On Thursday, she dropped her latest effort, and there's simply no other way to describe it than as a masterpiece of mad genius. At one point during the 30-minute video she observes that she wouldn't presume to tell you what her creation is "about," but that's not going to stop me.

Here are a few things I think Vi Hart's "Twelve Tones" video is about:

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"One of the gravest crises in the history of American cryptanalysis," writes historian Colin Burke, led directly to the 1949 mergingof the SIS and OP-20-G into the Armed Forces Security Agency. Three years later, another bureaucratic shuffle transformed the AFSA into the National Security Agency. A sense of panic induced by the "Soviets' A-Bomb, the Berlin Blockade, the forming of the satellite bloc in Eastern Europe, the fall of China, and the Korean War" -- all of which "were not predicted" by the intelligence agencies -- encouraged the U.S. government to authorize the NSA to spend tens of millions of dollars on computer research, in the hope that technological advances would help crack the new Soviet codes.

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The service started in New York last year and expanded to Boston and Atlanta this spring. Service in the Chicago area will begin Sept. 13 and will come with several Chicago-area broadcast stations plus Bloomberg TV. Eligibility is limited to 16 counties in Illinois and Indiana.

Aereo converts television signals into computer data and sends them over the Internet to subscribers' computers and mobile devices. Subscribers can watch channels live or record them with an Internet-based digital video recorder. Viewers can pause and rewind live television.

Broadcasters have sued Aereo for copyright infringement, but Aereo has won key court rulings.

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Created by Scott Garner, a master's degree candidate in the interactive telecommunications department at NYU, Hell Is Other People relies on the same technology as Foursquare, an app that allows people to "check in" at various establishments to display their location to other users. Unlike Foursquare, which aims to maximize the possibility of face-to-face interaction, Hell Is Other People displays the locations of others, as well as the best routes you can take for how to avoid them.

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under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.

The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by theNSA codename Stellar Wind.

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

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Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.

The relationship provides a rare window into the U.S. law enforcement investigation into WikiLeaks, the transparency group newly thrust back into international prominence with its assistance to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Thordarson’s double-life illustrates the lengths to which the government was willing to go in its pursuit of Julian Assange, approaching WikiLeaks with the tactics honed during the FBI’s work against organized crime and computer hacking — or, more darkly, the bureau’s Hoover-era infiltration of civil rights groups.

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Oops. The World Food Prize committee’s got a bit of egg on its face—genetically engineered egg. They just awarded the World Food Prize to three scientists, including one from Syngenta and one from Monsanto, who invented genetic engineering because, they say, the technology increases crop yields and decreases pesticide use. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Monsanto and Syngenta are major sponsors of the World Food Prize, along with a third biotech giant, Dupont Pioneer.)

Monsanto makes the same case on its website, saying, “Since the advent of biotechnology, there have been a number of claims from anti-biotechnology activists that genetically modified (GM) crops don’t increase yields. Some have claimed that GM crops actually have lower yields than non-GM crops… GM crops generally have higher yields due to both breeding and biotechnology.”

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The filibuster was a gripping spectacle that kept me rapt for hours. On Twitter, people were able to offer support, however symbolic, for Sen. Davis’ efforts. There was a sense of community. For some levity, I couldn’t help remarking on Sen. Davis’ flawless hair, several hours into her ferocious stand.

Near midnight, after some intense and partisan efforts to derail Sen. Davis’ efforts, the impassioned crowd in the gallery began shouting and cheering, letting the senator know she did not stand alone. It was a sound of women fighting for their reproductive freedom in the only way they could: with their voices. I will never forget that sound. It awoke something in me I hadn’t realized had gone dormant.

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Of course, I should be clear: This was my world of social media. We are filtered by whom we follow and friend. If I associated with a different motley crew, the cries of joy and rage could easily flip places. Social conservatives believe that what happened in Texas Wednesday night was a travesty of democracy and that Jesus is weeping in dismay over the prospect of a flood of gay marriage in California. And they're on Twitter too.

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