Weekend tech reading: Canadian police can bypass BlackBerry encryption, drone racing coming to ESPN

Matthew DeCarlo

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How Canadian police intercept and read encrypted BlackBerry messages Imagine for a moment that everybody’s front door has the same key. Now imagine that the police have a copy of that key, and can saunter into your living room to poke around your belongings while you're out, and without your knowledge. By way of metaphor, this is exactly how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s federal police force, intercepted and decrypted “over one million” BlackBerry messages during an investigation... Vice

The Minecraft generation Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities. He recently read "The Maze Runner," a sci-fi thriller in which teenagers live inside a booby-­trapped labyrinth, and was inspired to concoct his own version -- something he then would challenge his friends to navigate. The NY Times

Bill requiring warrant for emails takes step forward in the House The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday approved a bill to protect the private emails of Americans from the government, marking a small step forward for one of the most widely supported bills in Congress. The committee, on a unanimous 28-0 vote, approved the Email Privacy Act, which would require that law enforcement obtain a warrant before forcing a technology company to hand over a customer's emails or other electronic communications... The Hill

Copyright fight club The biggest tech fight on the Continent this year doesn't involve Google or Uber, though those are big. Nor is it the raging Transatlantic policy debates over net neutrality or the privacy shield so steeped in technocratese of little relevance to most people. The biggest is the fight over copyright. A looming overhaul of the morass of laws and regulations across the EU will impact how millions of people consume images, words and music on their various devices. Politico.eu

For stronger, lighter, cheaper materials, scroll up Water filters of the future may be made from billions of tiny, graphene-based nanoscrolls. Each scroll, made by rolling up a single, atom-thick layer of graphene, could be tailored to trap specific molecules and pollutants in its tightly wound folds. Billions of these scrolls, stacked layer by layer, may produce a lightweight, durable, and highly selective water purification membrane. MIT (also, Graphene-coated solar panels could create electricity from raindrops)

Unix's file durability problem The core Unix API is overall a reasonably well put together programming environment, one where you can do what you need and your questions have straightforward answers. It's not complete by any means and some of the practical edges are rough as a result of that, but the basics are solid. Well. Most of the basics. One area where the Unix API really falls down on is the simple question of how to make your file writes be durable. Chris Siebenmann

How Facebook is slowly eating the rest of the Internet You can now stream live to Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know it’s a big deal. But Facebook’s latest feature is more than just the ability to post live video for your friends to see. There’s a map where you can explore streams from across the world. There are filters to use when broadcasting, and integration with the newly minted Facebook reactions. The Washington Post

New full duplex radio chip transmits and receives wireless signals at once A new wireless chip can perform a feat that could prove quite useful for the next generation of wireless technology: transmitting and receiving signals on the same frequency, at the same time with the help of a single antenna. This approach instantly doubles the data capacity of existing technology though is not yet capable of power levels necessary to operate on traditional mobile networks. Spectrum IEEE

MNT VA2000, an Amiga 2000 Graphics Card (Zorro II), written in Verilog This repository contains my Kicad schematics and Xilinx ISE/Verilog files for my graphics card project. This is a work in progress, started in October 2015. The first 4 prototypes were assembled in Jan/Feb 2016 and had noise problems, so I started a redesign on Feb 13, 2016. On Mar 27th, 2016, the redesign worked and I could load a 16 bit 565BGR coded raw image from floppy into the graphics card that displayed a 1280x720p resolution (75mhz pixelclock). Github

The Ars guide to building a Linux router from scratch After finally reaching the tipping point with off-the-shelf solutions that can't match increasing speeds available, we recently took the plunge. Building a homebrew router turned out to be a better proposition than we could've ever imagined. With nearly any speed metric we analyzed, our little DIY kit outpaced routers whether they were of the $90- or $250-variety. Ars Technica

Chip, implanted in brain, helps paralyzed man regain control of hand Five years ago, a college freshman named Ian Burkhart dived into a wave at a beach off the Outer Banks in North Carolina and, in a freakish accident, broke his neck on the sandy floor, permanently losing the feeling in his hands and legs. On Wednesday, doctors reported that Mr. Burkhart, 24, had regained control over his right hand and fingers, using technology that transmits his thoughts directly to his hand muscles and bypasses his spinal injury. The NY Times

UGA researchers use single molecule of DNA to create world's smallest diode Researchers at the University of Georgia and at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have demonstrated for the first time that nanoscale electronic components can be made from single DNA molecules. Their study, published in the journal Nature Chemistry, represents a promising advance in the search for a replacement for the silicon chip. UGA

Most of what you wish you knew about coils of wire but were afraid to ask If you are a novice electronic constructor, you will become familiar with common electronic components. Resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, LEDs, integrated circuits. These are the fodder for countless learning projects, and will light up the breadboards of many a Raspberry Pi or Arduino owner. Hackaday

IDRA and ESPN announce drone racing international media distribution deal The International Drone Racing Association (IDRA), the leading global organization in first-person-view drone racing, announced today it has signed a multi-year, international media distribution deal with ESPN, bringing the new sport of drone racing to the worldwide leader in sports. IDRA

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