John Carmack's brilliant Oculus Connect keynote goes 'off message from the standard PR plan' There are two sorts of people in this world: those that have listened to John Carmack talk and those who are unenlightened. One of the key minds behind Doom and Quake is a most unlikely orator, but one who has the ability to hold the attention of a room full of geeks like no other. Anyone who's witnessed his unscripted, unprompted streams of consciousness from his legendary Quakecon keynotes will know this, and for his inaugural talk as CTO of Oculus at their first developer event, 'Connect', he pulled no punches. Road to VR
The NSA is renting its technology to U.S. companies The National Security Agency (NSA), which develops surveillance tools that are both dazzling and terrifying, has been making money on the side by licensing its technology to private businesses for more than two decades. So if you're looking to buy a tool to transcribe voice recordings in any language, a foolproof method to tell if someone's touched your phone's SIM card, or a version of email encryption that isn't available on the open market, try the world's most technologically advanced spy agency. The Daily Dot
Manufacturing the future: How 3D printing went from pipe dream to your desktop It's not a particularly well-produced video. There are no titles, no credits -- no contextual information at all, really. The image is shaky, the sound full of static. The whole thing could have been shot on a phone. A man stands alone in the desert in a black polo shirt and blue jeans, poorly framed in the video which crops off the top of his head. He adjusts a tethered earplug before turning his attention to the strangely shaped chunk of white plastic in his hands. DigitalTrends
Indian Mars mission beams back first photographs India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) got straight to work as it closed in on Martian orbit on Tuesday -- it began taking photographs of the Red Planet and its atmosphere and surface as it slowed down to reach its ultimate destination. After a two-day wait, those first images are slowly trickling onto the Internet. And they're beauties! "A shot of Martian atmosphere. I'm getting better at it. No pressure," the @MarsOrbiter official Twitter account cheekily wrote on Thursday morning. Discovery
Security collapse in the HTTPS market (assessing legal and technical solutions to secure HTTPS) HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) has evolved into the de facto standard for secure Web browsing. Through the certificate-based authentication protocol, Web services and Internet users first authenticate one another ("shake hands") using a TLS/SSL certificate, encrypt Web communications end-to-end, and show a padlock in the browser to signal that a communication is secure. ACMQueue
Security experts expect 'Shellshock' software bug in bash to be significant Long before the commercial success of the Internet, Brian J. Fox invented one of its most widely used tools. In 1987, Mr. Fox, then a young programmer, wrote Bash, short for Bourne-Again Shell, a free piece of software that is now built into more than 70 percent of the machines that connect to the Internet. That includes servers, computers, routers, some mobile phones and even everyday items like refrigerators and cameras. NY Times
Understanding what Minecraft really means to Microsoft When Facebook announced it would buy Oculus VR earlier this year for $2 billion, it was hard to imagine any game industry acquisition could eclipse that deal. Lo and behold, the unexpected (well, unexpected till recently) happened this morning, when Microsoft announced it would be buying Minecraft studio Mojang for $2.5 billion. That makes this the biggest game industry acquisition of 2014 so far. Gamasutra
MagMIMO: MIT's new long-range wireless charging tech that works like WiFi Wireless charging already exists in various forms, but you still have to get your device pretty close to the charger for it to work. Innovations like Qi 1.2 promise to extend the range of wireless charging, but a team at MIT has unveiled a new wireless charging tech called MagMIMO. If this system can be perfected, you might not even have to take the phone out of your pocket to charge it... ExtremeTech
'Cloaking' device uses ordinary lenses to hide objects across range of angles Inspired perhaps by Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, scientists have recently developed several ways -- some simple and some involving new technologies -- to hide objects from view. The latest effort, developed at the University of Rochester, not only overcomes some of the limitations of previous devices, but it uses inexpensive, readily available materials in a novel configuration. University of Rochester
Samsung exits (European) laptop market including Chromebook Following in the path of Sony and its Vaio PCs, Samsung has decided to exit the laptop market stopping sales of Ativ Windows and Chromebook devices in Europe, PC Advisor can confirm. It's common knowledge that the PC market is in decline with Sony pulling out and selling its Vaio business back in February of this year. Despite being a giant of the tech world, Samsung has now followed suit. PC Advisor
Cortana: How Microsoft will bring Windows 9, Windows Phone and Bing closer together Cortana, the lovable personal digital assistant on Windows Phone will be moving to the desktop with Windows 9. This is not a new revelation, of course - we were able to break this news and provide some of the first details around its Windows iteration earlier this year and thanks to new documents obtained by Neowin, we now understand the intention of the platform. Neowin
Rise of the simulations: Why we play at hard work Simulations have always been around on the PC gaming scene. Train and flight simulators have a long, illustrious history on the platform, stretching back decades. Flight sims, especially, were once the crown jewels of PC gaming for some. I knew several people in the early 00s who lived the yearly Microsoft Flight Simulator entry, snapping up each one at release and building PCs to keep up with the physics. Paste Magazine
