The ACLU of Massachusetts this week asked a federal judge to order federal prosecutors and judges to stop sealing information about requests to unlock phone data - if they are, in fact, doing that. Read more.
Technology
M.L. reports seeing a weird, teensy-tiny little purple car on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge today, headed towards MIT (of course). Corinne replies with the above photo. Anybody know more about it?
The Globe reports on a case involving a phone belonging to an alleged member of the Columbia Point Dawgs, indicted last year with 47 other people.
The Boston Business Journal remembers Ray Tomlinson, who gave us both e-mail and the use of the @ symbol in 1971, as an engineer for what was then Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge.
Boston Dynamics is not winning fans with the way it manhandled poor Atlas the robot.
Also see:
Boston Dynamics robot is a typical Masshole (NSFW): Read more.
Boston Dynamics posted this video to show off the abilities of its newest robot, but if you watch the whole thing, you'll see the poor automaton get tormented by some jerk with a hockey stick who winds up kicking it to the ground. A robot dog fares no better.
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting takes a look at what we do know about Boston Police's use of a StingRay device, which can masquerade as a cell tower and intercept location data from nearby phones.
In a lawsuit filed this week, Cambridge's Akamai Technologies charges that basically everything that competitor Limelight Networks does violates three Akamai patents. Akamai wants a judge in US District Court in Boston to tell Limelight to knock it off and pay lots of damages for having that sort of nerve. Read more.
MIT researchers say Boston could become more energy self sufficient and become a greener city by working towards a series of neighborhood power sources that would include small natural-gas power plants and "community" solar systems. Read more.
If you like reading books, you are probably interested in appropriate apps, which will make this process easier. Of course, when you meet with this problem at first time, you may not choose the right one at the beginning. So I decided to write this article and to advise you the best apps for reading. So let’s see which ones are best.
MIT says Toshiba owes it at least that much in royalties for the right to make digital TVs, video players and home-theater systems based on patents it holds.
In a lawsuit filed this week in US District Court in Boston, MIT says that Toshiba stopped making agreed upon royalty payments in 2011 for patented work by MIT researchers on several key digital-TV standards, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. Read more.
The Harvard Gazette reports researchers at Harvard, MIT and the Joslin Diabetes Center have successfully tested an implantable bundle containing human pancreas cells in mice and primates with type 1 diabetes.
Key to the research is alginate, a substance derived from seaweed that blocks the immune system from attacking the container for the new cells as "foreign" without the need for expensive and risky immune suppressing drugs. Read more.
MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory reports Minsky, 88, died Sunday
Minsky viewed the brain as a machine whose functioning can be studied and replicated in a computer - which would teach us, in turn, to better understand the human brain and higher-level mental functions: How might we endow machines with common sense - the knowledge humans acquire every day through experience? How, for example, do we teach a sophisticated computer that to drag an object on a string, you need to pull, not push - a concept easily mastered by a two-year-old child?
A standout amongst the best choice of showcasing correspondence is the Internet. The perceivability of any business or association is essentially to accomplish by beginning a web journal. It can be utilized either by the specialty unit to publicize something or by a distinctive individual to share the thoughts, individual considerations et cetera. You can without much of a stretch find free stages in the Internet. For example, Blogger, TypePad and WordPress. The last one is the best. It is fairly well known among the clients for few reasons. WordPress is simple being used and it offers a control alternative.
City Hall today announced an online dashboard that is supposed to let people know at a glance how efficiently various city services and metrics are being met - for example, stabbings (hey, it's the very first item) are apparently down from where the city expected them to be (yay!), while city traffic-light repair is going slower than it should (boo!).
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that prosecutors can use photos found on the phone of Hyde Park man against him when he comes to trial on gun charges related to a 2011 gun battle outside his apartment.
That the decision came in a 4-3 vote, however, highlights the court's struggles to adapt search-and-seizure laws and decisions that date to the age of quill pens to the current digital world. Read more.
Boston Dynamics, the company that gave us robot horses that fling cinder blocks, wishes you all a merry and non-nightmarish Christmas.
Motherboard reports on how the town of Leverett (population 1,876) is supplying its residents with far broader broadband than we can get here in Boston.
Researchers at Olin College are looking at programming robots with what sounds a bit like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, the Boston Business Journal reports:
Think of a fire-fighting robotic dog that sacrifices itself to rescue people ... Or of a robot riveter that stops short of punching through a human workers’ misplaced hand because the robot has been programmed to value human safety over assembly line efficiency.
The Harvard Gazette reports researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed "a model of human intestinal inflammation and bacterial overgrowth in a human-gut-on-a-chip" that should make it easier to figure out and develop possible remedies for such ailments as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.