3D printers are gaining in popularity, with uses spanning the spectrum from moon bases to firearms, but there's another area where the ability to construct complex shapes is beginning to provide benefits: getting high. Online magazine Motherboard has published the story about the slow but inevitable rise of 3D-printed bongs.

A “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. The groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app also enables people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button.

Tech is all about disruption. When a problem presents itself, someone will find a way to route around it. Red light cameras, the controversial jackpot generators favored by certain law enforcement agencies, are the problem. The solution?...

"Two Navy SEALs are bringing world-class encryption to the iPhone, for everything from state secrets to celebrity selfies. But that means it can be used by criminals as well."

Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.

Mark's Robot Body: We're getting there! (Reuters) - Dianne Ashworth, who has severe vision loss due to the inherited condition retinitis pigmentosa, was fitted with a prototype bionic eye in May at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital. It was switched on a month later.

"All of a sudden I could see a little flash ... it was amazing," she said in a statement.

"Every time there was stimulation there was a different shape that appeared in front of my eye."

Users of electronic cash protocol Bitcoin might soon have another way to access and spend funds...Charlie Shrem...revealed that his company was 6-8 weeks away from launching a Bitcoin-funded international debit / credit card that will be issued by two unnamed major banks: one international and one domestic...the card will function like a regular debit or credit account and should be accepted wherever MasterCard is accepted – virtually everywhere. The first 1,000 cards will be given away for free but after those have been spoken for, expect to pay around $10 for a card.

"When you finally grasp the magnitude of Apple’s play in the payments business, it becomes clear that potential competitors will be shunned from the platform. As Daniel Terdiman suggests in CNET, “New Apple features may leave fresh app roadkill in their wake as Apple is likely to undercut several existing third-party applications.” With the introduction of Passbook, Apple has launched mobile payments on iOS and competing virtual payment systems, including bitcoin, must be terminated."

According to Dr. Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, terahertz (THz) waves destroy human DNA. The waves literally unzip the helix strand. Now a team of technologists at UT Dallas are planning to take chips broadcasting THz waves and embed them into mobile phones for use as an imaging system for consumers, law enforcement and medical personnel… a potentially deadly technology that could eventually kill or sicken millions of people.

it's a way to embed Easter Eggs in images - we need to best this before everyone else - just PLEASE promise me you won't embed auto-play audio - for our own good ;)