Samsung will ban the Note 7 from connecting to mobile networks in New Zealand

Despite a global recall, airline ban, and numerous financial incentives to get a new phone, some stubborn souls are still using their Galaxy Note 7s. The next step? Stop them connecting to mobile networks.Samsung announced yesterday that as of November 18th, anyone using a Note 7 in New Zealand will be disconnected from all mobile carriers. They won’t be able to make calls, send texts, or access mobile data, be that 3G or 4G.Wi-Fi access will be be unaffected by the move, but it should get the attention of those dragging their heels on returning the phone. According to New Zealand site Stuff.co.nz, the country’s Telecommunications Forum chief executive Geoff Thorn said most of the devices had already been exchanged, but a few hundred were still out there.

Here’s an Idea: Give Special Forces Some Flying Motorcycles

ELITE MILITARY FORCES have plenty of cool ways to reach targets. Black Hawk helicopters. V-22 Ospreys. Scuba gear.Here’s one more: a jet-powered flying motorbike that can hit 150 mph and happens to be carrying four Spike missiles.When Franky Zapata showed off his Flyboard earlier this year, zooming through the air 7,000 feet up at 55 mph, I knew a military version of the Green Goblin-inspired transportation would surely follow.So I thought up the Zaxon, a tactical vehicle that uses that turbojet technology to deploy special forces on the ground to a target less than 100 clicks away, possibly after dropping from a Lockheed Martin C-5 Galaxy.The size of a standard touring motorcycle, the single-seat Zaxon would use two larger engines up front, and two smaller ones in back. The jets could tilt slightly for liftoff, landing, or full-speed flying. The large fuel tank would sit inside the bike, taking the space usually occupied by a motorcycle engine.

Two jet nozzles would help with lateral stability, making small adjustments when necessary. An onboard flying system would help stabilize the vehicle automatically, although the pilot would need to be trained to properly feel the bike and learn how to react to its movements.The Zaxon would have landing skids like those on a helicopter. After dropping from the plane and free-falling, it would power up, then come in a for a low-speed landing and skid just a bit when touching down. As a backup, the Zaxon would carry a parachute for flights over 1,000 feet, and infrared lights for landing in darkness. Small wings could create more lift in level flight.

Like so many military vehicles, the Zaxon would cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, so a government arm like Darpa would be best equipped to make it reality. But once it exists, if costs come down, the nonmilitary types might be able to enjoy a civilian version.I developed the Zaxon concept in collaboration with Ashish Thulkar, an industrial designer from Bengalore, India. He also created the Drone Tower concept and the Tridika people mover.

It’s Finally Legal To Hack Your Own Devices (Even Your Car)

YOU MAY HAVE thought that if you owned your digital devices, you were allowed to do whatever you like with them. In truth, even for possessions as personal as your car, PC, or insulin pump, you risked a lawsuit every time you reverse-engineered their software guts to dig up their security vulnerabilities—until now.Last Friday, a new exemption to the decades-old law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act quietly kicked in, carving out protections for Americans to hack their own devices without fear that the DMCA’s ban on circumventing protections on copyrighted systems would allow manufacturers to sue them. One exemption, crucially, will allow new forms of security research on those consumer devices. Another allows for the digital repair of vehicles. Together, the security community and DIYers are hoping those protections, which were enacted by the Library of Congress’s Copyright Office in October of 2015 but delayed a full year, will spark a new era of benevolent hacking for both research and repair.

“This is a tremendously important improvement for consumer protection,” says Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. “The Copyright Office has demonstrated that it understands our changed technological reality, that in every aspect of consumers’ lives, we rely on code,” says Matwyshyn, who argued for the exemptions last year.For now, the exemptions are limited to a two-year trial period. And the security research exemption in particular only applies to what the Copyright Office calls “good-faith” testing, “in a controlled environment designed to avoid any harm to individuals or to the public.” As Matwyshyn puts it, “We’re not talking about testing your neighbor’s pacemaker while it’s implanted. We’re talking about a controlled lab and a device owned by the researcher.”

But within those restrictions, the exemptions remove a looming fear of DMCA lawsuits that has long hung over the security research community. “There’s a universe of security vulnerabilities that the law keeps researchers from figuring out and telling you about, but are nonetheless present in devices you use every day,” says Kit Walsh, an attorney with the Electronic Freedom Foundation. “For the next two years, that threat will be lifted for many forms of security research that are really important.”Section 1201 of the DMCA has for years forbidden hackers from reverse-engineering many computer systems—even ones that they owned—in an attempt to prevent Americans from circumventing protections on the intellectual property of manufacturers. Sony used the law, for instance, to sue reverse-engineer George Hotz for hacking the Sony Playstation to allow it to run unauthorized software. (Sony and Hotz eventually settled that lawsuit in 2011, after Hotz agreed to stop reverse0engineering Sony’s products.) Tractor manufacturer John Deere last year cited the law to argue that tractor owners couldn’t repair certain software components of their vehicles.

Electron Microscopes Can Finally See in Wonderful Color

Imagine a Where’s Waldo book with nothing but black and white pictures. Good luck using his candy-stripe sweater as a visual cue. Now you know what it’s like trying to find a virus on a greyscale microscopic image. Microbiologists have dealt with this problem for decades, because when things get small, things go dark. Photons, bits of light essential to discerning color, are too clunky to resolve anything much smaller than say, a synapse connecting two neurons. If you want to look at things like viruses, bacteria, or molecules passing through cell walls, you must use an electron microscope.The devices, developed in the 1930s, use electromagnetic coils to bombard a chemically-prepped, vacuum-sealed specimen with, you guessed it, electrons. The resulting image is more like a shadow casting than a photograph, with the particles revealing shapes, depth, contours, and texture. But not color. Which sucks, because color is an excellent way of finding things—important things—hidden in an image.

Finding all those microscopic Waldos will be much easier, because investigators at the Center for Research in Biological Systems at UC San Diego developed a method for adding color to electron microscopic imagery. The method, published today in Cell Chemical Biology, involves two key technological developments: Treating specimens with rare earth metals, then examining them under a special type of electron microscope typically used to analyze novel synthetic materials.The colorizing process starts like normal electron microscopy. Electrons like metal, so the microscopist treats the specimen with a heavy metal, like lead, then creates a greyscale image—the base layer. The next step is treating the specimen with different types of rare earth metals called lanthanides (also used in lithium-ion batteries). Lanthanides are pickier than heavy metals and only stick to certain molecule types, which makes those the only molecules the electron microscope sees. The microscopist processes the image, assigns the layer a color—say, green—and layers it on top of the grayscale base layer.

“So now we have something that makes Waldo stand out from everything else, because we take one picture where everything that wasn’t Waldo disappears into grayscale, and then assign the Waldo molecules a color, like orange, and then put that back together with the greyscale,” says Mark Ellisman, microscopist at CRBS and co-author of the study. “We’ve found a way of making multiple Waldos stand out based on the way they interact with the electrons we throw at them.” That’s fine, but Waldo wore a red (striped) shirt, not orange.At the moment, the team can add just two or three colors per image. “The hardest part is being able to use several metal treatments in sequence without one cross contaminating the others,” says Ellisman. This electron colorizing work builds upon research that earned co-author Roger Tsien, who died in August, a Nobel in 2008. His death has done more than leave the team without a leader. It’s left them hurting for money. “We are thinking of crowdfunding to keep his vision going,” says Ellisman. The next big goal, in other words, is finding the color green.

This Evil Office Printer Hijacks Your Cellphone Connection

JULIAN OLIVER HAS for years harbored a strange obsession with spotting poorly disguised cellphone towers, those massive roadside antennae draped in fake palm fronds to impersonate a tree, or even hidden as spoofed lamp posts and flag poles. The incognito base stations gave him another, more mischievous idea. What about a far better-disguised cell tower that could sit anonymously in office, invisibly hijacking cellphone conversations and texts?Earlier this week, the Berlin-based hacker-artist unveiled the result: An entirely boring-looking Hewlett Packard printer that also secretly functions as a rogue GSM cell base station, tricking your phone into connecting to it rather than your phone carrier’s tower, effectively intercepting your calls and text messages.For quite some time I’ve had an interest in this bizarre uncanny design practice of disguising cell towers as other things like trees,” says Oliver. “So I decided to build one into a printer, the most ubiquitous of indoor flora, and have it actually antagonize people’s implicit trust in these technologies.”

Oliver’s fake printer, which he calls the Stealth Cell Tower, could potentially eavesdrop on the voice calls and SMS messages of any phone that’s fooled into automatically connecting to it. Since it sits indoors near its victims, Oliver says it can easily overpower the signal of real, outdoor cell towers. But instead of spying, the printer merely starts a text message conversation with the phone, pretending to be an unidentified contact with a generic message like “Come over when you’re ready,” or the more playful “I’m printing the details for you now.” If the confused victim writes back, the printer spits out their response on paper as a creepy proof of concept. It’s also programmed to make calls to connected phones and, if the owner answers, to play an mp3 of the Stevie Wonder song “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” After five minutes, the printer drops its connection with the phone and allows it to reconnect to a real cell tower.

Oliver’s creation isn’t intended merely to stage an elaborate office prank. He wants to demonstrate the inherent privacy flaws of the cellular connections our phones depend on. His Stealth Cell Tower, after all, is no different from the devices known as IMSI catchers, or “stingrays,” that police use to hijack cellphone connections and spy on and track criminal suspects. “GSM is so broken and phones are so desperate to get hooked up that they’ll just hop onto anything that looks like a cell tower,” Oliver says. “IMSI catchers are most commonly deployed at protests. It’s worrying, when you’re looking at activist movements organizing themselves over SMS and calls.”

Instead, he says, his mischievous printer should serve as a reminder to the paranoid to end-to-end encrypt their communications. He recommends the free encryption app Signal. “My project is intentionally built to humiliate GSM in a sense,” says Oliver. “It’s broken, and we need to encrypt our stuff end-to-end.”Oliver built his spy printer from easy-to-buy hardware: A Raspberry Pi minicomputer, a BladeRF software-defined radio, two GSM antennae and of course, a Hewlett Packard Laserjet 1320 printer. He’s also released the code for Stealth Cell Tower on his website.

But don’t try this hacker trick at home—or at the office. Oliver admits his printer would break plenty of laws if used without certain safeguards. In the US, for instance, it likely violates the Wiretap Act and Federal Communications Commission regulations. Civil rights groups have even alleged that Baltimore Police broke the law when they used the same IMSI catching technique on criminal suspects.Oliver says that if he eventually displays the printer in a gallery or museum, he’ll consult his lawyers and post warnings that anyone who enters the room consents to have their phone’s communications intercepted.“The whole idea is to lure a phone over to an object in the room for this brief encounter, to create an unsettling, critical break,” says Oliver. “If you don’t want your phone to behave oddly, you should turn it off.”

Missing the MagSafe Charger in the New MacBook? Here’s Your Dongle

FFOR ALL THAT the new MacBook Pro has gained—a Touch Bar, Touch ID, more power, a space grey variant—it has also suffered a significant loss. In exclusively embracing USB-C, Apple has abandoned its MagSafe charging technology. You know, that magical magnetism that constantly saves you from tripping your $2,000 laptop off the coffee table.Worried about a MagSafe-less life? Don’t be. There’s a way out of this. One industrious accessory maker has recreated the experience for a USB-C world. It’s not MagSafe, but it’s the closest you can get right now.Griffin first introduced its BreakSafe Magnetic USB-C Power Cable in January, as an appeal to buyers of the then-new, also sans-MagSafe MacBook. It consists of two parts: A tiny nubbin that plugs into your laptop’s USB-C port, and a cable that attaches magnetically in a manner similar to MagSafe. It’ll break off cleanly if you tug on it, saving you from catastrophic trips and tugs.

The BreakSafe has always been clever, but its usefulness was limited on the MacBook. Apple’s revamped entry-level laptop has only one USB-C port, period, doing double or triple duty as a source of power and connectivity. It’s dongletown. Which makes clogging that one port for charging exclusively an impractical proposal.The new MacBook Pro suffers no such limitations. Its four USB-C ports (or two, on the entry model) mean you can keep one forever-stuffed with a BreakSafe, and still have ample room for additional peripherals.The caveat here is that while BreakSafe looks like a reasonable MagSafe facsimile, it is not actually MagSafe. Apple’s patented that specific tech every which way. The most immediate difference is that BreakSafe isn’t reversible, meaning you can’t plug it in however you want. You’ll need to use the BreakSafe cord exclusively. And the little donglet it connects to also juts out slightly from your laptop, a perpetual wart, and a reminder that the MacBook’s best feature has been put to rest.

Still, a pale imitation of the original beats no imitation at all. And $40 seems like a reasonable price to pay to reclaim the true value of MagSafe: a little peace of mind.

A Chain-Smoking Robot Isn’t Just Hilarious—It’s a Big Deal

ROBOTS ARE GREAT at a lot of things—brute force, repetition, and speed, for instance (though maybe not walking). Now add to that list one of the most human of human endeavors: smoking.

That’s right, researchers have built a chain-smoking robot. And not because they want a real-life Bender. Forcing a robot to smoke could help scientists at Harvard’s Wyss Institute solve the mysteries of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—the intense coughing and lung infections that plague smokers. And it’s far more humane than the other research method of forcing rats to smoke.

Here’s how it works. The researchers load as many as 12 cigarettes in a sort of gatling gun arrangement, and the robot fires up each with a lighter right out of a car. Then they program the machine to huff away at customizable intensities and frequencies.

The robot is passing the smoke into what’s known as a lung on a chip, which mimics a human airway. This transparent chip contains a channel of living lung cells, which produce mucus and hairlike structures called cilia that ferry the mucus around. Connected to this channel are tubes that move smoke in and out. By loading up one chip with lung cells from a patient with pulmonary disease and another chip with cells from a healthy patient, researchers can observe how the two react differently to smoke.

And early results, published in a paper last week, are a glimpse at what this technology can do for medicine. For one, by sending smoke through the chips, the scientists could confirm a hunch. “First of all, we were able to show that the chips that were lined by cells from COPD patients showed a much bigger inflammatory response to the cigarette smoke exposure than normal, which is consistent with cigarette exposure bringing a COPD patient to the emergency room,” says Donald Ingber, one of the robot’s creators and director of the Wyss Institute.The second bit gets deeper into the actual mechanisms involved. Because the researchers can see right into the chip, they can observe the beating cilia moving the mucus around. They found that smoke makes these cilia freak out a bit, beating at irregular intervals instead of their standard, uniform rate. “The cigarette smoke essentially interferes with their oriented cleansing motion, so you get distorted motion,” says Ingber, “and that’s probably why people who smoke are coughing and have more mucus.” Treating COPD, then, could be a matter of treating the wayward cilia.Great stuff, and all the better considering the robot doesn’t give a hoot if you force it to chain smoke. The alternative subjects in this type of experiment? Not so much. This sort of thing typically requires stuffing rats in a smoke-filled box. Not only is using a robot more humane, but it’s a better representation of human responses to smoke. Rats don’t breathe like we do—it’s all in and out through the nose—and a rodent’s immune response to smoke isn’t like that of a human.

So a big welcome to the chain-smoking robot. Your fellow smokers—human or otherwise—appreciate your habit.