Hasta La Gadget!

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocking the enforcement of an Illinois eavesdropping law. The broadly written law — the most stringent in the country — makes it a felony to make an audio recording of someone without their permission, punishable by four to 15 years in prison.

Many states have similar “all-party consent” law, which mean one must get the permission of all parties to a conversation before recording it. But in all of those states — except for Massachusetts and Illinois — the laws include a provision that the parties being recorded must have a reasonable expectation of privacy for it to be a crime to record them.

The Illinois law once included such a provision, but it was removed by the state legislature in response to an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that threw out the conviction of a man accused of recording police from the back of a squad car. That ruling found that police on the job have no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Read More…
More on Video

A while back, I found some lamps that were pretty reminiscent of the ghosts from Pac-Man. However, they weren’t officially-licensed, and they looked really cheaply made. On the other hand, these new Pac-Man lamps are totally official, plus they look like they’re well built and have a few other tricks up their sleeves. Ghosts do have sleeves, don’t they?

These ghosts have one big feature absent from the cheaper clones from last year. Each official Pac-Man ghost lamp includes a wireless remote control, which lets you set your ghost to one of sixteen colors. Want Blinky red? Check. Inky cyan? Yap. Pinky pink? Absolutely? Clyde orange? Indeed. Blue ghost blue? Of course. You can even make up new ghost colors and names. Personally, I like the idea of a purple ghost named “Barney”.

You can also set the lamps to blink, flash, dim, fade and strobe modes if you like ghosts at your raves. The ghosts also look like they’re floating above the surface of your desk for added effect.

The Pac-Man ghost lamp is available now over at Firebox for about $56(USD), and if you order now, you should be able to get one in hand in time for Christmas gift-giving.

Now all we need is a Pac-Man lamp to go with, and we’ll be all set.

Chevrolet’s 2013 Sonic is a spritely little city car, and as of the new year it will have a perky digital personal assistant in the shape of Apple’s Siri. Targeted at cash-strapped but mobile-obsessed college leavers and first-car owners, the 2013 Sonic is the first in Chevrolet’s line-up to feature the MyLink Siri integration, though it won’t be the last. We caught up with Chevy ahead of the new Sonic’s infotationment system making its debut at the LA Auto Show to see how iPhone and automobile play together.

Just as college is a time of BYOB (bring your own beer), the 2013 Sonic is Bring Your Own Siri (BYOS). Bluetooth hooks up the in-dash entertainment system – which focuses on a large touchscreen in the center console – with your iOS 6 device, whether iPhone or iPad, and, once they’re paired, you get all the usual media streaming and hands-free calling. That’s hardly new, but the Sonic is the first to borrow Siri to take responsibility for road use.

Hit the button on the steering wheel and Siri fires up as normal: you can access almost all of the features you’d use regularly, so you get speech-triggered calling of people in your phone book, the ability to listen to and respond to messages, and ask what’s on the calendar for today. However, Chevrolet has sensibly left out anything that would require too much attention being paid to the iPhone’s display, so that the driver can keep their eyes on the road.

The system is called “Eyes Free” and it basically leaves the iPhone or iPad’s display turned off. It makes no difference to Siri’s usability, but it does mean that the sort of queries that would normally trigger a web search don’t work when you ask them via MyLink. Otherwise, all the prompts are fed through the car’s speakers, and a microphone suspended above the driver proved capable of picking up our voice even with background noise.

With a starting price of $12,995 (including destination fees) the 2013 Spark is hardly going to be a Corvette – it’s not even Impala level, the 2014 model year of which will debut Chevy’s next-gen MyLink system in the spring of 2013 – in fact, it’s really just a container for mobile Siri use. By offloading the more advanced functionality to a smartphone (which many buyers will already have) it helps keep the Spark’s price down by not needlessly replicating features; it also means there’s no need to sync your phone with the car to have your contacts on both, and since we generally upgrade our phone more frequently than we do our car, it’ll be easier for Chevrolet to tweak MyLink to support whatever new Siri functionality Apple has in the pipeline.

Chevrolet Sonic and Siri integration hands-on is written by Vincent Nguyen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you’ve followed Technabob for a while, you know that we’ve always enjoyed the cool and offbeat modern watch designs coming out of Tokyoflash Japan. The latest digital model to find its way from the watchmaker is no exception.

The new Kisai Polygon features an unusual display which uses a series of triangles and other polygons to indicate the current time. The triangles around the outer edge point to the current hour, while the next ring of triangles indicates 10 minute intervals of time. Then the large, hexagonal digit in the middle of the watch indicates individual minutes. It takes a minute to understand the display, but once you get used to it, it’s actually pretty straightforward. Plus, it’s definitely unique.

If you’re still confused, check out the video demo below, and it’ll make perfect sense:

The display of the watch is an LCD, which comes in a black, mirror, blue or pink color schemes. It’s also got EL backlighting for easy reading in the dark.

You can order the Kisai Polygon now in black or silver stainless steel with your choice of display color over at Tokyoflash now. If you order by Thursday, 11/29 at 4pm Japan time (2AM Eastern time), you can get the watch for an introductory price of $99(USD) – after which point the price goes up to $129.

Social media, while home to endless cat pictures and game updates, is an excellent medium for voicing social discontent and advocating against authority, whatever that authority may be. Such is the case in politics, where citizens voice their opinion on social media networks to reach a larger audience. Now Facebook has received the proverbial banhammer in Tajikistan, which has blocked access to the website due to “mud and slander.”

Service providers in Tajikistan were ordered to block users from accessing Facebook due to a myriad of complaints regarding what was considered unsavory statements about the country’s officials and president. Following along with the orders, a total of six mobile and Internet providers blocked the social network. Allegedly, the public has praised the move, “flooding” the Telecommunications agency with positive calls.

Tajikistan’s Office of Telecommunications’ Beg Zukhorov offered this statement. “I received many calls from citizens of Tajikistan asking me to shut down this Facebook as a hotbed of slander. Unknown people there insult the leaders of the state. They are apparently being paid well for that … My phone has literally exploded with calls from grateful citizens who happily greeted the news of the closure of the site, and only a few will see this as a negative step.”

Thus far, Facebook has not issued a response, saying only that it is not, at this point, “taking any active action.” The Tajik agency extended an invitation to Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the matter in its Dushanbe office. Not surprisingly, this isn’t the first time Tijikistan has blocked access to Facebook, having already done so once for a little over a week in reaction to posted criticism of the country’s president.

[via Ria Novostri]

Facebook gets the banhammer in Tajikistan is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.