Kids and parents beware: modern toys are another gateway to private data

The personal information of almost 5 million parents and more than 200,000 kids was exposed earlier this month after a hacker broke into the servers of a Chinese company that sells kids toys and gadgets. That company is VTech, but the hack is not on the toys themselves: it’s on the servers that recolect parents

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OnePlus, Apple, cables and book covers

These days there have been reports on two sides of the same product: cables and power adapters, often dismissed by users, are more important that it may seem. On one end we’ve got OnePlus, who has been victim of a detailed analysis by a Google Engineer. He found that this maker should be using 56kΩ resistors

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The Raspberry Pi Zero is a crazy little wonderful microPC that costs $5

The Raspberry Pi was a marvel of design and versatility, and it was one of the big reasons the maker movement started in the first place. Sure, Arduino and other projects have helped, but the RPi democratized the trend and made anyone a potential hardware tinkerer. After developing several versions, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just

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Xiaomi’s Mi Pad 2 is a promising cheap alternative to Surface Pro 4 & iPad Pro

You don’t need much more than that to work on the go. A 7.9 inch screen (2048 x 1536 resolution), a quad-core Atom X5-Z8500, 2 GB RAM and 64 GB of internal storage make this Windows 10 tablet a surprising cheap alternative to the new breed of expensive convertible tablets. This is exactly what Microsoft

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Samsung Gear VR vs Google Cardboard: the differences are night and day

As an owner of a Google Cardboard model, I had doubts about how Samsung Gear VR could really make a difference when the experience should depend more on the mobile phone than on the mobile VR glasses themselves. In fact, to me the Samsung Gear VR weren’t nothing else than a expensive, pretty version of the

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Are we ready for virtual showrooming? HoloLens fails to give a good answer

Here we’ve got another nice example of a promising technology that has to overcome several big obstacles. The user experience is far from perfect, and on this specific scenario -showrooming- it fails when what you actually want is touching something physical. But as with many HoloLens demos, objects are coherent only at a very specific

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iFixit: Apple Pencil is a little technology marvel

I remember Ken Shirriff’s article about the Apple iPhone charger teardown. On something so seemingly unimportant, Apple showed their capabilities. Design was important, but execution was critical. Something similar has happened with the Apple Pencil. We can laugh about Apple admitting finally that the stylus can be useful on certain scenarios. What we can’t do is

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Apple Watch Magnetic Charging Dock makes you pay $79 for something that Apple should have given in the first place

On May’15 Mark Sullivan wrote his review of the Apple Watch, and he had something to say about the charging features of the device: You can’t sleep with the Watch because you have to charge it every night. If Apple didn’t mean for you to be able to leave your Watch on while you’re sleeping,

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The $85 Chromebit is another nice, useless product that solves a problem that didn’t exist

The original Chromecast initiated a trend: HDMI dongles with computing capabilities were born. Intel Compute Stick and Splendo are two good examples of this kind of miniPC (in this case, based on Windows). Now we’ve got another alternative, not in format but in its OS. The Chromebit was announced a few months ago, and it has

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