Have You Jailbroken Your Ford Lately?
At a not-too-distant point in our future, this will be a serious question. Today Ford and Bug Labs announced that they are jointly supporting the first open source car software. Think of it as your car's API. You'll need to install a small $40 piece of hardware to interact with the car systems, and the effort, called OpenXC, is making this data available to both Android and Arduino platforms. What can you do for starters? Things like read real-time data about your car's position and speed, and a dozen other measurements about your car's performance. "OpenXC opens up a previously opaque environment to an entirely new class of developers, who will bring more ideas and solutions to the table than any one company or industry consortium could dream up," according to information posted on the site.
As anyone who has ever had a valid credit card charge questioned knows, there is a lot of fraudulent use of cards, and the Internet has made it even easier for the bad guys to exploit them. According to comScore, last year ecommerce in the U.S. reached record levels of spending with more than $160 billion in transactions. With all this activity, it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a very large haystack to try to track down fraudulent transactions. But a look into a couple of new fraud detection and prevention technologies shows that perhaps the good guys are making some inroads in this war. 
Some would argue that the biggest obstacle robotics currently faces isn't the Uncanny Valley or suppressing the urge to destroy all humans—it's keeping their batteries charged. The newest version of the EcoBot may have the answer—it eats poop. Our poop.
One of the most interesting sessions at Educon this year was facilitated by Chad Sansing and Meenoo Rami, both of them Science Leadership Academy faculty. The title was Hacking School: the EduCon 2.4 Hackjam. I didn’t know what to expect – and what actually happened was beyond any expectation.