Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: The ultimate God mode, burned geeks and crashing cars with code.
• Many video games put you in the position of a god, be it a benign or despotic one, but German developer has a good claim to making a game with the ultimate God mode. It has created The which translates the Old Testament into a browser-based multiplayer game. :
"In the beginning, there was... Chapter 1, The Heroes, which will be the first release of the game, and sounds a lot like Age of Empires (it looks a lot like it too), as you control Abraham and his descendants on their journey to the promised land. There's even a 'hero' system for levelling up and transferring skills, as Abraham begets new characters like Isaac and Jacob."
• Continuing the theme of ancient and modern is a list of the top ten lost technologies . It includes Roman concrete, Greek fire and less well-known ones such as Nepenthe. If all of them had been saved doubtless we'd be jetting to work in our flying cars by now:
"The world has never been more technologically advanced than it is now, but that doesn't mean that some things haven't been lost along the way. Many of the technologies, inventions, and manufacturing processes of antiquity have simply disappeared with the passage of time, while others are still not fully understood by modern day scientists."
• Flying cars have obvious risks but the growing amount of technology in contemporary cars might spell problems too. that they may be the route by which viruses take to start causing mayhem in the real world:
"The idea would be to launch a worm that would spread on the Internet (in any of a number of well explored ways) looking for vulnerable smart phones. Smart phones have GPS devices in, so the worm, having infected the phone, could ensure it was only operating in some geographic area of interest (eg the US, or a particular city). The worm could then check if it was on a smart phone that happened to be plugged into a car, and if so compromise the car. It could then use whatever wireless opportunities were available to compromise any other cars within the attack range."
• Star Wars may have happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away but that has not stopped Bradley Lewis engaging in a kind of retro-futuristic archaeology by trying to create authentic light-sabers, :
"Brad tracks down the pieces of equipment actually used to build the original props - or, when they're unavailable, very close replicas, that he further customizes with a metal lathe in his garage - and puts them together with loving attention."
• The Burning Man festival is ground-breaking in art and technology and now it is doing the same with mobile networks. that an open-source mobile network based around OpenBTS is being set up for the duration of the event:
"Burning Man has become a brutal, but great test vehicle. There are not too many places you can go where tens of thousands of people show up, all of them with cell phones, in a hostile physical environment - lots of heat and dust, with no power and no cell service."
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