Stingrays were once the most secretive of surveillance technology: devices whose existence was so sensitive that the feds actually raided local cops and stole their crime files to stop them from being introduced in court and revealing the capability to spy on cellular phones. Read the rest

InvaderZ is a Space Invaders variant that incorporates a genetic algorithm that mutates the invaders as you shoot at them, with survival for a fitness function: the longer an invader lasts before being blasted out of the sky, the more its behaviors are carried over into the next wave (here's a playable live version). (via Kottke) Read the rest

Jason Antic's DeOldify is a Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network-based machine learning system that colorizes and restores old images. It's only in the early stages but it's already producing really impressive results, and the pipeline includes a "defade" model that is "just training the same model to reconstruct images that augmented with ridiculous contrast/brightness adjustments, as a simulation of fading photos and photos taken with old/bad equipment." Read the rest

Frequent Boing Boing contributor Sean O'Brien and his colleagues Laurin Weissinger and Scott J Shapiro built a Raspberry Pi-enabled smart pumpkin and then challenged their Yale cybersecurity students to hack it. Read the rest

Repairnator is a bot that identifies bugs in open source software integration and creates patches without human intervention, submitting them to the open source project's maintainers under an assumed human identity; it has succeeded in having five of its patches accepted so far. Read the rest

Google's WWWBasic project allows you to write web-page interactivity using a BASIC-like syntax that will be recognizable to anyone who grew up with early personal computers in the late 1970s and 1980s (it can be imported within Node.js, too, so you can mix Javascript and BASIC). Read the rest

On Wednesday, the EU will vote on whether to force all online platforms to filter user-generated content against massive databases of copyrighted works (anyone can add anything to these databases, without penalties for abuse); not only is this a catastrophe for everyone who writes software that will have to comply with this bonkers idea, it's also a catastrophe for anyone who writes software, period. Read the rest

Coffeeman 500's Useless Box - Multi Switch project is an open-source hardware project that's an ambitious variant on the beloved "Useless Machine" -- 2010, 2010 (Lego)), 2010 Political edition), 2011 (HOWTO), 2012 (politics), 2013 (fancy), 2013 (advanced) (vs human), 2016 (most useless), 2017 (vs twisty vase). Read the rest

Ben Cartwright-Cox observed that he could modulate the bass frequencies in electronic dance music/dubstep in a way that was easy to detect with a signal processor and inaudible to his unaided ears, so he wrote some code to hide messages in the wubwubwub. Read the rest

A reader writes, "A couple years ago MIT changed their dorm security/student tracking policy. They hired security contractors to work in dorms and required everyone to tap their RFID cards upon entry (no vouching for friends/guests). Most students complied. Some moved out. Some got in trouble ;)" Read the rest

The lifecycle of technology is fundamentally parasitic: successful technologies are ones that colonize their predecessors, devour them, and burst out of their limiting skins to and grow into new, more ambitious tools -- until they, too, are colonized by a more-evolved successor. Read the rest

In much of the world, addresses are difficult to convey because they refer to locations on unnamed streets, in unnumbered buildings, in unincorporated townships, sometimes in disputed national boundaries (I have often corresponded with people in rural Costa Rica whose addresses were "So-and-so, Road Without Name, 300m west of the bus stop, village, nearest town, region"). Read the rest

Nick Johnstone's "Programmer's Oath" is billed as "An oath for programmers, comparable to the Hippocratic Oath." Naturally, it's on Github and you can create a pull request if you think that Johnstone got something wrong. Read the rest

Robin Baumgarten's Line Wobbler is an incredibly clever dungeon crawler game based on a single, one-dimensional line of lights, traditionally implemented as large-scale, high-priced public art installations. Read the rest

Flybrix kits allow you to turn a variety of Lego builds into little copter-drones that you can fly with an app or a Bluetooth joystick. Read the rest

Laser Maze is a super-fun electronic board game that challenges players to arrange angled mirrors to route a laser beam from an emitter to a sensor, avoiding obstacles; in The Quantum Game, you undertake the same fundamental task, but with a virtual laser that only emits one photon, and virtual beam-splitters, absorbtive polarizers, quarter-wave plates, polarizing beam splitters, Faraday rotators, and other exotic apparatus. Read the rest

This fancy interactive deep colorization software harnesses AI to fill in colors on a black and white photo with just a few inputs. Watch this cool demo. Read the rest