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Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Restaurant offers a 5 percent discount to eat without your phone.

- China is building an army of noodle-making robots.

- Melky Cabrera (SF Giants) created a fake Web site to explain failing drug tests.

- Infrared palm scanners at elementary school are the Mark of the Beast.

- Teenager uses fake ID with picture of Bobby Hill to buy alcohol at six different shops.… Read more

Technology is taken for granted by those who design it, grow up with it, or worship it as if it's a digital deity.

Yet not everyone believes that, for example, giving 24-Hour Fitness your fingerprint in order to lose a little blubber is such a natural, safe act.

Take certain parents at Moss Bluff Elementary School in Louisiana. Their arms are raised up high in celestial fright at the school's heathen attempts to introduce a palm scanner into the cafeteria.

As KPLC-TV reports it, the parents see the devil in the details.

Mamie Sonnier, a very concerned parent, … Read more

NirSoft's RegScanner is a lightweight, portable tool that searches the Windows registry for specific values, displaying its findings in a simple list view that lets you quickly access specific results. You can view the properties of registry values, open items in their containing folder, or double-click items to open them directly in the Windows Registry Editor (RegEdit). RegScanner is easy to use, even for beginners, but our usual caution about changing things in the registry applies to RegScanner since it's perfectly capable of deleting keys as well as copying, saving, and exporting them. We recommend utmost caution when … Read more

Printers are suffering the same fate as hardcover books -- which is not only good for the environment but maybe for your state of mind.

In a research note titled "Dead-tree format is dying," Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore illustrated the decline of paper-spewing printers with plenty of stats (see graph below).

June quarter results for printer suppliers were "particularly weak as Canon, Epson, Lexmark and Xerox all missed expectations," according to Whitmore.

Canon, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Lexmark over the past 10 quarters show combined supplies and hardware revenues declining about 6 percent year-over-year in the … Read more

Let's be real: paper isn't going anywhere. Just yesterday I needed to print my tickets to the local airshow. And last week I had to scan some signed forms to send to corporate.

In other words, every home and home office needs a good multifunction printer. And, preferably, an inexpensive one.

For a limited time, and while supplies last, OfficeMax has the Brother MFC-J430W multifunction printer for $49.99 shipped (plus sales tax in most states).

Actually, to score free shipping, you need to spend at least $50 -- so you're a penny short. Might I suggest … Read more

The glamor days of great meals on airplanes, no luggage limits, and easy boarding at airports are long gone. Those Pan Am dreams have disappeared into a maze of airline money-saving efforts and increasingly personal TSA security checks.

Ever since the TSA rolled out its revealing body scanners, we've been in the midst of a contentious privacy versus security debate. … Read more

Some big stories in Thursday's tech highlights, but stick around for the Olympic LOLs:

Google Wallet now lets users pay with any major credit or debit card. But you still have to have one of the few Sprint devices with NFC to use the service. That's because Verzion, AT&T and T-Mobile rather have you wait for the competing service they invested in, called Isis. But don't hold your breath waiting for Isis.

The Transportation Security Administration has been ordered to address comments and concerns from the public about its airport body scanners. Wired has reported … Read more

I've been flying a lot lately and it's become harder to find security lines that don't have nude body scanners.

They seem to be proliferating like Zuckerbergs at Google.

Worse, they become ever more spectacularly demeaning, as people take up a submissive pose -- like bending over at the proctologist's -- and hope it will be over quickly.

One assumes that all the powers that were, be, and are were happy with these things.

It appears not. For the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is grousing that the TSA … Read more

Hackers are like unruly sailors on liberty when it comes to open ports: You can't keep them out, and they leave disaster in their wake. Protecting your ports is essential to keeping your system safe, and that starts with knowledge of your system's ports and whether they're Wide Open or Closed for the Duration. Free Port Scanner is just the tool for the job. This simple freeware from Network Security Audit Software (Nsasoft) thoroughly scans and tests your system's ports. It can reveal vulnerable access points so you can take action to close them to attackers.… Read more