tempest

Classic arcade games for iOS

Back in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, one of the favorite destinations for kids after school and on weekends was the local video arcade. Many readers will probably remember changing dollars for tokens, stacking up tokens and quarters on machines to indicate you "had next," and how quickly you could blow your money by playing game after game. Sadly, arcades slowly died out as home gaming consoles improved and stand-up arcade cabinets--for the most part--became a thing of the past.

When iOS devices and the iTunes App Store came along years later, the developers of those old games (… Read more

Old-school arcade classics--on your iPhone!

Atari's Greatest Hits lets you relive the early history of video gaming, giving you tons of old-school arcade and Atari 2600 hits on your iPhone. But it's not without flaws. Games like the original Asteroids, Tempest, Gravitar, Crystal Castles, and many more are available via in-app purchases packaged with their associated Atari 2600 games and some extras. In other words, the Atari Greatest Hits app itself is free, but if you want to play Tempest, for example, you'll need to buy the Tempest pack (99 cents), which comes with Tempest, Tempest for Atari 2600, Outlaw (2600), and … Read more

The future of magic: Augmented reality?

For decades, slightly cheesy sleight-of-hand artists around the world have promised that "you won't believe your eyes!" before demonstrating ageless moves handed down from generation to generation.

Now that an ever-accelerating cascade of eye-popping visual technology such as augmented reality has threatened to steal some of the magic dust from old-fashioned magicians, along comes a pasteboard prestidigitator who folds augmented reality into his own YouTube-ready routine.

Enter Marco Tempest, a renegade cardsharp and AR artist who assembled an open-source, real-time theater of the future for your entertainment, called Augmented Reality Magic 1.0.

Is this, ladies and gentlemen, magic of the future?… Read more

Keystrokes can be recovered remotely

Wired keyboards, like those found on desktop PCs, emit electromagnetic waves that can be read remotely, according two Swiss researchers.

Researchers Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini of the Swiss Security and Cryptography Laboratory at LASEC/EPFL, were able to recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters (about 65 feet), even through walls, simply by reading the electromagnetic emanations of the peripheral device. The experiments focused on wired keyboards attached to a computer either by PS/2 or USB connections.

In two videos, Vuagnoux demonstrates the attacks.

In the first video, he shows how only the … Read more