3 SciFi Technologies That Are About to Get Amazingly Real

Lisa Su, the talented new CEO for AMD, last week gave a pitch on the future to get people excited about where AMD is going. Based on the stock performance after her talk, she and her team knocked it out of the park. However, they also got me thinking about some technological advancements that have been quietly percolating, which likely will form the basis for a revolutionary announcement in the next few years. Three technologies that are tied to other efforts, are getting close to breaking free.

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Gadget Ogling: Virtual Sensations, Radio-Wave Charges and a Bitcoin Keeper

We're edging ever closer toward a virtual reality boom, with Oculus finally promising its Rift headset will arrive in 2016. Yet what if there were a way to make VR even more immersive? Feelreal has come up with two devices -- a virtual reality mask and a helmet -- that aim to draw users almost entirely into a fictional world. The mask is an add-on, compatible with major VR headsets. The company is seeking Kickstarter funding to develop a commercial model based on demonstrated prototypes. The helmet is designed to work with a smartphone. A prototype is under development.

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Cyanogen Taps Truecaller in Effort to Build a Better Mobile OS

Cyanogen, best known for its FOSS Android-based OS, CyanogenMod, soon will provide caller ID screening and spam blocking directly from the native dialer on Cyanogen OS, the commercial version of its operating system. These capabilities will be provided through the company's global partnership with Truecaller. They will be baked into future smartphone devices preloaded with Cyanogen OS. "I'm wondering whether Truecaller is addressing an actual need of smartphone users," mused Werner Goertz, a research director with Gartner.

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The Last Apple Watch Review You'll Ever Need to Read

If you're thinking about getting an Apple Watch and have been on the fence, this review is for you. Why? The Apple Watch, it turns out, is less about being the perfect smartwatch than it is about being a watch. For the fence sitters out there, these two questions are really where you should start: First, do you want a watch? Second, do you want a digital wearable device you can use to transform your life, pay for coffee, live healthier, and make the rest of the world think you're actually paying more attention than you really are?

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Voyager-X Will Take You on a New Xfce Journey

Voyager-X 10.14.4, released in March, is based on Xubuntu/Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This new Voyager-X is one of the first distros to use the new Xfce 4.12 desktop. Ubuntu has yet to implement it, and few other Linux distros have put the new update into play. Thus, the latest Xfce desktop is considered "experimental." However, it is a fully functional upgrade. Voyager-X adds to this the Linux kernel 3.16, for a faster and more responsive OS that is optimized for better performance and offers much improved hardware support.

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Splatoon: Nintendo Hits You With Its Best Shot

Nintendo has invited players to paint the town red -- and green and blue and a palette of other colors -- in Global Testfire events over the weekend for Splatoon, a new game launching May 29 exclusively on the Wii U. The Testfire events will provide three hour-long windows to try out Splatoon and provide Nintendo with the server stress-testing the game will need for a successful launch. The first Testfire event takes place from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. PT on May 8. Two more tests -- 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. PT, and 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. PT -- are set for May 9.

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Xiaomi's Mi 4i Spreads in Asia

Chinese wunderkind smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi is taking its flagship Mi 4i smartphone to Hong Kong and Singapore, with availability slated for next Tuesday. Designed especially for emerging markets, the Mi 4i has been wildly successful in India, where it launched two weeks ago and reportedly sold 40,000 units in less than 15 seconds. The Mi 4i is the first Xiaomi phone to run Android 5.0, aka "Lollipop," albeit with MIUI 6, Xiaomi's custom skin for the OS.

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Twitter's Timid Anti-Trolling Tweaks

Twitter recently amended its rules in yet another attempt to crack down on the abuses perpetuated by online trolls, but the changes may do little to protect victims. Its latest move was an extension of its ban on threats of violence against others or the promotion of violence against others. The company decided to let its support team lock down abusive accounts for specific periods of time. Further, it began testing a new, unspecified feature that helps it identify suspected abusive tweets in an effort to limit their reach.

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Oculus VR Promises a Rift for All in 2016

An exact date hasn't been set, but Facebook's Oculus VR on Wednesday announced that the highly anticipated consumer version of its virtual reality headset will launch in the first quarter of 2016. Preordering will begin later this year. More details will emerge about the consumer version of the Rift in the coming weeks, the company said, including information about its hardware specifications, software and unannounced made-for-VR games and experiences. When Oculus VR talks Rift, it talks VR games.

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EM Drive Stirs Blood of Hopeful Space Explorers

It may not be warp drive, but electro-magnetic drive, aka "EM drive," is perhaps even more exciting, because it has a better chance of being science fact than fiction. EM drive technology theoretically could allow a trip to the moon in four hours, to Mars in 70 days, and to Alpha Centaurii, the star system nearest to our own, in roughly 130 years. If that sounds like a long time to be hurtling through space, compare it to the thousands of years it would take to make a similar mission using current space travel technologies.

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'Night Terrors' Could Turn Your Home Into a Hellscape

Gamers could get the chance to count themselves among the things that go bump in the night, if Novum Analytics' Night Terrors, an augmented reality game for mobile devices, meets its Indiegogo funding target. The story itself is rudimentary, but the gameplay takes place in relatively uncharted territory. The player is alone in the dark with a smartphone. The phone's LED lights the way through the player's pitch-black house, while the game mixes photorealistic frights into a real-time stream of the player's augmented home.

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Mumblehard Malware Mugs Linux Servers

A family of Linux malware targeting Linux and BSD servers has been lurking around for five years, Eset has reported. Dubbed "Linux/Mumblehard," the malware contains a backdoor and a spamming daemon, both written in Perl. The components are mainly Perl scripts encrypted and packed inside an executable and linkable format, or ELF, said Eset. In some cases, one ELF executable with a packer nests inside another. An Eset sinkhole saw more than 8,800 unique IP addresses over seven months. Web servers are the most susceptible to the attack.

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Report: Top Endpoint Security Packages Perfectly Foil Drive-By Attacks

Drive-by attacks on the Internet are a particularly pernicious form of online threat, especially for individual Web surfers. On the corporate level, though, a company with good endpoint protection software can foil the malicious practice. A drive-by occurs when an infected website automatically downloads malware onto a Net traveler's computer. Several companies make endpoint solutions to -- among other things -- thwart those kinds of attacks. NSS Labs recently tested 10 of them.

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Facebook Responds to Critics by Unlocking Internet.org

Facebook on Monday announced that it will expand Internet.org to ensure that it doesn't conflict with the principles of a free and open Internet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded to criticisms of Internet.org and outlined plans to make the free service even more open. "Soon, we're going share an open technical spec, and any compatible service will be available through Internet.org across the whole world," he said. "This will give people even more choice and more free services, while still creating a sustainable economic model."

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FOSSers Puzzle Over Significance of Open Source .Net Core

Microsoft last week released a preview of the next version of its .Net Core runtime distribution, fulfilling last fall's pledge to open source .Net and take it cross-platform for Mac and Linux. "Windows 10 is and will be a standard .Net platform, and improving the interoperability of .Net builds bridges from those platforms to Windows 10, effectively augmenting the developer community available to Microsoft and exposing the portfolio of apps they create to Microsoft platforms," said Black Duck Software's Bill Weinberg.

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Adobe Adds Dazzle to Lightroom

Adobe's recently launched new version of Lightroom for its Creative Cloud Photography platform improves performance of the photo manager and adds new HDR, panorama and facial recognition features. Lightroom's mobile support also is bolstered in the latest version of the program. Further, it has new capabilities for creating slideshows from stills and video. "The more Adobe can offer within [Lightroom], the less photographers will need to find elsewhere," noted photographer David Guenther.

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Holy Crap: Microsoft Is Building Tomorrowland!

One of the movies I'm really looking forward to this month is Disney's Tomorrowland. My first real job was at Disneyland, and I was so in love with the place I often would come back and work a second shift for free. Epcot, the city of tomorrow, was supposed to be Walt's final legacy but his untimely death ended that vision. That city of tomorrow never came to be, except finally -- at least in concept -- in the Tomorrowland movie. Imaginary Tomorrowland is an amazing place, where people go to create amazing things.

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Gadget Ogling: Wine in a Dash, Connected Bicycles, and a Wearable for Behinds

I'll admit I'm not the planet's most refined wine connoisseur, but I do enjoy a glass or two of red with my dinner. Right now, I have a few bottles that are vacuuming up space in my kitchen, so I could use a wall-mounted wine rack -- but what's the use of having an empty rack once they're gone? Poppy Reserve -- just a concept at present -- could solve the problem of a barren wine rack by tapping into Amazon's Dash technology. It would track the level of wine in a given bottle and then ask Amazon to ship more when the supply's running low.

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Elon Musk Unveils Tesla's World-Changing Powerwall

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk on Thursday announced the company's plan to develop residential and business battery systems, including the Powerwall Home Battery and business-oriented Powerpack. These systems are being developed to work in conjunction with solar panels to store energy for use at a later time. They also can draw power from the grid when demand for electricity is low and discharge it during the more expensive rate periods, when demand is higher. Musk suggested it could substantially reduce energy dependence on fossil fuels.

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Steer Clear of iOS 8's Infinite Loop

A flaw in iOS 8 allows hackers essentially to crash apps that perform SSL communications whenever they like. Skycure reported the bug at the RSA security conference held last week, advising owners of iOS devices to upgrade to iOS 8.3. Apple this week confirmed that iOS 8.3 addresses the vulnerability, according to Skycure. An attack would involve specially crafting an SSL certificate to regenerate a bug. SSL is used in almost all apps in the iTunes App Store, which means pretty much every device user running iOS 8 could be at risk.

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