标签：#Tech

The old app "still needs to be retired," AcuRite tells us.

Pokémon Go Scans Trained Military Drone Navigation Tech Meta Description: Discover how Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones — the surprising data pipeline from your phone to the battlefield. (158 characters) TL;DR: Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, collected millions of 3D environmental scans from players worldwide through its AR scanning features. That same spatial mapping technology and data infrastructure has now been linked to navigation systems used in military drones — raising serious questions about informed consent, dual-use technology, and the hidden value of "free" mobile apps. Key Takeaways Pokémon Go players unknowingly contributed to a massive real-world 3D mapping dataset through Niantic's AR scanning features. This spatial data and the underlying technology stack have been connected to navigation systems used in autonomous military drones. The pipeline from consumer app to defense application is a textbook example of dual-use technology — civilian tools repurposed for military ends. Users were not clearly informed their scans could be used beyond in-game features. This story has major implications for data privacy, tech ethics, and how we think about "free" apps. Regulatory frameworks around dual-use data collection remain dangerously underdeveloped. Introduction: The Game That Mapped the World When Pokémon Go launched in July 2016, it looked like a harmless — if slightly chaotic — augmented reality game. Millions of people wandered parks, city squares, and college campuses, phones raised, hunting virtual creatures overlaid on real-world environments. But beneath the Pikachus and Poké Stops, something far more consequential was happening. Niantic was building one of the most detailed, crowd-sourced 3D maps of the physical world ever assembled. And as reporting has surfaced in 2025 and 2026, the revelation that Pokémon Go scans trained the navigation tech for military drones has ignited a firestorm of debate among tech

You can save on a big set of outdoor security cameras ahead of Prime Day. Amazon has a five-pack of Blink cameras with a video doorbell included that’s marked down to $166.99. The bundle includes a Blink Battery Doorbell 2K+, five Blink Outdoor 2K+ cameras, and a Blink Sync Module Core. The doorbell is typically […]

Even at full price, the Roborock Q10 S5 Plus offers impressive value, boasting features typically reserved for pricier robovac models at a fraction of the price. That’s especially true today. It’s down to just $269.99 ($280 off) at Wellbots when you apply promo code NEW10, which matches its all-time low and is the best price […]

Just after Seattle enacted a one-year data center moratorium that some of Amazon's own employees pushed for, Amazon shared how much water its data centers use, reportedly for the first time. With concerns about water consumption and energy use a focus of new AI data center construction debates, Amazon says its global data center operations […]

Nothing is more frustrating than buying a new pair of headphones, an OLED TV, or a laptop just to find out that you could have gotten it for cheaper somewhere else just a few days or weeks later. That’s why, in order to keep customers happy and prevent them from shopping elsewhere, some retailers offer […]

Congress has failed to pass a three-week extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), with the House voting 218-198 against reauthorizing the controversial warrantless wiretapping authority through July 2nd. After a short-term extension earlier this year, the spying program now appears set to lapse for at least a week. This is […]

I have tested more portable MIDI controllers than I can keep track of, and I will tell you right now: 37 keys is the ideal size. While Arturia's 25-key MiniLab MK3 is a solid controller that easily fits in a backpack, it feels a bit claustrophobic. The new $149 MiniLab 37 adds another octave, giving […]

The Weather Company announced an "enhanced allergy experience" now available through its The Weather Channel app designed to help allergy sufferers better understand when their symptoms might flare up, and what's causing them. While the app already provides static pollen counts, its "Health & Wellness" section is being expanded to take into account other factors […]

Cash App's AT&T-based MVNO will offer an unlimited 5G data plan for $40 per month including taxes and fees. The new mobile service is powered by Gigs, the same firm behind the Klarna mobile service that launched last year with the same pricing and is "rolling out to select users, with broader availability planned in […]

Connecting to a payment gateway rarely fails because of business logic. More often, it fails at the very first technical step: authentication. If you’ve ever worked with payment APIs, you know the drill. Before sending a single request, you need to generate a cryptographic key pair and sign every request correctly. Sounds straightforward—until you actually try to do it. The hidden hurdle in every integration To securely call the Payneteasy API, each request must be signed. That means: Generating an RSA key pair (usually via OpenSSL) Converting between PKCS#1 and PKCS#8 formats Building a correct signature base string Percent-encoding everything properly Signing with RSA-SHA256 or HMAC-SHA1 Assembling the Authorization header One small mistake—a missing character, wrong encoding, or incorrect format—and your request gets rejected. For teams without deep cryptography expertise, this step alone can turn a one-day integration into a week-long debugging session. If you’re curious, the full manual process is documented here: https://doc.payneteasy.com/integration/general_api_usage/request_authentication_methods/oauth.html#generating-key-pair The solution: Key Pair Factory We built the Payneteasy Key Pair Factory to remove this bottleneck entirely. Instead of dealing with OpenSSL commands and key formats, you can generate everything you need in just a few clicks. What it does: Generates a ready-to-use RSA key pair Ensures correct formatting for Payneteasy APIs Eliminates manual conversion and configuration errors Keeps the private key on your side Provides a public key for request verification No cryptography expertise required. The tool is open-source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/payneteasy/key-pair-factory Why this matters This is not just about convenience—it directly impacts integration speed and success. With the Key Pair Factory, you get: Faster onboarding Fewer integration errors Less back-and-forth with support teams A smoother developer experience I

As summer returns, I'm again reminded of my limits as I head into the great outdoors: I can put up with a heavy, uncomfortable backpack, bug bites, mud, and even bland dehydrated food, but I will not forsake my morning brew. I've tried every imaginable coffee gadget in my half-century of camping. These range from […]

Boox has announced a new version of its smallest e-reader that expands the Go 6's functionality to now include note-taking. The new Go 6 (Gen II) sticks with a 6-inch, 300PPI E Ink screen like its predecessor but gets a bump from 2GB to 3GB of RAM and now supports Boox's InkSense Plus stylus, which […]

Summer is almost here, and that means getting outside, having fun in the sun, and touching grass. But if you need to cool down for a bit, allow me to sing the praises of the library. If your local library system is anything like mine, it probably offers a lot of great things for you […]

AI aside, Golden Gate includes a bunch of subtle-but-helpful improvements.

YouTube is reintroducing private messaging after testing new ways for users to share videos and "have conversations about them" last year. In an announcement on its official blog, YouTube says it's now starting to expand the in-app video sharing and messaging feature to users in the US and "other global regions" who are 18 or […]

I’ll say it plainly: the first health-adjacent agent workflow I’d trust is not an AI doctor. It’s a narrow pipeline that takes 6 months of Apple Watch sleep data, cleans timestamps, maps records into a fixed sleep-diary schema, flags broken rows, and stops for human review before anything reaches a clinician. That sounds unsexy. Good. That’s exactly why it’s the first version I’d trust. I landed on this after reading a post on r/openclaw where someone said they had their AI assistant turn months of Apple Watch sleep data into the diary their sleep clinic requested, and the data gotchas were brutal. That sentence contains the whole product. Not “AI healthcare.” Not “autonomous wellness.” Not a GPT-5 wrapper with a soothing UI pretending it understands sleep medicine. Just a very practical engineering problem: parse ugly export data normalize time boundaries fit it into a clinician-friendly format fail loudly on bad rows require a human to approve it That is a real use case. And if you build automations in n8n, Make, Zapier, OpenClaw, or Python, it should feel familiar: the hard part is not the final prompt. The hard part is the ugly middle. The hard part is ETL, not reasoning Most health-agent demos skip the only part that matters. They show the polished summary. They show Claude or GPT-5 saying something calm and articulate. They show a dashboard. I don’t think that’s the hard part. The hard part is ETL: extraction transformation loading For sleep data, that means dealing with stuff like: timestamps crossing midnight timezone normalization naps vs overnight sleep missing start or end times overlapping intervals gaps from the device not recording clinic-specific diary formats If you get any of that wrong, the model summary at the end is not helpful. It is actively misleading. That’s why I think the boring pipeline is the real product. The workflow I’d actually ship If I had to build this today, I would keep the architecture aggressively narrow. Apple Health export ->

Bluesky will be getting "communities," which will function as smaller spaces where you can "go deeper and hang out with people who care about the same stuff" sometime this year, according to head of product Alex Benzer. They will be built on the decentralized AT Protocol that underpins Bluesky, with Benzer saying that "it's a […]

The Framework Laptop 13 Pro is delayed. The new 13-inch Framework flagship was set to launch in June, but shipments from the first batch are now expected in July - and there's still a chance some shipments could slip to early August. If you're not in the first batch, your Laptop 13 Pro shifts from […]

Apple's new Siri AI is finally here, and so far, it seems like it works. I have access and have been messing around with it, and my biggest impression so far is that Siri AI is quite curt - which I mean as a compliment. Many AI chatbots are cheery and wordy. While a more […]