One More Thing: CIA to tap into smart homes

One More Thing: CIA to tap into smart homes
Just because you are paranoid

Stop worrying gadget fans, the wait is over and what you have been looking forward to for like forever has arrived.

No, not the new iPad silly – One More Thing is here to not only brighten up your Friday and get you ready for the freakin' weekend but also to prove that good things don't have to come in a 2048x1536 resolution.

And what an issue this is – yes, it's an issue and we are compiling the whole set for an annual to be released later in the year.

We have 31 words on the Tron dance, 86 on the CIA spying on you through you smarter-than-the-average home and a whopping 52 words describing the brilliance of an electrifying rendition of Duelling Banjos. Oh and the bit on Jurassic Park is 65 words in the making. All of this plus six more nuggets of tech titillation…

CI, eh? – Not content with bugging your car and spying on you through dark glasses, the CIA has been caught rubbing its hands together in glee at the fact that our homes of the future will make it a lot easier to spy on people. This is all because of that strange phenomena called 'The Internet of Things'. With objects like lights, fridges and washing machines all to be web-savvy, CIA chief David Petraeus believes that smart homes of the future are primed for a bit of spy action. [Wired]

Light fantastic – Just when we thought Tron couldn't get any cooler, someone comes along and invents the Tron dance. The only thing that could top this would be a Daft Punk workout video. [Wired]

Alan would be proud – Jurassic Park is to get a 3D makeover and will be re-released in cinemas in 2013. We had kind of hoped that by next year everyone would have pretended 3D was just a bad dream, like that episode in Lost where they revealed exactly how Jack got his tattoos but it would seem that Spielberg et al want to keep the 3D dream alive. Gits. [Ain't It Cool]

If you like it, then you should have put Turing on it – Judea Pearl, an expert on all things AI and the pioneer of the technology behind Siri and Google's driverless cars, has been given the coveted 2011 ACM Turing Award. In short: if the events in The Terminator were to become true, there's a good chance Pearl was behind it. [Tech Eye]

Sound of silence – Do you want to win an iPad 3? Of course you do, well one of the more exciting ways to do this is through the Silent Film Director app. Simply create your very own The Artist, upload it to http://www.macphun.com/sfdcontest and cross your fingers. See Apple fans, sometimes not talking about your shiny gadgets can be a good thing! [MacPhun]

Facebook's a load of rap – Rapper Adam Tensta has come up with an ingenious way to combat pirates, by putting his song behind an app wall. Essentially, the only way to listen to his music is by installing his app first. That way, only one copy of his song exists and those perilous pirates can't half-inch his work. Good work. [Facebook]

Sonic boom – The new episode of Sonic 4 will be available to play across both Xbox and Windows Phone, so if you start it on your phone you can continue it on your Xbox and so forth. Just don't get the two missed up – holding an Xbox up to your ear is not a cool look, even if the hipsters in Shoreditch tell you it is. [The Verge]

Electric dreams – For most people, the tune Duelling Banjos will conjure up images which would put anyone off eating bacon for life. Lucky then, someone has created a Tesla coil version of the much which brings the piece kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. And it does so without any man rape. Bonus! [YouTube]

People in glass houses – Intel hosted an interesting experiment this week, putting its ultrabooks behind glass casing and seeing what the general public would do when they were given a hammer to break the glass. Yes, it's marketing madness but it can also be seen as a neat psychological look into the nature of man. Or something… [SlashGear]

Apple founder queues like everyone else – Steve Wozniak, or Woz to give him his full Muppet name, queued to get a new iPad like the rest of the great unwashed. This is something he does every year, apparently. Personally, if we were a co-creator of Apple we would have gotten Siri, our robot butler, to queue up for us. [Mashable]

Obligatory TechRadar YouTube video of the day - Speaking of iPad queues, you really must check out our video of the iPad queue in Covent Garden. It's rather special.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.