DARPA Challenges Researchers to Link Human Brains With Computers

The United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, last week announced a new program that aims to build a connection between the human brain and the digital world.

To achieve the goals of the Neural Engineering System Design program, DARPA has invited proposals to design, build, demonstrate and validate a human-computer interface that can record from more than 1 million neurons and stimulate more than 100 thousand neurons in the brain in real time.

The interface must perform continuous, simultaneous full-duplex interaction with at least 1,000 neurons -- initially in regions of the human auditory, visual, and somatosensory cortex.

Devices created for the NESD project might be used to compensate for sight or hearing deficits, DARPA suggested, as well as other possible applications.

DARPA will award up to US$60 million in funding, depending on the quality of proposals received, the successful achievement of milestones, and the availability of funds. Multiple awards are expected.

WhatsApp Cancels Subscription Fee, Announces Social Media Banking As Possible Revenue Source

Whatsapp announced that there will be no more yearly subscription fee for its over half a billion regular, active users, the company also announced that they will be looking for other ways of making money giving the example of embedding tools to allow the application's users to communicate with their banks.

This announcement was made by the company, through its official blog, where it sighted the main reason of removing the fee as a way to do away with inconveniencing their users.

"Nearly a billion people around the world today rely on WhatsApp to stay in touch with their friends and family. From a new dad in Indonesia sharing photos with his family, to a student in Spain checking in with her friends back home, to a doctor in Brazil keeping in touch with her patients, people rely on WhatsApp to be fast, simple and reliable," the

Major Security Flaw Found in Silent Circle's Blackphone

Security researchers at SentinelOne on Wednesday revealed a vulnerability they discovered in the Blackphone.

The flaw -- an obscure socket -- lets an attacker take over and control communications on the Blackphone, a highly secure Android smartphone Silent Circle developed and marketed in reaction to news of government surveillance of people's communications.

Silent Circle began taking preorders for the

Hack Lets PS4 Run Linux

Hacking team fail0verflow last week demonstrated a hack of Sony's PlayStation 4 game console that allows anyone running the modification to run the Linux OS on the appliance.

The demo was part of a lightning talk session at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress.

The hackers used exploits in FreeBSD, PS4's operating system and WebKit, which powers the game console's browser.

Both the OS and

The Future of Deliveries Will Be Driverless

Thanks to Google, self-driving passenger cars have gained a lot of media attention, but the immediate future of driverless vehicles may lie in home deliveries.

Starship Technologies in 2016 will launch two pilot projects -- one in the UK and one in the United States -- to test a driverless vehicle designed to make short-distance deliveries.

Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets

Longer tweets are coming soon to Twitter.

Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit, and the company is targeting a launch date toward the end of Q1, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Twitter is currently considering a 10,000 character limit, according to these sources. That’s the same character limit the company uses for its Direct Messages product, so it isn’t a complete surprise.

There is no official launch date set in stone, these sources say. It’s also possible the character limit could fluctuate before it rolls out the final product, which people