How install Backtrack 4 to your hard disk side by side with another OS. ;On my website you can download an ebook about this: http://system-override.co.uk/#/dual-boot-backtrack-4/4541334361
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Sunday 30 May 2010
Saturday 29 May 2010
How to hack Windows Vista and XP with OPHcrack
More password hacking tutorials to come!
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Negroponte promises $75 OLPC slate by December
The OLPC slate may actually get made after all. Nicholas Negroponte of the One Laptop Per Child foundation has promised to get his XO-3 tablet computer into prototype form by December this year for a showing at CES in January 2011. The super-slim all-touch tablet will have a 9-inch screen and sell for just $75 (£50).
The problem is, we’ve been here before. Just last year, Nick was promising essentially the same thing. There have been a few changes, though. Speaking at MIT’s Media Lab on Tuesday he said that the price point should be no problem because the whole device, screen and all, will be made from plastic. The prototypes, however, will stick with heavy, fragile glass, presumably because the technology to extrude a whole computer (Negroponte’s plan) from a machine is not yet here.
The XO-3 doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous as it once did, though. Apple has managed to deliver the iPad for just £429, and the simple tablet form with no moving parts seems ideal for the rugged outdoors that is the intended home of the OLPC slate. In fact, there’s something the computer will have that I wish were in the iPad. The XO-3 will have the same dual-mode screen as the original XO, which will be backlit indoors but use the light of the sun when outside so it can be read in bright light. Outdoor use is one place where the iPad fails.
Whether the final result is like the machine shown in the mockup pictures or not, we’re pretty sure to see something similar, even if it does take a few more years. The original OLPC had a long and difficult gestation, but Nick Negroponte is stubborn enough to pull it off.
How to hack WEP wireless connection in Backtrack 4
How to hack WEP wireless networks with Backtrack 4
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Ebook:
Friday 28 May 2010
Tuesday 18 May 2010
Unreleased MacBook shows up in Vietnam
Vietnam, previously known for its awesome food and friendly populace, has recently become the go-to country for Apple hardware leaks. And these aren’t your usual, suspicious shaky-cam leaks, either. The photos and video coming out of the Tinhte.com news site are sharp, comprehensive and professional. As iFixit CEO and friend of US Wired Kyle Wiens Tweeted: "Man, these Vietnamese leakers are schooling everyone in the quality photo department."
After that iPhone 4G video comes the new MacBook. The white plastic unibody MacBook will get a processor speed bump from 2.26GHz to 2.4GHz and the current Nvidia GeForce 9400M will be replaced with the Nvidia GeForce 320M, putting it almost on a level with the newly updated aluminum MacBook Pro. It also appears to come with the new fray-free MagSafe connector.
The news in this story isn’t that the MacBook is getting an update, but that the whole machine has leaked out in its final, store-ready packaging. What’s going on at Apple? Where’s that famous secrecy? And why is this all happening in Vietnam?
Hotmail revamped by Microsoft
Microsoft has taken the scissors to Hotmail and given it a haircut that the company hopes will stop all the kids laughing at it in the playground. There's a whole host of new features, including the ability to view messages in a thread, and a function that lets you 'sweep' unwanted email out of your inbox.
A majority of the additional features seem to only be there to let Hotmail continue to compete with Google's rapidly-expanding Gmail service. There's a better search box, no doubt powered by innovations from Bing. There's the aforementioned message threading, where back and forth messages between a group of senders are clustered onto one page. There's storage in Microsoft's SkyDrive for attachments, and unlimited storage in the mailbox itself.
There's in-line viewing of multimedia links. If someone sends you a YouTube video or a Flickr set, then Hotmail will give the content to you right there in the message -- not forcing you to click through to an external page. Best of all, though, is the ability to edit Office documents within email messages - taking advantage of Office 2010's sharing features. If someone sends you a spreadsheet, or a presentation, you can tweak it and send back a link to the attachment stored on SkyDrive, rather than the document itself.
Elsewhere, there's the ability to star messages, and to apply "flags", which don't just rhyme with Gmail's tags -- they do pretty much the same thing. There's a "Hotmail Highlights" view for your inbox, which shows you at a glance any emails from your friends, social network notifications, package tracking emails, calendar items and birthday reminders. There's also an interface that's more text-based than before, which will please people who prefer simplicity to icons.
On the security front, there's an improvement in the spam filters that Microsoft reckons can cut down the amount of unwanted and malicious emails in your inbox to only about 4% of total messages received. There's the ability, already offered by Gmail, to identify trusted senders with a distinctive logo, and full-session SSLencryption if you want it. Rather neatly, Microsoft's also offering the option to text you a single-use password for using at public machines that you don't trust.
For mobile phone users, the inbox has been redesigned for touch input, and you can access filters, message previews, offline viewing, conversation threading and the ability to flag messages from your handset. Back on the desktop, there's access to Windows Live Messenger from the inbox, along with the ability to chat to people on Facebook, and you can update your Facebook and Windows Live Messenger status from the Hotmail homepage.
The new features are rolled up in a package called Hotmail Wave 4, which isn't yet available to the general public. The roll-out begins in mid-summer, but you can get a full preview of what the new service is going to offer by heading over to hotmailpreview.com.
Monday 17 May 2010
Roommate’s tip led police to iPhone 4G's finder
Police closed in on the man who found and sold a prototype 4G iPhone after his roommate called an Apple security official and turned him in, according to a newly unsealed document in the ongoing police investigation.
The tip sent police racing to the home of 21-year-old Brian Hogan, and began a strange scavenger hunt for evidence that a friend of Hogan’s had scattered around Silicon Valley. Police recovered a desktop computer stashed inside a church, a thumb drive hidden in a bush alongside the road, and the iPhone’s serial-number stickers from the parking area of a petrol station.
The 10-page search-warrant affidavit (.pdf) -- unsealed Friday at the request of US Wired and other news organisations -- sheds new light on the events surrounding the sale of the prototype to Gizmodo, the Gawker Media-run gadget site that paid Hogan $5,000 (£3,500) for the device.
Gizmodo dropped a bombshell on the gadget world on 19 April with a detailed look at the iPhone prototype, which an Apple employee named Robert "Gray" Powell had lost at a bar. Gizmodo has acknowledged paying $5,000 for the phone and returned the phone to Apple after publishing its story about the prototype.
The affidavit confirms that Steve Jobs personally contacted Gizmodo to ask for the phone back, as reported byNewsweek last month.
According to the document, the roommate said Hogan told her he received a total of $8,500 (£5,800) for the phone, but did not indicate if all of the money came from Gizmodo or other sources as well. The roommate also told police Gizmodo promised Hogan a bonus if and when Apple officially announced the product.
Police are investigating Gizmodo editor Jason Chen for possible receipt of stolen property, copying of a trade secret, and destruction of property worth more than $400 (£275), according to the affidavit, which was filed in support of a search warrant for Chen’s home. Gizmodo partly disassembled the iPhone, a process that Apple alleges left it damaged.
Apple also told the police that the publication of Gizmodo’s story was "immensely damaging" to the company, because consumers would stop buying current generation iPhones in anticipation of the upcoming product. Asked the value of the phone, Apple told the police "it was invaluable."
Apple discovered that Hogan was the person who found the iPhone the day Gizmodo’s story broke, after Rick Orloff, director of information security at the company, received a phone call from one of Hogan’s two roommates, Katherine Martinson. She told Apple that Hogan had found the phone and had been offering it to news outlets in exchange for a payment, despite having identified Powell as the rightful owner from a Facebook page visible on the phone’s display when he found it.
"Sucks for him," Hogan allegedly told Martinson about Powell. "He lost his phone. Shouldn’t have lost his phone."
Martinson turned Hogan in, because Hogan had plugged the phone into her laptop in an attempt to get it working again after Apple remotely disabled it. She was convinced that Apple would be able to trace her Internet IP address as a result. "Therefore she contacted Apple in order to absolve herself of criminal responsibility," according to the detective who wrote the affidavit.
An Apple spokeswoman told Threat Level that Apple officials took Martinson’s tip directly to the district attorney’s office, and did not show up at Hogan’s house, as a US Wired source claimed last month.
"We reported what we believed was a crime and the DA is taking it from there," said Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton.
Police were preparing a search warrant affidavit for Hogan’s apartment two days later, when Martinson phoned them to report that Hogan and a second roommate, Thomas Warner, were in the process of removing evidence from their Redwood City apartment: a desktop computer, stickers from the iPhone, a thumb drive and a memory card. Police raced to the apartment, but by the time they arrived, Hogan and Warner had left in separate cars with the evidence.
The police headed to Hogan’s parents’ house, and were let in by Hogan’s father. They found Brian Hogan sitting on his bed with his girlfriend. When the cops told Hogan that removing evidence implied "consciousness of guilt," Hogan agreed to cooperate, and phoned his friend Warner, who had taken the computer gear and the stickers away in his car.
Warner directed the police to the nearby Sequoia Christian Church, where the cops recovered Hogan’s black desktop PC and flatscreen monitor outside an administrative office. Warner initially claimed he didn’t know where the other evidence was, but eventually told police where they could find the thumb drive and memory stick hidden in a bush.
He then offered that he may have accidentally dropped the serial-number sticker from the iPhone at a Chevron gas station. Police found it there, in the parking lot.
Hogan’s lawyer, Jeff Bornstein, said Friday he had not yet seen the affidavit, and could not comment on its details. "Hogan cooperated fully with the police in terms of turning over the evidence that they sought," said Bornstein.
US Wired was unable to locate Warner or Martinson for comment. The apartment where Hogan and his roommates lived was vacant Friday.
The affidavit supports the story, offered by Gizmodo and Hogan’s attorney, that the phone was found, and not stolen from the Apple employee. The employee, Gray Powell, had been at the Gourmet Haus Staudt in Redwood City with his uncle. The last time he saw the phone was when he put it in his bag on the floor.
The iPhone may have tumbled from the bag when it fell over. It was possible, but unlikely, that it was stolen from the bag, Powell told the police.
However, it’s generally considered theft under California law if one "finds lost property under circumstances that give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner" and yet appropriates the property for his own use "without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him."
Google to offer encrypted search next week
Google will begin letting users run encrypted searches on its flagship search site Google.com starting next week, the company said in a blog post.
Allowing users to search using https -- the web security system that many associate with online banking and shopping -- would mark a first for a major search engine, and could begin a move by web services such as social networks to begin offering encryption for more than just log-ins. Such increased adoption would cut down on network eavesdropping and also have the added benefit of preventing some online attacks.
Ironically, the announcement of the upcoming change came in a long blog postexplaining that the search company had been "mistakenly" eavesdropping and recording what people were doing on unencrypted Wi-Fi networks as itsStreet View cars were taking pictures of cities around the world and recording the IDs of Wi-Fi networks and routers. That data is used to help geo-locate people using devices without GPS, but the company has said for years it was not collecting session data.
Google turned on encryption -- better known as https:// -- as a default forGmail users earlier this year. That encrypts the data sent between a user’s browser and Google’s servers, making it nearly impossible for someone in the middle to read the contents of that email. When not using SSL, a user of a school or corporate network can have their email and web traffic content read by authorities who control the network, while anyone using an open Wi-Fi connection can have their traffic sniffed by a hacker using simple tools.
Gmail was the first major webmail service to offer encryption for full sessions, rather than just for log-ins. Google allowed power users to use https:// for years, and under pressure from privacy and security advocates turned it into the default for all users earlier this year. In contrast, Gmail’s competitors including Yahoo Mail or Microsoft’s Hotmail don’t even offer https sessions as an option.
Using https, rather than http, is not technically difficult, but the authenticating handshakes between a server and a browser do require more resources from both a server and the browser. That means it costs a company more to run a service and can slow down an application.
This story relates to Google US, but we have contacted the company to find out if Google.co.uk will also be enabling encrypted search. We will update this story when we hear back.
Update: Google UK's official response to our question about UK search encryption: "There's nothing more we can add at this stage." Oh well.
What to expect from Google I/O 2010
Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O, begins on 19 May, and is traditionally used by the search giant to unveil exciting new products. This year, however, it looks to be a massive Android-fest, with the success of the mobile platform meaning that development has focused almost wholly on the little green robot.
The conference has been running since 2008, and was preceded by Google Developer Day in 2007 and Geo Developer Day in 2006. It was scaled up to a full conference after the company realised it needed to better serve the legions of software engineers who depended on it.
In 2008, it brought us initial info on Android, lots of Google Maps mashups and sessions on Google Gears. In 2009, there was a pile of juicy Chrome details and the uber-hyped but ill-fated launch of Google Wave.
So what will 2010's conference bring us? Well, it's looking like the focus is going to be Android, Android and more Android. The big announcement is almost sure to be FroYo -- Android 2.2. Rumours suggest that the new version of the OS, which will roll out quickly to Nexus One owners, will include huge speed improvements, data tethering, the ability to act as a Wi-Fi hotspot, and the bundling of Adobe's Flash Player 10.1. It's also said to feature the decoupling of some of the main Android apps from the OS itself, so they can be more easily updated even if phone manufacturers take their time issuing OS updates.
Looking a little deeper at the list of sessions on offer, however, gives a look at what the company's major focus is for Android in the near future. There's a talk on writing games for Android -- suggesting that Google is concerned about the success of games on the iPhone and iPad. There's a session on targeting all Android devices, which seems to indicate that there's internal concern over fragmentation of the platform, too. There's also a session on app speed, which when combined with the zippiness of the 2.2 update shows that perhaps Google's focusing on speed and responsiveness as an avenue of attack against Apple.
The other big rumour for Google I/O 2010 is that a flavour of Android customised for set-top boxes will be launched. Google TV has long been said to be in development at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, and is said to allow televisions to run web applications such as Google Search, YouTube, Google Earth and Picasa. A Google-made device is supposedly in the works, but other manufacturers will be able to put the platform on their hardware, too.
Tablets are likely to be on show, too. Following the early excitement about Apple's iPad, manufacturers have been looking to Google to provide an alternative operating system. We wouldn't be surprised if a series of tablets from a range of manufacturers appear -- including Dell, Archos and Enso. Similarly, there's talk of Android appearing in cars too, with GM set to allow smartphones to sync with your car dashboard. That could set the scene for a user to save an address on Google Maps on a laptop, leave the house, and then have navigation start automatically when they set off in their car.
Aside of Android, there's a suggestion from eWeek that there'll be a big event for Google App Engine and the Google Apps ecosystem, but other than that there's radio silence. What about a merger of Twitter-like Buzz and location service Latitude to provide a rival for Foursquare? What about the future of Google Docs now that Microsoft has roped in Facebook for integration with Office 2010? What about the company's plans to roll out fibre-optic cables across the United States for super-fast broadband? And what about ChromeOS -- the lightweight desktop OS that there's been little activity on since launch?
A focus on Android is entirely understandable for the company, but we'll be very surprised if that's the whole story. Keep track on the Google I/O website, the official Twitter account and hashtag, or the YouTube channel.
Sunday 9 May 2010
Five ways Apple could make itself look less evil
It’s appropriate that the Apple logo on the iPad is black. The Cupertino company’s image is taking on some awfully sinister tones lately.
For a company that made its name fighting for the little guy, it’s a surprising reversal. In the past, Apple touted itself as the computer company for nonconformists who “Think Different.” Now the company is making moves that make it look like the Big Brother it once mocked.
First Apple tightened its iron grip on the already-stringent iPhone developer policy, requiring apps to be made with Apple-approved languages. A short while later, Apple rejected some high-profile apps based on their editorial content, raising journalists’ questions about press freedoms in the App Store. Then, police kicked down a Gizmodo editor’s door to investigate a lost iPhone prototype that Apple had reported as stolen.
It’s tough to imagine customers will stay loyal to a company whose image and actions are increasingly nefarious. We want to like the corporation we give money to, don’t we?
Here are five things Apple should do to redeem its fast-fading public image.
Publish App Store RulesAs I’ve argued before, the App Store’s biggest problem is not that there are rules, but that app creators don’t know what the rules are. As a result, people eager to participate in the App Store censor themselves, and that hurts innovation and encourages conformity. The least Apple can do is publish a list of guidelines about what types of content are allowed in the App Store.
After all, Apple has had nearly two years and almost 200,000 apps to figure out what it wants in the App Store. Tell people what the rules are so they know what they’re getting into, and so they can innovate as much as possible. That would also tell us customers what we’re not getting on our iPhone OS devices.
Formalise Relationships With PublishersPublishers are hypnotised by imaginary dollar signs when they look at the iPad as a platform that could reinvent publishing and reverse declining revenues. But after recent editorial-related app rejections, journalists are slowly waking up to our forewarning that Apple could control the press because news and magazine apps on the iPad are at the mercy of the notoriously temperamental App Store reviewers.
If Apple wants to look a little less like the Chinese government, it should work with publishers to ink formal agreements regarding content to guarantee editorial freedom to respected brands.
Tweak iPhone Developer AgreementApple’s stated purpose of its revised iPhone developer policy is to block out meta platforms to ensure a high level of quality in the App Store. Also, from a business perspective, there is no lock-in advantage if you can get the same apps on the iPhone as you can on other competing smartphones. Fair enough, but Apple would be silly to think it can keep the mobile market all to itself, and its developer agreement comes off as a piece of literature holding developers hostage.
It’s hard to create new rules, but it’s easy to abolish existing ones. Apple should loosen up its iPhone developer agreement by snipping out a part of section 7.2, which states that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store.
That implies that if you originally create an app with the Apple SDK, you’re not allowed to even modify it with different languages and sell it through another app store like Google’s Android market. In other words, iPhone apps belong to Apple. This rule is basically unenforceable to begin with, and Apple should just remove it, along with other similar policies.
Apologise to Jason ChenReasonable people can disagree over whether it was ethical for Gizmodo to purchase the lost iPhone prototype, but the police action -- kicking down Jason Chen’s door to seize his computers -- was overboard.
It was self-evidently a clumsy move: After damaging Chen’s property, the police paused the investigation to study whether the journalists’ Shield Law protected Chen. The proper action would have been to issue a subpoena to get Chen to talk about the device first. Apple, which instigated the police action by filing a stolen property complaint, should publicly apologise to Chen (no relation to the author of this post) and reimburse him for the damages.
Get Gray Powell on StageWhen Apple accidentally leaked its PowerMac G5 a couple of years ago, Apple’s legal team forced MacRumors’ Arnold Kim to pull down his post containing the information. But a humbled Steve Jobs joked about the slip during his WWDC 2003 keynote, calling it a case of “Premature specification.” (See the video below.)
He should do a similar thing when he officially unveils Apple’s next phone, by having Gray Powell -- the engineer who misplaced the next-generation iPhone prototype -- make a stage appearance. Powell could walk out and hand Jobs the phone, saying “Hey Steve, I found your lost phone,” or something similar. Some comedic relief, provided by the engineer who lost the iPhone prototype in a bar, can remind us that Apple is still a company guided by a man with a sense of humour.
Google Android now translates foreign menus
Google Goggles, the visual-searching tool for Android powered smartphones, has been updated with perhaps its most useful functionality yet.
The powerful app can provide all sorts of pertinent information by analysing photos taken with an Android handset. Goggles can identify a snap of objects such as a landmarks, paintings or book covers, and pull up complimentary data from the web.Now, the app takes its first step towards having a Hitchhiker's Guide-esque service, by translating text from one language to another just by snapping it with your Android. Useful for menus, signs and documentation, Google hopes it will prove essential for monolingual travellers in Europe.
As of now, Google Goggles can read text in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish, and translate it to many more Latin-based languages. The team hopes to expand functionality in the future, and even support non-Latin languages such as "Chinese, Hindi and Arabic".
The team at Google Labs admits that the technology is in its infancy, and is plagued by technical hurdles. "Computer vision is a hard problem." Google's blog says, "we know that there are many images that we cannot yet recognize."
That's why the development team is so dedicated to keeping Google Goggles updated with new functionality and tweaks. Alongside the translation service, the new Goggles update features improved barcode recognition, a massive update to the image database, a fresh user interface and the ability to initiate searches from images on your phone's memory.
The translation update to Google Goggles is available now for handsets running Android OS 1.6 or newer, which include the Motorola Droid and Google's own Nexus One.
Scribd ditches Flash for HTML5
Online docs editor and sharing site Scribd is moving its entire web app off of Flash and is rebuilding it using HTML5 and web standards.
The company has been developing its free browser-based app -- which most of its customers use to make and share presentations and documents, and which provides a more elegant experience than Google Docs or Zoho -- in Flash for the past three years.
The announcement was made by Scribd CTO and co-founder Jared Friedman, who spoke on Thursday morning here at the Web 2.0 Expo developer conference. The news was leaked on Wednesday to TechCrunch, who ran a report with screenshots of the new interface.
Scribd’s move comes amidst a fiery debate over the future of rich content presentation on the web, whether Flash or emerging web standards likeHTML5 is the right tool for the job. Most online document editors now, like those from Google and Zoho, offer standards-based experiences using HTML5, but they are lacking somewhat in advanced text and layout capabilities.
Friedman says Scribd isn’t porting its entire web app off of Flash for any particular political reasons, but rather because web standards have finally reached the point where the company can use them to offer a feature set close enough to the Flash experience for it to make the switch. He says Scribd makes extensive use of multiple emerging standards, including HTML5 markup, the Canvas element and CSS 3, especially the @font-face element.
He did, however, point to one big drawback of Flash -- its “browser in the browser” problem. In order to present a web-based app like Scribd’s Flash app, you have to essentially embed one interface (the reader and editor) inside another (the web browser). It adds a layer to the experience that Scribd didn’t feel was elegant.
In a live demo, we got to see a glossy magazine laid out in Scribd, complete with searchable, standards-based text rendered in a fancy font and transformed to be positioned at non-horizontal angles. There were overlays, background images and nicely styled bounding boxes for text, and all of it was editable through a JavaScript-powered toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
Docs can be viewed in a slideshow mode, which moves from slide to slide for presentations and page to page in documents using JavaScript. You can also scroll through the document like it’s a very long web page. Links to your document can be tweeted or shared on Facebook.
Friedman says that by ditching Flash, Scribd is allowing itself to fully compete on mobile devices which don’t support the Flash Player. The current platform to beat -- the iPhone and iPad -- most famously does not run Flash. Friedman showed off the new version of Scribd on an iPad as part of his presentation.
He also says his company’s initial testing shows that over 90% of browsers can use new Scribd -- even IE6(though we don’t have any way of testing that claim).
Apple iPad's UK release date and price confirmed
After a month long delay, and setting an ambiguous "late May" date almost down to the wire, Apple has finally revealed its plans for releasing the iPad outside of the United States.
On 28th May, customers in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK can finally pick up their shiny new tablet that Apple fanatics across the Atlantic have been so fervently championing these past few weeks.
Pre-orders for the tablet begin Monday, 10 May at the Apple online store, retail Apple shops and "select Apple Authorised Resellers".
Pricing might come as a bit of a blow to some fans, as the iPad has come out a little worse for wear after a fight with a currency conversion machine. The Wi-Fi only, 16GB model translates from $500 to a hefty £429; a good £90 premium for the privilege of living in the UK.
The full pricing list is as follows:
The full pricing list is as follows:
Wi-Fi only models
16GB: £429
32GB: £499
64GB: £599
W-Fi and 3G models
16GB: £529
32GB: £599
64GB: £699
Other pricing, such as accessories and 3G data charges have not yet been announced, but Apple has confirmed that the bookstore app iBooks will be available to download, for free, on 28 May. Also, no confirmation of the freeWinnie the Pooh iBook. Where are Apple's priorities?
If you're still left without the iPad, in countries such as Ireland and New Zealand, Apple plans to get the tablet to a further nine countries in July, with local pricing and pre-order information soon.
Top 5 film gadgets that now exist (in some form)
Fuelled by Hollywood, I thought that when I was older I'd be taking a jet pack to work. Apparently the future isn't panning out quite as I'd expected. It’s not all bad news though, as there are in fact plenty of film inspired gadgets that you can now have for real.
Here are my top 5 films with gadgets that are now a reality, what are yours?
Star Wars - The Force: From the moment Obi-Wan Kenobi advised Luke to use the Force it sounded like something I wanted. No gimmicks or gadgets just the power of the mind. Who didn't want to go home and use the Jedi mind trick on their mum, maybe that’s going to far over to the dark side! Now we’ve got devices like the G.tec intendix that allow us just that. The power of the mind to move a ball through a hoop? It’s not what Obi-Wan had in mind but it’ll have to do… for now.
Back to the Future 2 - Hoverboard: Possibly the best gadget from a film ever! Who didn't want one of these? I didn’t know how it was powered, how to steer it, I just knew I had to have one, even if it didn’t work over water. Well we’re not quite there yet but the chaps at Five's Gadget Show have figured out how you can make one yourself.
James Bond, Thunderball - Jet Pack: The ultimate in personal transportation. Although I’m not old enough to have seen this in the cinema, watching the opening sequence on Thunderball on TV still had enough of an impact to tell me everything I needed to know about how I would be getting around in 30 years time. If you have a few (thousand) pounds to spare you can place an order for your very own Martin jet pack. Not quite in shops yet.
Star Trek - Communicators: Federation-issue communicators with their gold flip cover were oh so achingly cool on Captain Kirk, but no so much when Motorola delivered its own take in 1989, heralding the onslaught of personal mobile communications in the 1990’s. It took them a little while to get closer, but the Motorola Razr fitted the bill pretty well.
Superman - X-ray vision: From comics to TV to film, the must have super power for schoolboys across the globe was X-ray vision. Many school changing room discussions will have ended at the same conclusion. But at last, every schoolboy's dream has become a reality at your local airport with their Backscatter X-ray machines. Almost like magic.
What are your favourite film-gadgets-that-now-sort-of-exist? Let me know in the comments.
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