Direct neural interface has long been a dream and fantasy of tech geeks like myself who grew up reading science fiction. Slap an electrode net on your head (or screw a cable into an implanted jack) and there you are, controlling a computer with the same ease that you'd walk down the street or bend a paperclip with your fingers. If nothing else, those of us who battle the spectre of carpal tunnel syndrome constantly know that our careers have a shelf life, and at some point we're going to be out of action more or less permanently. So we …
Late last year, known and respected information security researcher Dragos Ruiu began tweeting about something he called #badBIOS - a malware agent of some kind that he says jacks the BIOS of a machine and sets itself up as a hypervisor-cum-backdoor beneath the operating system. He's gathered got some evidence that instances of the beastie communicate via near-ultrasound by directly manipulating the soundcard without interacting with the OS' drivers. Whether or not he's actually right, some of the NSA's older existing tools aside - it was surprising how fast corroborating details started popping up around the Net.
For a couple of weeks now, people in major cities like New York City and Los Angeles have been experiencing something far more unusual: Voices in their heads that suddenly cause them to look up at billboards. It isn't auditory hallucinations causing this but snipers armed with tight-cone directional sonic projectors aiming recorded sounds at people on the street as part of an advertising campaign for a show on A&E called Paranormal State. The device in question is called Audio Spotlight from Holosonics and involves the use of carefully tuned ultrasonic speakers. The principle behind this is that ultrasound …
