Your phone has its own signature
Tech-savvy criminals try to evade being tracked by changing their cellphone鈥檚 built-in ID code and by regularly dumping SIM cards. But Jakob Hasse and colleagues at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, found that every handset鈥檚 signal hides within it an unalterable digital fingerprint. Tiny variations in microchip manufacturing processes make each phone generate radio signals with digital errors at unique rates. The researchers are now developing a customised receiver to pick up these signals.
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Security engineer Diogo M贸nica on the software he wrote that automatically books him hard-to-get tables at San Francisco鈥檚 top restaurants. He describes the practice as an 鈥渁rms race鈥� among Silicon Valley鈥檚 wealthy programmers.
Go shopping with a beam of light
Tap-to-pay just got an upgrade. A new short-range communication technology allows cash registers to talk to smartphones using patterns of light. Light field communication, or LFC, was designed by ByteLight, whose normal business is indoor navigation using the imperceptible flashing of LED lights. Customers download an app which uses the phone鈥檚 camera to read the light patterns coming from the register. The first LFC system is about to be installed in shops in China.
Shoes get their own virtual reality
Gestural interfaces let people point their fingers to navigate around virtual spaces 鈥� but feet have been neglected, say Denys Matthies and colleagues at the University of Munich, Germany. So they are developing a wearable wireless insole stuffed with pressure sensors. These detect motions like walking, jumping, turning and running and transmit wirelessly from a module clipped to the user鈥檚 shoe.
