5 Interesting Tech Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

Image via Complex Original

It's become clear the various technologies we dress our lives in are intrusive, interrupting private flows of thought with push notifications and and a swarm of marginalia. Call in the Night is a new digital network designed to make intrusiveness a positive. Designed to interrupt its members in the middle of their REM sleep cycles, the program will call you at a preset time in the middle of the night, and have you explain your dream to another member of the network, a conversation that's recorded and aggregated in your profile. "I see it as a distributed documentary radio project," creator Max Hawkins told Digital Trends' Jam Kotenko. "We listen to a randomly-selected sample of the clips to discover interesting conversations that might be featured in the podcast. The rest of the clips are archived and can be accessed by keyword search."

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One of the miracles of the Internet is the unexpected connections formed between people who would otherwise never have known about each other. This is also one of its scariest features, something which one Lyft user in San Francisco discovered last month. Valleywag's Sam Biddle recounts the experience of one woman who met a chatty driver while using Lyft's car share services, and after a commute's worth of small talk she agreed to give the man her number when he pressed her for it. What ensued was a bizarre and increasingly hostile string of texts from the man, saying he was planning on visiting New York at the same time as her, constantly badgering her about why she didn't want to hang out, telling her she gives a bad name to females, and then pretending to have cancer to force some gesture of sympathy. The encounter seems to only confirm every idle fear about connecting with strangers too easily over the Internet.

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Carpal tunnel syndrome is one of the most infamous maladies of the 21st Century, a physical malfunction with crippling consequences spring from the most important device in your home and work place. Trent Wolbe describes his experience with this dreaded affliction for The Verge, enumerating how difficult it can be to treat a condition brought on by technology by simply swapping in other kinds of technology. After experimenting a standing work station, different kinds of mice and ergonomic keyboards, Wolbe comes to realize "I was trying to buy a way around my problem as opposed to treating it at its source...every aspect of my life was mediated by a mouse and keyboard: the Internet is a quick and easy medium for working most of the time and chatting with friends or watching YouTube the rest of the time. But my body was sending me an excruciatingly clear signal that being chained to a console wasn't right for me." Sometimes the simplest solution to problems brought on by over-dependence on technology is to loosen your hold on the technology.

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The last few months have not been good for Microsoft, from the hostile reception to its Xbox One console to the recent news that its Surface tablets had lost the company almost a billion dollars. Paradoxically, many of the company's most impressive developments in recent years have been marginal ones, from which no obvious path to profitability can be seen. This week the company announced new software for its motion tracking camera Kinect that can interpret sign language, or alternately translate typed words into sign language demonstrated by a 3D avatar on a computer monitor. Developed in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the software is another in a long-running list of uses for the videogame peripheral that make more sense in non-game settings. Unlike most new software inventions, which come with a hyperbolic wave of investor enthusiasm and revolutionary promises of market disruptions, this small bit of news shows technology at its best, a means of helping people better connect with one another and not as a platform for advertisements or data mining.

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Complaints about technology reveal as much about the person making them as the technology itself. Such is the case of Chris Sevier, an attorney in Nashville, who filed a lawsuit against Apple for allowing sex websites to be viewable on their laptops. The complaint is sure to be thrown out long before it reaches trial, but the ridiculousness of the premise is a steady shows that our issues with technology have just as much to do with our own psychology. In one of the most painful parts of the complaint, Sevier claims the various sex videos he found online constitute "unfair competition and interference of the marital contract" against his wife. "The plaintiff began desiring, younger more beautiful girls featured in porn videos than his wife, who was no longer 21," the complaint states. Perhaps if Apple can invent a time travel machine that could return his wife to 21 he might be willing to settle out of court.

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