Tech 9: Stories From the Week You Need to Read Right Now

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As more and more Internet-connected devices enter our lives a new security hole is opening up. This week Forbes' Kashmir Hill reported on a new search engine, Shodan (named after the super computer villain in the game System Shock), which crawls the Internet in search of other connected devices, which its users can then potentially hack. The company claims to expose devices like webcams, routers, iPhones, wind turbines, and power plants. One unlucky family had their baby monitor hacked, which they found out about when a distant hacker began yelling at their sleeping 2 year-old through the monitoring device they left in her bedroom.

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Trying to stay young is a special obsession of many Americans and a new study suggests that playing video games may help postpone the mental affects of old age. Reporting for the New York Times, Matt Richtel investigates MIT researchers who found people as old as 80 could build measurably improved short-term and long-term cognitive abilities by playing games based around simple multitasking actions. "We know we can rewire the brain, but the challenge is how to do it properly," Daphne Bevalier, one of the lead researchers, said. "We're in the primitive age of brain training."

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The days when BlackBerry was synonymous with smartphone have been over for a while. After a long string of increasingly disappointing product launches, RIM this week announced it was bringing its once-fabled messaging service, BBM, to iOS devices. The company submitted the app two weeks ago and is waiting on Apple's notoriously opaque approvals process to be completed. Once approved, RIM will join the long list of one-time or current Apple competitors including Microsoft and Google who've decided to bite the bullet and build iOS apps while trying to unseat the market leader all at the same time.

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Can you marry something that isn't alive? Davecat, a videogame fan in his mid-40s, makes a case that his wife, Sidore Kureneko, a RealDoll he bought for $6,000, is better than a human companion. In an interview for The Atlantic with Julie Beck, Davecat explains that dolls "don't possess any of the unpleasant qualities that organic, flesh and blood humans have. A synthetic will never lie to you, cheat on you, criticize you, or be otherwise disagreeable." You might argue that learning to navigate a human partner's unpredictability and critical views is an essential part of building intimacy, a necessary but difficult rite of maturation. But for those who want to opt out, maybe lifelong relationships with a "Gynoid" is a tolerable compromise.

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Richard Branson's wild-seeming plan to launch a commercial space flight service in 2014 appears to be progressing according to schedule. This week the company announced the second official test flight of its SpaceShipTwo rocket, which reached a lofty 69,000 feet and reached Mach 1.4. Earlier this year, the company announced tickets for the first wave of flights will cost $250,000 so now would probably be a good time to start saving.

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As machines come to play more roles in our daily lives, it becomes easy to overlook how unpredictable and potentially dangerous they may be. In one especially tragic event this week, a 19-year-old Brooklyn man died after losing control of a remote controlled miniature helicopter, a hobby he'd taken up with his father as a child. The helicopter was powered by 24-inch carbon fiber rotors, which struck him in the head after he'd lost control. He later died in the hospital.

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While Google typically gets most credit for self-driving cars, this week Nissan announced it was working on its own in-house version of similar technology. Japan's second-largest automaker has begun testing a self-driving version of its Leaf line of cars, which it showed off at an event in Irvine, navigating through a simulated urban environment. "The technology to create self-driving cars is already here," Karl Brauer of Kelley Blue Book told Bloomberg. "As sci-fi as it sounds, self-driving cars that don't ever crash, reduce traffic congestion and make valet attendants obsolete are coming."

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The last 50 years have seen a dramatic rise in the diagnosis of commonplace mental disabilities like depression and bipolarism, but a report by Gary Greenberg in the New Yorker suggests the practice of treating these conditions with pills has been built on shaky foundation that's led the industry into a moment of crisis. In specific, treating depression with Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, medications meant to rebalance serotonin in the brain, have turned out to be no more effective at treating depression than placebos, and nobody really knows what to do about it. "Without a new explanatory framework," Greenberg writes, "drug-company scientists don't even know where to begin, so it makes no sense for the industry to stay in the psychiatric-drug business."

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The growth explosion of Silicon Valley tech companies in the last decade has spurred rapid demographic change in San Francisco, with companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Yahoo! becoming major employers. The catch is many workers prefer to live in the city rather than the sprawling suburbs of Cupertino, Redwood City, and Mountain View. So most major tech companies have begun operating employee shuttles to bring their gingham-adorned employees from downtown to the suburban boonies everyday, which according to Eric Rodenbeck reveals a good map of how exactly San Francisco has been gentrified by the tech industry. Perhaps even more alarming is the emergence of a completely separate form of mass transit that's accessible only to people connected to a specific corporation, while BART-dependent commuters have faced the reality of their public service slowly succumbing to budget cuts and strikes.

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