- Japan’s Geospatial Information Authority is piloting open-source software that converts government topographic data into low-cost 3-D-printable tactile maps for the blind; the live demo is at http://cyberjapandata.gsi.go.jp/3d/index.html.  
- Channel members explored non-invasive electrolyte-loss monitoring during exercise, weighing skin-conductance, impedance spectroscopy, and the counter-intuitive finding that evaporative water loss can raise sweat salinity.  
- A lightweight DHTML gear-design tool (http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gears/) was demonstrated for interactively creating irregular, collision-free gears, including a working planetary gearset with stick-figure planets; prior art cited a 2009 Swantner paper on automated gear-train synthesis.  
- Security discussion centered on Bitcoin: participants argued that any exploitable cryptographic flaw would already have surfaced given BTC’s high value, while also considering non-monetary attack vectors such as embedding Stuxnet-like payloads in wallet software or sabotaging competitors’ transactions.  
- Two verifiable-computation papers were spotlighted: “Practical delegation of computation using multiple servers” (CCS 2011) and MIT’s “VerSum: Verifiable computations over large public logs.”  
- Google Play Games’ client-side license check was criticized for long delays and trivial automated stripping; server-side cryptographic APIs were proposed as a more robust anti-piracy model.  
- Infrastructure-as-code tools troposphere (Python library for AWS CloudFormation) and OpenStack Heat’s AWS compatibility layer were recommended for reproducible cloud deployments.  
- The October 2014 Drupal SQL-injection vulnerability (SA-CORE-2014-005) affected high-profile sites including economist.com, csail.mit.edu, sens.org, popsci.com, and several central banks; participants labeled Drupal “WordPress on steroids,” citing its monolithic PHP/MySQL architecture as inherently insecure for critical applications.