• Security Research Labs demonstrated “BadUSB,” showing that commodity USB peripherals can be reprogrammed at the firmware level to masquerade as malicious keyboards or network adapters, exposing a new class of hardware-level attacks.

• Google Project Zero released a practical Rowhammer exploit that flips bits in adjacent DRAM rows to escalate to kernel privileges, confirming that even commodity DDR3 is vulnerable to hardware-level bit-flipping attacks.

• Intel’s RealSense F200 depth camera uses structured-light sensing (IR laser projector + 640×480 IR camera) rather than time-of-flight; a $99 dev kit exists but the SDK forbids reverse-engineering and requires a 4th-gen Core CPU, while open-source structured-light decoding tools remain “haphazard and incomplete.”

• ΛLΞXΛNDRIΛ, a new distributed publishing tool announced on the unSYSTEM mailing list, aims to provide censorship-resistant, decentralized hosting for scientific papers and datasets.

• MIT’s “trillion-frame-per-second” camera was debated; participants concluded that picosecond-scale photon timing for time-of-flight microscopy is still beyond affordable sensors without pulsed-light tricks.

• Tesla’s planned Nevada Gigafactory is sized for 35 GWh of cells and 50 GWh of packs per year by 2020—more than doubling 2012 global Li-ion output—and would require ~200 such plants to supply the entire world automotive fleet.

• A Medium/Physics arXiv article proposing quantum criticality as a hidden driver in the origin of life sparked discussion, with participants drawing analogies to antenna tuning for biological information processing.

• Bay Area DIY biology lab tours were coordinated, highlighting Noisebridge, BioCurious, Counter Culture Labs, Berkeley BioLabs, and IndieBio as the most valuable stops for visiting biohackers.

• Web-development chatter noted that Chrome and Firefox now treat “localhost” as a distinct origin for CORS, forcing explicit Access-Control-Allow-Origin headers even during local testing; Flask best practices included a working CORS decorator and recommendations for Flask-Restless or Celery/Flower for long-running scientific compute jobs.