Belkin WEMO Maker

Your world is now fully controllable with a WEMO maker.

I've wanted to write about Wemo for a while, as it's a really interesting technology. Devised by Belkin, Wemo products have the capability to be remotely controlled using a phone and tablet using local wi-fi. So far Belkin has released power switches. Smart LED Blubs and even some security cameras to utilise the technology, but the new Wemo Maker takes the concept to wholly new place, by embracing the maker community with a tool to Wemo almost any piece of low voltage electronics.

Samsung Galaxy Alpha on Vodafone

Vodafone offer most of the top designs in their Pay Monthly selection these days, and have included the Samsung Galaxy Alpha alongside the S5, Nexus 6, Apple's iPhone 6, and various LG, Blackberry, Nokia Lumia, Sony and HTC products.

You can get it free on contract from £30.50 a month, £4 less than the S5. Or, you can get that down to £22.50 a month if you stump £149 upfront, and agree to a 24 month contract for 100 mins, 100MB and unlimited texts.

Currently Vodafone haven't added this phone to their Pay Monthly range, but you can get it unlocked elsewhere for roughly £450-500. That price is an accurate reflection of the specification, where it's close to being a leader without ever actually heading the pack.

Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon R9 290X 8GB

The freaks come out at night.

Sometimes, at the tail end of a generation of GPUs or CPUs, you see something a little exotic get to retail shelves, perhaps as a way to boost sales of remaining inventory before the shiny new thing wipes the slate clean. Other times, it’s simply a window of opportunity for experimentation. Asus is delivering the Ares III, a Radeon R9 295X designed for custom water cooling and built on a custom PCB. (They’re only making 500 of them, though, so good luck tracking one down.) Now, Sapphire has come along with a 290X that doubles the VRAM allotment from 4GB to 8GB.

Tor: The Dark World

Operation Onymous appeared to strike a big blow against the Deep Web, but as you would probably expect in such matters, not everything is what it seems.

Tor, the anonymising web protocol that underpins the so-called 'Deep Web' has been on the radar of law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic for a good while now. However, last year's arrest of Ross Albricht, the man allegedly behind the infamous Silk Road online marketplace and known online as 'Dread Pirate Roberts', appeared to mark an escalation in efforts to bring law to its wild west nature. While other sites popped up to replace Silk Road (most notably Silk Road 2.0 - SR2 from now on), many of them seemed to have been seized in a multinational police operation a few weeks ago, apparently highlighting just how far investigative tactics have come in a year. It may not have been as successful as was first trumpeted, though.

What does it all mean for Tor going forward? Is law enforcement circumventing its efforts to create an anonymous online service, and is its aim of creating an untrackable web network just a pipe dream? If so, what does it mean not only for criminals but for the dissidents, activists, whistleblowers and journalists that have also turned to this technology in the face of increasing surveillance?

Affinity Designer

Could this be a genuine alternative to Illustrator?

Since Macromedia Freehand was discontinued in 2007, Mac creatives have craved an alternative to the highcost Adobe Illustrator, and with Serif’s Affinity Designer, they may finally have one. Part of a suite of new apps that will see image-editing and design tools released in the coming year, Affinity Designer is created specifically for the Mac and, as such, is optimised for OS X. It offers perfectly smooth panning and zooming, and more than 1,000,000% zoom (you read that correctly), so you can close in on the finest detail without a loss in quality. It ran well on our 2012 MacBook Pro, even with complex multi-layered images.