Event

Science: Pablos: Hacking and Innovation

Chances are one or more of your credit cards is embedded with a radio frequency ID tag, listing your name, credit-card number and expiration date, and more, for your security. But with $8 worth of gear from eBay, hacker/futurist Paul Pablos Holman can scan your card from a distance, retrieve all that data, and start shopping. Luckily for us, Pablos is more concerned with demonstrating the frontiers of what hackers do, and how tenuous our sense of security really is. And even hackers have day jobsat former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold's Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures Laboratory, Pablos is part of a team at work on a wide variety of futuristic projects, including a fission reactor powered by nuclear waste, a machine to stop hurricanes (by harnessing the oceans own energy to lower its surface temperature), and a laser-based mosquito-eradication system to eliminate malaria. Presented as part of Seattle Science Lectures, with University Bookstore and Pacific Science Center.