Toys

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- This man will take your picture while macing you.

- Ticketmaster does one thing right, dumps captchas.

- PornHub's rejected SFW Super Bowl ad is brilliant marketing.

- Swedish police raid teenagers playing Call of Duty.… Read more

Jeff hasn't finished complaining about last year's Retina Display iPad yet and Apple went ahead and announced a new 128-gigabyte model for $799. But wait, haven't we been getting beaten in the head with Apple's cloudcentric messaging for the last two years? Why the push for local storage all of a sudden?

In pop culture news, we'll spend some of the first half talking about mistaken identities through the Internet and the "Catfish" show on MTV that just wrapped up its first season.

Some critics accused the episodes of being staged (like the film it was based on), but a casting application for Season 2 at least proves that the stories are staged at most, not entirely made up.… Read more

Thanks to "Twilight," vampires are more popular than ever. It's only natural that people would want their own vampire babies, isn't it? OK, maybe not, but there is a niche market out there for vampire baby dolls. I'm not talking about action figures or stuffed toys, I'm talking about dolls so realistic you'll feel like you've crossed the Uncanny Valley and emerged from the other side.

Artist Bean Shanine runs the Twisted Bean Stalk Nursery, a site devoted to her unholy baby creations. She takes Reborn doll kits and transforms them into monstrosities. Reborns are incredibly realistic, making Shanine's transformations all the more creepy.… Read more

Count computer science Ph.D. candidate Lingxiang Xiang as the latest tinkerer to tap the potential of the cheap Raspberry Pi computer.

The enterprising student fixed a broken R2-D2 toy replica using a Raspberry Pi computer and other off-the-shelf electronics bought online. The toy was meant to be a birthday gift for his girlfriend.

The end result: a robot with face recognition; motion and distance detection (to avoid bumping into obstacles); and the ability to understand voice commands in both English and Chinese.

Like the movie version, the R2-D2 can also record and play back audio messages, though obviously holographic messages aren't in its repertoire. … Read more

Microsoft assumes you probably haven't used an Internet Explorer browser since the mid-1990s, and the company's latest commercial for IE10 takes us all back to those awkward times with a montage of '90s nostalgia that includes slap bracelets, Oregon Trail, LA Gear Lights, and Tamogotchis. We're not sure how any of those items are supposed to lure us away from Firefox or Chrome, but check it out anyway.

We knew it was only a matter of time before a 6-second clip of hardcore porn made its way to the Twitter Vine, but we never expected it to come from Twitter itself--a nasty clip was featured for a short time on Vine's "Editor's Choice" pick list. Granted, it's not the first instance of adult content on the new social video service.

With Vine's TOS giving users creative freedom to access its service, an unfiltered stream of dirty hashtags is already building out on VineRoulette. Then again, who the hell wants to watch porn for only six seconds?… Read more

Listeners of The 404 Show have plenty of financial questions, so we look to our resident expert Jill Schlesinger from "CBS MoneyWatch" to make sense of it all. From ETFs to IRAs and everything in between, Jill and Jeff navigate the choppy waters of personal finance. They'll also talk about Apple in great detail, and whether the company's sinking stock price is a sign of things to come.

Jill hits up The 404 Show every three weeks, so if you've got a question you want answered on the show, be sure to send a tweet or e-mail us! … Read more

The flu has finally struck down our very own Justin Yu, but luckily the much more attractive Bridget Carey is available to fill his tiny men's size 6 shoes. Bridget and Jeff get uber-nerdy today, discussing all things Nintendo nostalgia including what games they used to rent repeatedly and the current state of gaming as it exists in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Finally, we'll noodle over the fact that older brains can't remember a lot of new stuff because they're too "full." All this and more on today's show!… Read more

Welcome to today's show, where we're finally analyzing the food photography trend for what it is, with the help of this article in the New York Times that profiles restaurateur David Bouley and the creative tactics he's come up with to stop the dining room distractions.

The way we see it, the problem with food photography is that we've collectively lost our shame and sense of subtlety when it comes time to dine. Instead of snapping a quick 3-second iPhone pic, we've seen folks stand on chairs, use tripods with a giant dSLR, and even ask the restaurant to adjust the ceiling lights to suit the mood of the picture.

The fact is that there's really no better way to prove you're eating above your budget than to take a picture of it. Argue all you want, it's just a tacky move and plenty of restaurants agree. Check out today's show to hear some places are doing to avoid the awkwardness.… Read more

Before we take on the Subway issue, we start today's show welcoming Ariel back from the dead. He spent the last week in bed, proving our theory once again that CES is bad for your health and should be treated accordingly.

On to the news. Google's security team just released a new research paper where GP Eric Grosse unveiled his vision of our future in terms of Web security.

Phishing attacks, malware, and poor password choices are making it hard to keep private data in the cloud, but Grosse proposed a new method called the Yubikey USB card that automatically logs you into your Google account when you plug it in. If you're thinking that sounds like a step back, check out what Google has to say.… Read more