Confuzzled, not that we blame him. (Photo: screencap)

Even the most devoted of gadget geeks faces a learning curve upon buying a new smartphone. Among those who grew up with rotary phones, however, the curve looks a little more like a sheer rock face. The BBC recently witnessed this firsthand, on a visit to a Cambridge lab that does user testing with the elderly to figure out how to make a friendlier product.

"I was amazed how thick I am, really," 75-year-old, bowtie-wearing Archie Ferguson told the BBC after fiddling and fiddling with one of these unfamiliar devices, attempting to answer a call. "If you can't do it, you feel a right wally," he added.

Of course, upsetting nice Mr. Ferguson isn't the point of the exercise. "We're trying to forget what we know and see that product afresh for the first time," explained Ian Hosking, who runs the project. Still, it's impossible not to feel a little sad on the older man's behalf, watching his befuddlement:

Of course, a toddler can probably pwn any one of us on an iPad, too.

Smile, Sarah! (Photo: Terminator Wikia)

Good news for those of you kept awake at night by terrible apocalyptic visions and/or whose name is Sarah Connor: The BBC reports that the University of Cambridge is taking up the study of the existential risks posed by new technologies. Think killer AIs with indestructible robot bodies.

One of organizers is Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn, along with philosopher Huw Price and astrophysicist Martin Rees. What, the English professors were all busy?

The BBC helpfully adds that, "Fears that machines may take over have been central to the plot of some of the most popular science fiction films" and proceeds to explain the example of Skynet which "gained self-awareness and fought back after first being developed by the US military."

But the Cambridge Project for Existential Risk won't be limiting its sights to scenarios suggested by the Terminator franchise. The founders are also worried about a wide range of technological developments that could "soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole." Think everything from massive climate change to nanotechnology.

The project's mission statement argues that "these issues require a great deal more scientific investigation than they presently receive," adding:

The seriousness of these risks is difficult to assess, but that in itself seems a cause for concern, given how much is at stake.

Q.E.D, sir.

The project should open its doors sometime early next year, as the BBC drolly notes, "survival of the human race permitting." That leaves plenty of time for all the Singularitarians to buy plane tickets.

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Team GhostShell returned late Monday with Project WestWind: a leak of 120,000 records from 100 major universities around the world.

Team GhostShell is the hacking group behind Project Hellfire, which launched in August this year. Project Hellfire lifted 1 million accounts from 100 websites around the world, compromising data from the CIA and from Wall Street.

The hacked data leaked in Project WestWind does indeed appear to come from a who's who of major learning institutions. They include Harvard, Cambridge, Princeton, Tokyo University, Cornell and New York University.

In their Pastebin announcement, Team GhostShell said Project WestWind was a serious effort to jump-start a dialogue on the state of higher education today. Apparently this hack wasn't pranksterism for the lulz, but hacktivism for the greater good:

We wanted to bring to your attention different examples from Europe, how the laws change so often that even the teachers have a hard time adjusting to them, let alone, the students, to the US, where tuition fees have spiked up so much that by the time you finish any sort of degree, you will be in more debt than you can handle and with no certainty that you will get a job, to Asia, where strict & limited teachings still persist and never seem to catch up with the times and most of the time fail to prep you up for a world where foreign affairs are crucial in this day and age.

The hackers ask that others use the information as a conversation starter, team member DeadMellox writing:

You don't have to talk about it with us, what's important is that you bring up the subject 'today's education' in day-to-day conversations with your family, friends, people close to you and try to understand the system better, together. How it works, how a certain type of diploma can or cannot help you in your road to the career you want to pursue.

Though Team GhostShell's data dump contains user screen names and mostly hashed passwords (Betabeat examined one file in which some of the passwords were apparently cracked), they claim they've kept the leaked records to a minimum.

Team GhostShell issued a warning to the targeted institutions regarding the states of their networks: "When we got there, we found out that a lot of them have malware injected. No surprise there since some have credit card information stored."

Betabeat has reached out to a web network administrator at one of the hacked universities for comment and will update this post if we receive a response.

General Assembly hasn't announced the classes to be offered, but cofounder Adam Pritzker told the Globe that the initial schedule will be arranged by a New York producer and that they'll likely soon hire a local. In his comments to the paper, Mr. Pritzker was already evangelizing GA to the locals:

"All of our offerings take place in a social environment," says Pritzker. "Everybody is building a project. They're very goal-oriented. People are looking to start a company, or level up at work."

We've reached out to General Assembly and will update when we receive more detail.