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Thursday, January 19, 2006

 

Remote-control roaches are plagued by spammers

`A big brown cockroach crawls across the table in the laboratory of Japan’s most prestigious university. The researcher eyes it nervously, but he doesn’t go for the bug spray. He grabs the remote. This is no ordinary under-the-refrigerator type bug. This roach has been surgically implanted with a micro-robotic backpack that allows researchers to control its movements. This is Robo-roach.

Unfortunately spammers are emailing the roaches when they broadcast to cell phones. “We had an incident last week where we sent a roach into an duct to test for an air leak, when we asked the roach to turn right, it responded by asking for our email addresses and offered to send us viagra in return.” said Assistant Professor Isao Shimoyama, head of the bio-robot research team at Tokyo University.’




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