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iFixit’s Magic Leap teardown features super precise engineering and tiny projectors

Augmented reality company Magic Leap released a “creator edition” of its ambitious, hugely hyped headset earlier this month. Today, iFixit published its teardown of the device, featuring a concrete look at technology that Magic Leap discusses in very abstract terms. As we’ve previously discussed, the Magic Leap One Creator Edition uses a combination of waveguide lenses and tracking cameras to project hologram-like objects into your real environment. iFixit actually goes to the trouble (and it does have a lot of trouble with parts of this hard-to-repair device) of pulling out the multilayered waveguide and the little projector that shoots light through it. It also spells out the details of things like the controller’s magnetic tracking, which isn’t revelatory but also isn’t something Magic Leap spends a lot of time explaining. The teardown reflects the basic impression we’ve had of Magic Leap: it’s an interesting device with some serious compromises. iFixit suggests that the ma

Wickr has a new plan for dodging internet blocks

As encrypted chat apps grow more popular, they’re also becoming more popular targets for state-level blocks. Whether it’s brief interruptions in Brazil and Egypt or longterm censorship in China and Iran, countries are testing out their ability to block traffic at a national level, and apps are having to get creative to stay online. Wickr’s latest solution is a partnership with the circumvention service Psiphon, which will be available to enterprise users starting today, rolling out to free users in the weeks to come. Similar to a VPN, Psiphon will disguise Wickr traffic through proxies and other routing protocols designed to make the traffic hard to spot and even harder to block. Emerging out of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, Psiphon already provides anti-blocking services for a number of digital rights tools, most notably in Iran. “The systems doing network disruptions are very sophisticated,” says Psiphon’s Michael Hull. “So you have to have a smarter kind of VPN to pe