Copenhagen New Carsharing Integrated With Public Transport
Carsharing programs are becoming more sophisticated and eco-friendly by the minute. In the latest wrinkle, Copenhagen will be the first city to allow members of the DriveNow program to use their public transit cards to rent the vehicles.
DriveNow is launching the service in partnership with Arriva Danmark, the largest bus operator in Copenhagen. Arriva won the competition tendered by the city of Copenhagen last April to operate a free floating carsharing system. One of the main conditions included in the tender was the operation of a 100% electric fleet, aligned with the city’s focus on sustainability and green urban development.
http://www.citiesofthefuture.eu/copenhagen-new-carsharing-integrated-with-public-transport/
Toyota Finally Gets Serious About Self-Driving Cars
TOYOTA HAS JOINED the race to build a self-driving car.
The Japanese automaker announced it’s dropping $50 million in the next five years to establish research centers with both Stanford and MIT, to work on artificial intelligence and autonomous driving technology.
“We will initially focus on the acceleration of intelligent vehicle technology, with the immediate goal of helping eliminate traffic casualties and the ultimate goal of helping improve quality of life through enhanced mobility and robotics,” says Kiyotaka Ise, Toyota’s head of R&D.
Toyota’s new projects will be directed by Dr. Gill Pratt, who formerly ran Darpa’s Robotics Challenge, a contest to create robot systems to help emergency responders during disaster situations.
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/toyota-enters-self-driving-car-race/
Lack of sleep puts you at higher risk for colds, first experimental study finds
Of the 164 participants, 124 received the actual virus instead of the control, and 48 of them got sick. By checking the sleep duration of the sick participants, researchers report in the current issue of SLEEP that individuals who slept fewer than 5 hours a night were 4.5 times more likely to get sick than those who slept 7 hours or more. Those who slept 5 to 6 hours were 4.2 times more likely to get sick, but those who slept 6 to 7 hours per night were at no greater risk of catching the cold than those who slept 7 hours or more, suggesting that there’s a sleep threshold for potent immune defense.
Steve Wozniak On Education, Engineering & Apple
In a set of three ten-minute videos Steve Wozniak reveals how he became interested in electronics at elementary school and that he designed and built the Apple II as a personal project.
He states:
Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He’d never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn’t know software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that’s what he wanted to do.
The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed.
Xerox PARC’s new chip will self destruct in 10 seconds
Engineers at Xerox PARC have developed a chip that will self-destruct upon command, providing a potentially revolutionary tool for high-security applications.
The chip, developed as part of DARPA’s vanishing programmable resources project, could be used to store data such as encryption keys and, on command, shatter into thousands of pieces so small, reconstruction is impossible.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/584274/xerox-parc-new-chip-will-self-destruct-10-seconds/
DD4BC Hacker Group Blackmails Companies for Bitcoin Using DDOS Attacks
The group, identified and analyzed by Akamai’s Prolexic Security Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert), has been very busy in the past few months, launching numerous DDOS attacks against several Akamai clients, and requiring payments in Bitcoin to stop their operation.
Chinese tech companies reportedly hiring ‘cheerleaders’ to motivate programmers
The country’s government-run news service China.org.cn reported last week that internet companies “across China” are hiring “pretty, talented girls that help create a fun work environment.”
Dubbed “programming cheerleaders,” these young women serve to chit-chat and play Ping-Pong with employees as part of their role.
DOT and IIHS announce historic commitment from 10 automakers to include automatic emergency braking on all new vehicles
The announcement, made at the dedication of IIHS’s newly expanded Vehicle Research Center, represents a major step toward making crash-prevention technologies more widely available to consumers. The 10 companies – Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo – will work with IIHS and NHTSA in the coming months on the details of implementing their historic commitment, including the timeline for making AEB a standard feature. The Department and IIHS encourage all other light-vehicle and trucking manufacturers to bring automated vehicle technology to all vehicles on U.S. roadways as soon as possible.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2015/nhtsa-iihs-commitment-on-aeb-09112015
Honda gets California approval for self-driving cars on roads
Honda Motor Co Ltd has received a permit from the state of California to drive its autonomous vehicles on public streets, joining companies ranging from Google Inc to Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) in testing the fast-growing technology.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles on its website listed Honda as the most recent of 10 companies that had received the self-driving permits as of Friday.
Other companies already approved include Daimler AG’s Mercedes Benz, Tesla Motors Inc, Nissan Motor Co Ltd and BMW AG.
Honda, which is deploying advanced driver-assistance systems across its Honda and Acura models, is one of many carmakers investing in self-driving technology. Some, including Tesla and BMW, already offer semi-autonomous features.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/10/us-honda-autos-self-driving-idUSKCN0RA2G820150910
Error Exposes 1.5 Million People’s Private Medical Records on Amazon Web Services
Police injury reports, drug tests, detailed doctor visit notes, social security numbers—all were inexplicably unveiled on a public subdomain of Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the next big data breach horrorshow. Instead of hackers, it’s old-fashioned neglect from companies managing data that exposed your most sensitive information.
Texas tech enthusiast Chris Vickery had heard strange data dumps could turn up on Amazon’s cloud computing platform, so he started combing through. In early September, he found an enormous data breach that left the private medical information of millions of Americans sitting in the open online.
“It just kind of fell into my lap,” he told Gizmodo.
After Vickery downloaded the data and realized what it was, he started contacting the organizations impacted. Among those exposed: Kansas’ State Self Insurance Fund, CSAC Excess Insurance Authority, and the Salt Lake County Database.
http://gizmodo.com/security-hell-private-medical-data-of-over-1-5-million-1731548110
AWS outage knocks Amazon, Netflix, Tinder and IMDb in MEGA data collapse
Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) have suffered a monster outage affecting the company’s cloudy systems, bringing some sites down with it in the process.
The service disruption hit AWS customers including Netflix, Tinder and IMDb, as well as Amazon’s Instant Video and Books websites.
The outage may also explain Airbnb’s current service woes. Airbnb is an AWS customer.
At time of publication, Amazon had coughed to data faults being reported on multiple services at its North Virginia US-EAST-1 site – which is the company’s oldest public-cloud facility.
Some of the online retail giant’s cloudy services were having a miserable Sunday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/
OPM says 5.6 million fingerprints stolen in cyberattack, five times as many as previously thought
One of the scariest parts of the massive cybersecurity breaches at the Office of Personnel Management just got worse: The agency now says 5.6 million people’s fingerprints were stolen as part of the hacks.
That’s more than five times the 1.1 million government officials estimated when the cyberattacks were initially disclosed over the summer. The total number of those believed to be caught up in the breaches, which included the theft of the Social Security numbers and addresses of more than 21 million former and current government employees, remains the same.
