Home Depot confirms its payment systems were breached

Heads up, Home Depot shoppers: pay very close attention to your bank and credit card statements if you’ve made a pitstop there over the past few months. After a frenzied burst of investigation, the company confirmed earlier reports of a payment information breach that may have affected home improvement types in the United States and Canada as far back as April. Alas, there’s still no word on just how many people may have been affected by the hack, but there’s just the faintest silver lining here: there’s no evidence that your debit card PIN has been compromised, and folks who bought from HomeDepot.com are in the clear. That’s all thanks to the nature of the breach: security researcher Brian Krebs added last night that the culprit used a variant of the very same malware responsible for the huge Target data breach that potentially affected millions of customers over the holidays. That means only in-store point-of-sales systems running Windows were at risk, though that’s not going to make many people feel any better about all this.

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Via: Wall Street Journal

Source: Home Depot (PDF)

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Sound off! How often do you upgrade your phone?

Like clockwork, Apple’s latest iPhone is almost here. Of course Apple isn’t the only company that releases new phones on a regular schedule — in fact, it seems like some unveil new models every month. With the latest and greatest always on the horizon, it’s easy for us to feel pretty claustrophobic locked into a two-year contract and the thread of hefty early-termination fees hanging over our heads. How do you plan your upgrade cycles to get around these obstacles? Share you story in the Engadget forums.

Filed under: Cellphones, Misc, Mobile

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Jawbone Up coming to Android Wear, Apple HealthKit and Windows Phone

Until now, Jawbone’s Up bands have had the best software of any fitness tracker on the market. The problem, of course, has been that if you wanted that slick app experience, you had to buy yourself some Jawbone hardware to match — a risky proposition when the device has some documented sudden-death issues. Not anymore, though. A company spokesperson confirmed that Jawbone will be opening up its API, allowing the software to work on Android Wear smartwatches and anything running Apple’s HealthKit (translation: if and when the iWatch comes, it’ll be Jawbone compatible). That means going forward, you can run Jawbone’s app on your smartwatch, and enjoy the software without having to wear an Up band if you didn’t want to. Additionally, Up is at last coming to Windows Phone, so if you own a WP8 handset and have been eyeing the Up24, you can finally take the plunge.

The Up app will roll out across these various platforms over the month of September, according to Jawbone’s spokesperson, at which point there will be two apps you can choose from: the existing Up application for Up band owners, which you can find on iOS and Android, as well as a separate open-access app for everyone else.

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Take a ride in Honda’s self-driving car (video)

One day (soon, according to GM) it won’t be weird to get in a car, go for a drive and see the driver take their hands off of the wheel while the car continues on self-guided. That day isn’t today though, so while I’ve already had demos of “autonomous driving,” hopping in this Acura TLX for a quick drive through Detroit was still special. So far I’ve only seen similar technology working in controlled environments, but this time the car was navigating its way down the same highways I drive on regularly, and dealing with real drivers just trying to go about their day. As it turns out, after three years in development Honda’s technology can handle merging into highway traffic better than some people I know.

That blurry spot on top of the Acura is part of the array of radar, sensors and cameras that tell the car where it is and what’s going on around it. Blended with GPS data (including street information and the speed limit, etc.) the car is able to manage going on and off of the freeway, driving, and even changing lanes or merging with traffic. Once we began to enter the highway (M-10, underneath the Cobo Center) Honda’s system notified the driver it was ready to take over with an audio cue and a light on the dashboard, and when he pressed the button it just kept driving on the planned route. The only truly weird thing — as anyone who has driven this route would expect — is that the car’s system kept it going at the posted speed limit, as the usual downtown traffic whizzed by going quite a bit faster.

Other than the unusually low/legal speed for the area, the only other indication inside the car that anything was different are the screens displaying the accumulated sensor data. Honda’s engineers said it can detect objects hundreds of meters directly in front of the car, and on the screens it pointed out not only any traffic nearby, but also their predicted path for the next few seconds. Merging from M-10 onto I-94 proved tricky because of heavy traffic however, and with another audio cue it prompted the driver to take over again. Once he handled the merge, it drove along in slow-moving traffic, then signaled and exited onto I-96 as planned on its way back to the ITS World Conference 2014. If this were an Uber driver (and it might be, eventually), I’d probably give it five stars.

So far Honda hasn’t have laid out a specific timeframe to launch this technology, although industry watchers expect to see various forms available by 2020. More testing is needed before this hits streets in your town, as well as answers to the legal/insurance questions about who is responsible when the car is doing the driving. It’ll need to lose the roof rack filled with equipment, but the software proved surprisingly capable dealing with normal, every day traffic, and I could see the current implementation with its notifications for the driver working in a real world environment.

Filed under: Transportation

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Source: Honda

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