This is what Google’s new self-driving Chrysler minivans look like
Google’s self-driving cars have come a long way since those golf cart-looking prototypes we’ve all seen.
Earlier this month, Google revealed it was shaking up its autonomous car efforts by spinning its self-driving project into an all-new company, Waymo, and it appointed the project’s division head, John Krafcik, as CEO. While under Google’s parent company, Alphabet, it’ll act more like a “venture backed startup”, which means the autonomous vehicle technology should become a more realistic business that could even turn a profit.
Waymo might get into ride-sharing, trucking, and personally-owned cars. It could even license its technology out to car manufacturers. There’s all sorts of talk floating around about what’s happening, but in the meantime, Google’s autonomous vehicle division is unveiling its latest self-driving model: a souped-up Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan that can travel 30 miles in electric mode.
The car features a custom computer, sensors, and telematics previously tested in Google’s Lexus SUV and other cars. Waymo’s engineering team worked with Fiat Chrysler at a facility in southeastern Michigan on the vehicle’s assembly. Waymo has already completed “over 200 hours of extreme-weather testing” in California and at FCA’s “proving grounds” in Arizona and Michigan.
Google/Waymo
“Engineering modifications to the minivan’s electrical, powertrain, chassis and structural systems were implemented to optimize the Pacifica Hybrid for Waymo’s fully self-driving technology,” both companies announced in a press release, while claiming FCA’s product development and manufacturing teams enabled Waymo to go from program kickoff to full assembly in six months.
Krafcik wrote on Medium that on-the-road tests will help Waymo to learn how “people of all ages, shapes, and group sizes” experience fully self-driving tech.
What is Google Waymo and when can you expect the first cars?
After many years and millions of miles of testing, Google has launched a dedicated company for its self-driving car efforts.
The company, called Waymo, will act like a venture-backed startup, but it’s actually a standalone organisation within Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Headed by long-time automotive executive John Krafcik, it has the goal of making self-driving cars available for all, among other things.
Here’s everything you need to know about Waymo, including when you can expect the first cars to go on sale.
What is Waymo?
According to Alphabet, Waymo stands for a “new way forward in mobility”.
It is a new self-driving technology company building on software and sensor technology originally developed in Google’s secret labs since 2009. Waymo is currently refining that technology through billion of miles of simulated tests each year, as well as millions of million miles of self-driving tests on public roads across four US cities.
What is Waymo developing?
Google/Waymo
Waymo is developing fully self-driving technology.
With this type of technology, a car will do all the work for the driver, so that he or she is never expected to take control of the vehicle at any time. Waymo will presumably turn it Google’s existing self-driving technology into a more realistic business that could even turn a profit. It might get into ride-sharing, trucking, and personally-owned cars. Waymo could even license its technology out to car manufacturers, but that’s just speculation.
Google has long said that is it interested in tackling self-driving technology in an effort to stem the loss of lives attributed to car accidents. Over 1.2 million people die on roadways, and in the US alone, traffic collisions kill over 35,000 people a year. Ninety-four percent of those crashes involve human error or choice, but self-driving tech could make transportation easy and safe for all.
Does Waymo have any self-driving cars?
Google/Waymo
Remember, Waymo is building on top of what Google has already done, so its testing fleet includes modified Lexus SUVs and custom-built prototypes. On 19 December, it added modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans to its fleet. The car features a custom computer, sensors, and telematics previously tested in Google’s Lexus SUV and other cars. Waymo’s engineering team worked with Fiat Chrysler at a facility in Michigan.
You can learn more about Google’s past cars from here.
Is Waymo testing self-driving cars?
With the Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Waymo has has already completed “over 200 hours of extreme-weather testing” in California and at FCA’s “proving grounds” in Arizona and Michigan. But the company’s cars are currently out on the streets in California, Texas, Washington, and Arizona with test drivers on board. If you consider all those test hours, Waymo’s cars have the equivalent of over 300 years of human driving experience.
In October 2015, Waymo completed the world’s first fully self-driving ride on public roads. You can watch a video of that test above.
How does Waymo’s self-driving tech work?
Google/Waymo
Waymo’s self-driving technology uses a combination of sensors and software.
A self-driving car’s sensors can detect and observe if a cyclist has extended their arm and signaled, for instance, while its software predicts that the cyclist will move to the side of the lane and plans for the vehicle to slow down and make room for the cyclist to pass comfortably ahead. Waymo’s cars relies on million miles of real-world testing in order to know how to navigate safely and comfortably through everyday traffic.
You can learn more about the technology from here.
What’s next for Waymo?
Waymo’s next step will be to let people trial fully self-driving cars. It’s looking forward to having new vehicles on public roads in 2017. Krafcik wrote on Medium that road tests will help Waymo to learn how “people of all ages, shapes, and group sizes” experience self-driving technology.
Fake news could cost Facebook dearly in Germany
Fake news and hate speech are sadly unavoidable on social media, but that might change soon… in Germany, anyway. Late last week, Thomas Oppermann — chairman of the German Social Democratic Party — proposed a stringent law meant to hold companies like Facebook responsible when fake news makes the rounds. As reported by Der Spiegel (and translated by Deusche Well), Oppermann’s plan would require Facebook to actively combat fake news all day, everyday. Here’s the fascinating bit: if a fake news item pops up and Facebook can’t address it within 24 hours, it would be subject to a €500,000 (or $522,575) for each post left untouched.
Oh, it gets better. Facebook and other “market-dominating platforms” would be required to to have teams in Germany dedicated to fielding reports of fake news and hate-filled posts. Fortunately for Oppermann — and German web users, most likely — the push to penalize companies for letting false, misleading or malicious content run wild has received plenty of support from the other major party in German politics, too. The country’s Christian Democratic Union hates all of that stuff just as much, prompting one senior party member to promise definitive action “at the beginning of next year.” The CDU has also proposed legislation (with backing from Chancellor Angela Merkel, no less) that would make it illegal to post fake news entirely.
For what it’s worth, Facebook has already announced plans to address the rise of fake news in the US. Here, it’s all about self-policing with the help of a handful of media organizations: users will be able to report fake news posts when they pop up in their news feeds, while algorithms work in the background to flag fake stories that could go viral. Then, if third-party (i.e. human) fact-checkers confirm a post is fake, it gets labeled spiked from the flow of news. Is that enough? Is it inherently biased? We’ll have to see.
Anyway, it’s no surprise the German government is considering such decisive moves. The country is set to hold its federal elections next year, where 598 people will assume seats in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament. What’s more, Angela Merkel will be running what will probably be her toughest campaign yet for a fourth term as Germany’s chancellor. With the jury’s still out on whether fake news did or didn’t play a role in outcome of the 2016 US presidential election, Germany’s ruling parties are understandably concerned with keeping the electorate well-informed. That said, there is concern (which TechDirt’s Mike Masnick sums up nicely) that giving a company or government power over what people can and can’t say is basically begging for eventual censorship.
One thing seems clear, though. The controversy is too young, and the line between proper oversight and censorship is too blurry for any definitively brilliant answers to have emerged yet.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: Deusche Welle
New York City now lets you pay for parking with your phone
New York City is making good on its promise to have smarter parking meters before 2016 is over. As of December 19th, the first ParkNYC-capable Muni-Meters are live in midtown Manhattan — you can now pay for parking through a smartphone app (or the web, or a call) instead of fishing for cards and coins. While you’ll need to load a virtual wallet, you can extend your parking if you’re in danger of running out. The days of racing to the meter to top it up will soon be over, then, but so are the days of pleading with traffic officers when you’re a little too late.
NYPD officers will check the status of your parking by using handheld devices that check license plates.
The meters will still take conventional payments, and the eventual goal is to upgrade all 85,000 Muni-Meter spots by the end of summer 2017. It’s too soon to say how well ParkNYC will work in practice, as urban tech can occasionally go wrong (just ask NYC about the changes it made to its gigabit internet kiosks). If it does work as promised, though, it should make driving the city’s chaotic streets a little less stressful.
Via: PIX11
Source: NYC.gov
The Nintendo Switch could be twice as powerful while docked
Just how powerful is Nintendo’s next game console? We won’t know for sure until January, but if the latest report from Eurogamer pans out, the answer could be kind of complicated. According to specifications provided to developers, the Nintendo Switch performance changes depending on how you use it: in its docked, TV-mode or as a gaming portable.
Specifically, sources familiar with the system have revealed two different graphic processor specifications for the final Nintendo Switch hardware — an undocked portable profile that clocks the NVIDIA Tegra GPU at 307.2MHz and a docked, TV-based profile that more than doubles it to 768MHz. Doing some rough calculations using the Tegra X1 chip the Switch’s silicon is said to be based off of, we can guess the console can push around 400 gigaflops on FP32 while docked. Yes, that’s a lot of numbers, but don’t worry about the math too much. The long and short of it is that the latest numbers show that the Nintendo Switch will definitely outpace the Wii U — but it’s still a few hundred (or thousand) gigaflops shy of its competitors.
That said, nobody really expected the next Nintendo to keep place with the Xbox One or PlayStation 4. Nintendo dropped out of the race to the top years ago, and hasn’t made a move to be the ‘most powerful’ game console in over a decade. That doesn’t seem to be changing with the Nintendo Switch.
Source: Eurogamer
Nigerian man charged in hacking of 108 LA county employee emails
It might not quite rival last week’s revelation that up to one billion Yahoo accounts had been hacked in 2013, but it’ll be news to anybody who contacted local government officials in Los Angeles. A Nigerian national has been charged with hacking LA county employee accounts that might have exposed personal data of up to 756,000 people. 37-year-old Kelvin Onaghinor has not been arrested and authorities are unsure whether he’s still in the US. They’re also searching for possible accomplices.
The hack resulted from the successful phishing of 108 county employees back in May, who provided names and passwords to their email accounts. The potential victims’ data was contained in messages sent to those workers. Due to their occupational responsibilities, those communications may have included personally-identifiable information from names and dates of birth to Social Security numbers and medical records.
As of last Friday when news broke, there was no evidence that confidential information had been released from the breach. Onaghinor still faces nine charges, including unauthorized computer access and identity theft. If convicted, he could serve 13 years in federal prison.
Source: The Guardian
Tim Cook Says He Met Donald Trump Because ‘You Don’t Change Things by Just Yelling’
Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook attended President-elect Donald Trump’s tech summit at Trump Tower in Manhattan alongside other tech leaders, including Alphabet CEO Larry Page, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Oracle CEO Safra Catz, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Since the roundtable meeting, which reportedly focused on topics such as job creation and economic growth, Apple employees have wondered if it was important for Cook to meet with Trump, whose stances on issues such as encryption and immigration reform have been viewed controversially among the tech industry.
To address those questions, Cook issued an internal comment to employees, in which he said he has “never found being on the sideline a successful place to be.” He said “governments can affect our ability to do what we do,” and noted the way to make progress on key issues is to “engage.”
A copy of the question and answer, posted internally, was shared by TechCrunch:
Last week you joined other tech leaders to meet President-elect Donald Trump. How important is it for Apple to engage with governments?
It’s very important. Governments can affect our ability to do what we do. They can affect it in positive ways and they can affect in not so positive ways. What we do is focus on the policies. Some of our key areas of focus are on privacy and security, education. They’re on advocating for human rights for everyone, and expanding the definition of human rights. They’re on the environment and really combating climate change, something we do by running our business on 100 percent renewable energy.
And of course, creating jobs is a key part of what we do by giving people opportunity not only with people that work directly for Apple, but the large number of people that are in our ecosystem. We’re really proud that we’ve created 2 million jobs, just in this country. A great percentage of those are app developers. This gives everyone the power to sell their work to the world, which is an unbelievable invention in and of itself.
We have other things that are more business-centric — like tax reform — and something we’ve long advocated for: a simple system. And we’d like intellectual property reform to try to stop the people suing when they don’t do anything as a company.
There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be. The way that you influence these issues is to be in the arena. So whether it’s in this country, or the European Union, or in China or South America, we engage. And we engage when we agree and we engage when we disagree. I think it’s very important to do that because you don’t change things by just yelling. You change things by showing everyone why your way is the best. In many ways, it’s a debate of ideas.
We very much stand up for what we believe in. We think that’s a key part of what Apple is about. And we’ll continue to do so.
Despite any personal misgivings he may have had in the past, Cook reportedly stayed at Trump Tower after the summit was over to meet privately with the President-elect for further discussions.
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Tags: Tim Cook, Donald Trump
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Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘We Have Great Desktops in Our Roadmap’
In a post to an employee message board obtained by TechCrunch, Apple CEO Tim Cook assured employees that the company is still committed to the Mac and that “great desktops” are coming. Apple’s desktop computers haven’t seen an upgrade in at least 433 days.
Some folks in the media have raised the question about whether we’re committed to desktops,” Cook wrote. “If there’s any doubt about that with our teams, let me be very clear: we have great desktops in our roadmap. Nobody should worry about that.”
Cook says that the desktop is “very strategic” to Apple because the performance desktops can provide is “really important” to a lot of people and “critical” for some people. He says the current iMac is the best desktop Apple’s ever made and its 5K display is the best desktop display in the world.
In regards to its future roadmap and how Apple employees can help push the company forward, Cook says that “you can rarely see precisely where you want to go from the beginning.” Instead, Cook argues that “pulling strings” to see what’s coming next is one of Apple’s strengths, noting that the creation of Apple Watch led to the creation of ResearchKit, which lead to the creation of CareKit. Cook concludes the post by saying the company doesn’t do things for a return on investment, it explores new things because it’s exciting and might lead somewhere.
The lack of refreshed Mac hardware can be attributed to a combination of Apple waiting on chipmakers and suppliers to ship their new products and the Cupertino Company’s renewed focus on iPad.
Apple’s desktop Macs haven’t seen upgrades in over a year. The iMac’s last update was 433 days ago, the Mac Mini’s last update was 795 days ago and the Mac Pro’s last update was 1,097 days ago.
Related Roundups: iMac, Mac Pro, Mac mini
Tag: Tim Cook
Buyer’s Guide: iMac (Don’t Buy), Mac Pro (Don’t Buy), Mac Mini (Don’t Buy)
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Physicists learn how to measure antimatter
As you might guess, measuring antimatter is rather tricky: it’s destroyed the moment it comes into contact with regular matter, so conventional approaches just aren’t going to cut it. Give credit to CERN, then, as its Alpha group just measured antimatter for the first time. The team stuffed positrons (positively charged electrons) and antiprotons (protons with a negative charge) into a vacuum tube to create antihydrogen, with a “magnetic trap” keeping a small number of the anti-atoms in existence for long enough to measure them. The team then blasted the antimatter with a laser to study its positrons as they shifted energy levels, producing a spectral line.
The results aren’t shocking — surprise, antihydrogen behaves much like regular hydrogen (just with reversed charges). If it didn’t, scientists would have to rethink their understanding of physics. The very act of measuring is important, though. In addition to shedding light on the nature of antimatter, it also tells scientists something about the nature of the universe. In theory, matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other almost immediately. The new findings don’t explain why that didn’t happen, but they suggest that it isn’t due to the inherent nature of those substances.
Via: NPR, Popular Mechanics
Source: CERN, Nature
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