The workplace of the future tracks your every move, whether you like it or not
Why it matters to you
Biometrics are quickly entering the workplace but are they collecting invasive information?
Access control is nothing new in the office world, where keys slowly migrated over to smart key cards. However, several new startups now aim to give employers a more vivid picture of their office environment by tracking everything their employees do — save for visiting the restroom — via smart sensors and new technologies.
One of the most sophisticated companies in this brave new world is Enlighted, an IoT company whose goal is no less than “redefining smart buildings.” At the heart of Enlightened’s monitoring system are its smart sensors which collect a vast amount of information about the environment and issues reports in real-time. The dime-sized sensors, which owners install via lighting, computers, or a building’s HVAC system, detect motion, daylight, and energy use.
Part of Enlightened’s software
Enlightened
Taking smart sensors to yet another level is the five-year-old startup Humanyze, an MIT spinoff that aims to overlay biometric analysis and analytics over the traditional employee badge technology.
Humanyze badges look like traditional employee identification badges but they’re much more robust. The company equipped these bad boys with not just radio frequency identification (RFID) and near field communications (NFC) sensors — of which libraries and the retail industry already widely use — but it also on-boards the badges with Bluetooth, an infrared detector capable of tracking face-to-face interactions, an accelerometer, and two microphones.
More: Biometric authentication may soon be only a heartbeat away
The badges link up with beacons placed around the office to detect where an employee is at any one time. The microphones, on the other hand, creep frighteningly close to Big Brother territory but they don’t have the ability to record conversations. Instead, the mics measure tone, volume, and speed, along with potentially monitoring stress. The data processes in real time and delivers directly to managers in the form of an aggregated, anonymized view of their teams.
Naturally, in the age of massive intelligence-gathering scandals, one might expect some worries about privacy, risk, and legality. Legally speaking, employers have the option of performing any kind of monitoring in the workplace as long as they inform employees and don’t put cameras in the bathroom. But what’s more surprising are the attitudes of the tracked employees.
Some employers now track their employees every move
kadmy/123RF
Pollfish surveyed 1,000 employees last year and found radical differences in opinion depending on whether they thought their employers tracked them or not. Of the employees untracked with GPS at work, only 16 percent had a positive opinion of this type of technology, while 38 percent held a negative opinion. Meanwhile, 54 percent of employees tracked with GPS at work held a positive opinion, while only 5 percent had a negative opinion.
Despite the concerns of employees, many human resources experts say employee monitoring offers benefits to both employers and employees, particularly at companies with mobile employees like construction companies, service providers, or health and safety professionals. These benefits range from accounting for employees in emergency situations to protecting employees and employers from unfounded complaints.
Although biometric monitoring of employees remains a growing trend, the widespread use of these new technologies remains rare due to privacy and legal concerns. Privacy issues prevent many companies from instituting biometric IDs simply because — like anything else — they pose a hacking risk, too.
The workplace of the future tracks your every move, whether you like it or not
Why it matters to you
Biometrics are quickly entering the workplace but are they collecting invasive information?
Access control is nothing new in the office world, where keys slowly migrated over to smart key cards. However, several new startups now aim to give employers a more vivid picture of their office environment by tracking everything their employees do — save for visiting the restroom — via smart sensors and new technologies.
One of the most sophisticated companies in this brave new world is Enlighted, an IoT company whose goal is no less than “redefining smart buildings.” At the heart of Enlightened’s monitoring system are its smart sensors which collect a vast amount of information about the environment and issues reports in real-time. The dime-sized sensors, which owners install via lighting, computers, or a building’s HVAC system, detect motion, daylight, and energy use.
Part of Enlightened’s software
Enlightened
Taking smart sensors to yet another level is the five-year-old startup Humanyze, an MIT spinoff that aims to overlay biometric analysis and analytics over the traditional employee badge technology.
Humanyze badges look like traditional employee identification badges but they’re much more robust. The company equipped these bad boys with not just radio frequency identification (RFID) and near field communications (NFC) sensors — of which libraries and the retail industry already widely use — but it also on-boards the badges with Bluetooth, an infrared detector capable of tracking face-to-face interactions, an accelerometer, and two microphones.
More: Biometric authentication may soon be only a heartbeat away
The badges link up with beacons placed around the office to detect where an employee is at any one time. The microphones, on the other hand, creep frighteningly close to Big Brother territory but they don’t have the ability to record conversations. Instead, the mics measure tone, volume, and speed, along with potentially monitoring stress. The data processes in real time and delivers directly to managers in the form of an aggregated, anonymized view of their teams.
Naturally, in the age of massive intelligence-gathering scandals, one might expect some worries about privacy, risk, and legality. Legally speaking, employers have the option of performing any kind of monitoring in the workplace as long as they inform employees and don’t put cameras in the bathroom. But what’s more surprising are the attitudes of the tracked employees.
Some employers now track their employees every move
kadmy/123RF
Pollfish surveyed 1,000 employees last year and found radical differences in opinion depending on whether they thought their employers tracked them or not. Of the employees untracked with GPS at work, only 16 percent had a positive opinion of this type of technology, while 38 percent held a negative opinion. Meanwhile, 54 percent of employees tracked with GPS at work held a positive opinion, while only 5 percent had a negative opinion.
Despite the concerns of employees, many human resources experts say employee monitoring offers benefits to both employers and employees, particularly at companies with mobile employees like construction companies, service providers, or health and safety professionals. These benefits range from accounting for employees in emergency situations to protecting employees and employers from unfounded complaints.
Although biometric monitoring of employees remains a growing trend, the widespread use of these new technologies remains rare due to privacy and legal concerns. Privacy issues prevent many companies from instituting biometric IDs simply because — like anything else — they pose a hacking risk, too.
Study suggests that buying a 3D printer can actually save you money in the long run
Why it matters to you
While 3D printers may be a bit pricey, they could ultimately end of paying for themselves many times over.
Whether it’s to give you an excuse to buy the latest piece of cool tech, genuine financial need, or (most likely) a combination of the two, you probably had the experience of gazing at some fancy new gadget and wondering whether the money it will save you could make it cost-neutral over time. This is frequently the claim of smart devices, which regularly advertise the cash they can save customers by cutting down on wasted resources around the house.
At Michigan Technological University, Associate Professor Joshua Pearce recently decided to explore that question using 3D printers.
“For years we’ve been using 3D printers to print high-end scientific equipment in our lab,” he told Digital Trends. “It’s very easy to show that if you use an affordable 3D printer, you can make your money back by printing thousands of dollars of scientific equipment over the course of just one weekend. But we wanted to find out was whether there would be a similar benefit for normal, everyday consumers using 3D printers.”
Even in the past few years, Pearce noted that the number of freely available 3D printable models for everyday items has exploded online. Yes, there are still plenty of replica lightsabers and other objects which aren’t going to necessarily improve your life on a day-to-day basis, but there are also shower heads, kitchen utensils, light switches, sporting equipment, and many others that can function in your daily activities.
More: New 6-axis 3D printer can print complex objects with gravity-defying overhangs
For the study, Pearce decided to give Emily Peterson, an undergrad student majoring in material science and engineering, a new LulzBot Mini 3D printer without any instructions, and information about where she could find downloadable models. She then printed out items ranging from GoPro camera mounts to Dremel tools, after which she and Pearce ran high-cost and low-cost price comparisons.
Low-cost comparisons saved users an average of 93 percent per item, while high-cost items saved an average of a massive 98.65 percent.
“If you’re not printing high-value items, if you’re just printing normal consumer goods that you might pick up at Walmart, you can make your money back in three years — even if you choose the lowest cost items available online,” Pearce said. “If you choose higher-end custom items, it’ll pay for itself within six months, provided that you print one item a week. In that case, you’d save more than $12,000 over a printer’s five-year lifecycle.”
The fact that a customer could earn close to a 1,000 percent return on their 3D printer investment over half a decade is, frankly, amazing — and proof positive that 3D printers can be much, much more than a luxury item for buyers.
We may not yet be at the tipping point at which every home has additive manufacturing facilities, but at this rate, it is not going to be long before they do. After all, it makes perfect business sense.
Apple surpasses Samsung in smartphone sales for fourth quarter of 2016
Why it matters to you
Smartphone sales increased by five percent from 2015, meaning our world is becoming even more interconnected as companies look to get more people online.
The Galaxy Note 7 is still hurting Samsung — Apple has surpassed the South Korean giant in selling more smartphones globally in the fourth quarter of 2016.
To be more precise, Apple sold 77.04 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, according to estimates from Gartner. The Cupertino, California, company has a thin lead, though, as it only sold 256,000 more than Samsung’s 76.78 million units.
More: Uber finally lets Android Wear owners hail rides with their smartwatches
It’s the second quarter in a row that Samsung has seen falling sales, all likely due to the Galaxy Note 7 recall. On the flip side, this is the first time since the fourth quarter of 2014 that Apple is in the lead — the bump at the time came from strong sales of the iPhone 6 and the introduction of the 6 Plus.
This time around, sales of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus certainly are helping, but Gartner said Apple benefited “from the weakened demand for Samsung’s smartphones in mature markets such as North America and western Europe, and in some mature markets in Asia such as Australia and South Korea.” Samsung’s smartphone sales are estimated to have dropped eight percent in the fourth quarter.
It’s not all good news for Apple, though. Google’s Android operating system captured nearly 82 percent of the total market share during the quarter — a one percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2015. Apple only saw a 0.2 percent bump to 17.9 percent year-over-year.
Windows Mobile fell 0.8 percent to 0.3 percent market share, during the quarter, making any sort of comeback for the OS incredibly challenging. BlackBerry hit a zero percent market share, though it still managed to sell a few devices — the company recently switched to the Android operating system over its own BB10 OS.
For 2016 as a whole, Android grew 3.2 percent to reach a dominating 84.8 percent market share. Smartphone sales in general saw a five percent bump from 2015, totaling nearly 1.5 billion units.
More: Everything you need to know about the Huawei Honor V9
Competition is heating up in China, but BBK Electronics — which owns smartphone brands such as Vivo, Oppo, and OnePlus — seems to have maintained its second place position in the country. The company was “marginally ahead of Huawei in the fourth quarter of 2016,” and it has seen exceptional growth in India. BBK is now the fifth on the list of top smartphone vendors.
Oppo operates independently from BBK, and the brand has held onto its top position in China during the fourth quarter. It sits ahead of BBK on the list of top smartphone vendors.
Google’s virus-scanning Verify Apps feature for Android now reveals its secrets
Why it matters to you
Android’s Verify Apps, a tool that scans new and recently installed apps against a database of viruses, is becoming a little more transparent about what its doing on your phone.
Googls’ Verify Apps feature is a valuable tool against folks who mean your phone — and the data it contains — serious harm. Since the Mountain View, California-based search giant introduced it in 2012 as a part of Android version 4.2 Jelly Bean’s new security feature, Verify Apps has played an active roll in checking Android software against a growing database of malware, exploits, and other nasty viruses. But it’s done so a little too quietly for some folks’ taste, apparently. That’s why in the interest of transparency, Verify Apps will begin reporting a list of the apps it’s most recently scanned.
It’s a change first spotted by Android Police. A new version of Verify Apps shows the four applications that have been most recently scanned in a carousel menu, accessible by launching the Android Settings menu, tapping the Google option, and selecting the Security tab. Other newly exposed details include the time when the scan was completed, along with a toggle that “improves detection” by permitting Google to copy unknown apps and an option to disable Verify Apps altogether.
More: Top 5 Android security apps: Do they protect you?
According to Android Police, the update is being delivered as part of a new Google Play Services, a core Android component that synchronizes contacts, provides access to privacy settings, powers location-based services, and updates Google apps. Devices with version 10.0.x of the service lack the new carousel and settings menu, but those running 10.2.x do have it. Updates to Google Play Services are distributed via the Google Play Store, Android’s app marketplace.
At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Google announced that Verify Apps scans more than 750 million Android devices each day, checking as many as 6 billion apps for malware.
But that’s not all Google’s been doing to ensure Android devices remain safe and secure. The search giant has worked with 351 wireless carriers to improve the time it takes to test security patches before deploying them to users, an effort that’s resulted in a reduction of the software approval process from six to nine weeks to just a week. It’s doled out $1 million to independent security researchers, an amount that’s on track to reach $2 million next year. And it’s pursued an aggressive strategy of encryption — as of December 2016, 80 percent of Android 7.x (Nougat) users use encryption.
More: Security experts find 43 Android phone brands affected by Chinese spyware
Adrian Ludwig, director of Android security at Google, said social engineering — attacks that fool a user into installing an app that compromises his or her device’s security — as one of the biggest challenges facing app developers today.
“People don’t want to think about security,” he told members of the press at Wednesday’s RSA conference. “They just want it to be that way.”
EVGA offers 10 GTX 10-series graphics cards with its new iCX cooling tech
Why it matters to you
The technology offered on these new cards aims to provide more insight about temperature levels and better control over overclocking.
Graphics card manufacturer EVGA recently introduced a new cooling technology called iCX. The company created the system to provide customers with more insight about the temperatures of a graphics card’s key components, not just the graphics chip itself. The company also wanted a solution with asynchronous fan control so that customers have better control over GPU overclocking.
The new iCX system consists of nine thermal sensors embedded across the graphics card’s printed circuit board: one dedicated to the graphics chip, five dedicated to power-related components, and three dedicated to the onboard memory. The system also adds multiple memory controller units to display the load the onboard memory is handling.
More: EVGA will fix GTX 1080, GTX 1070 heating issue with an upcoming VRAM update
As for the asynchronous fan control aspect, customers will have the ability to control the card’s two fans separately. The left fan cools the graphics chip, and its speed and use are determined by the GPU’s temperature. The right fan cools the power-related components and memory, and its speed and use are determined by their temperatures. All of this information is displayed in diagrams through the company’s Precision XOC software.
However, users who purchase graphics cards with the iCX system installed can quickly determine the cooling levels without having to load up the software. On the side of the card are three LEDs representing the temperature levels of the graphics chip, the power components, and the memory components. Blue stands for cool, green for warm, and red for hot. Of course, this LED system isn’t useful if there is no clear siding on the desktop PC.
The new iCX cooling system also includes fin holes that direct airflow through the cooling fins. These fins are half-open and L-shaped to maximize the airflow and increase the surface contact, promising better cooling that the standard graphics card cooling solution. Other iCX ingredients include a die cast form-fitted baseplate and backplate, an interlaced pin fin on the backplate, double ball bearing fans, and an added fuse provided by EVGA.
“With PC gaming growing, it is important to provide ‘Peace of Mind Gaming’ to the user. With EVGA’s new iCX technology, users can have a better understanding of their cards operation,” the company said. “EVGA’s iCX is the very definition of Interactive Cooling.”
Eventually EVGA’s iCX cooling system will interact with the company’s other cooling solutions. For now, customers can purchase 10 graphics cards based on the new iCX cooling system:
# of
Cores
Base
Speed
Boost
Speed
TextureFill
Rate
Price
GTX 1060 3GB
SSC2 Gaming iCX
1,152
1,607MHz
1,835MHz
115.7GT/s
TBD
GTX 1060 3GB
FTW2+ Gaming iCX
1,152
1,632MHz
1,860MHz
117.5GT/s
TBD
GTX 1060 6GB
SSC2 Gaming iCX
1,280
1,607MHz
1,835MHz
128.5GT/s
TBD
GTX 1060 6GB
FTW2+ Gaming iCX
1,280
1,632MHz
1,860MHz
130.6GT/s
TBD
GTX 1070 Gaming iCX
1,920
1,506MHz
1,683MHz
180.7GT/s
$440
GTX 1070 SC2 Gaming iCX
1,920
1,594MHz
1,784MHz
191.2GT/s
$450
GTX 1070 FTW2 Gaming iCX
1,920
1,607MHz
1,797MHz
192.8GT/s
$470
GTX 1080 Gaming iCX
2,560
1,607MHz
1,733MHz
257.1GT/s
$640
GTX 1080 SC2 Gaming iCX
2,560
1,708MHz
1,847MHz
273.2GT/s
$650
GTX 1080 FTW2 Gaming iCX
2,560
1,721MHz
1,860MHz
275.3GT/s
$680
‘Rasputin’ responsible for hacking into university, government database servers
Why it matters to you
Your data is vulnerable to relatively easy cyberattacks, and incentives are needed to compel organizations to secure their database servers.
Studies have shown that millions of internet-connected machines are vulnerable to cyberattack based on a variety of configuration and other issues. One vulnerability that cybercriminals can use to relatively easily attack systems is called “SQL injection,” meaning that a database server that doesn’t carefully check the data submitted on web forms, for example, can be compromised.
One SQL injection, or SQLi, threat is known as “Rasputin,” referring to a Russian-speaking cybercriminal who has been linked to a number of attacks against various government and private agencies. A recent attack by Rasputin targeted over 60 government and educational institutions, and the solution to such attacks is to change the penalties and incentives related to resolving SQLi issues, according to a recent Recorded Future analysis.
Recorded Future
Recorded Future is a threat intelligence company that uses machine learning to reduce online security risks. The company worked with law enforcement in December 2016 to assess the database attack on the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the eventual sale of information. It’s Recorded Future who gave the actor the name Rasputin, and according to its analysis, Rasputin used SQLi technology to hack into the EAC’s database.
More: Misconfigured Pentagon servers could have been exploited for cyberattack
SQLi attacks nothing new, having been around for more than 15 years. Malicious agents don’t need special skills or knowledge to conduct SQLi attacks, given that a number of tools are freely available that automate finding and attacking vulnerable database servers. The tools literally make conducting SQLi attacks a “point and click” affair.
Recorded Future
Rasputin is a bit more sophisticated, as Recorded Future reports, having created his own proprietary SQLi tool. The reason for investing the time in creating such a tool and carrying out such attacks is purely financial — there’s a significant market for information that can generate real money for cybercriminals.
Recorded Future concludes that a number of steps need to be taking to respond to SQLi attacks and reduce their prevalence and impact. First is to raise awareness among developers, but that’s not enough. Rather, penalties and incentives need to be created to make it worthwhile to maintain database and web form security. Until the issues are addressed, however, agents like Rasputin will have their own incentives to hack into our data, often with serious repercussions.
Apple may oppose law that would grant third parties access to repair tools
Why it matters to you
Apple may prevent you from your own iPhone repair if it proceeds to block legislation.
Legislation that would give phone buyers and third-party repairers the legal right to purchase spare parts is under fire from iPhone maker Apple, which claims the so-called “right to repair” would put consumers at risk. The company’s lawyers will formally oppose a Nebraska bill under consideration that would allow consumers to repair their own phones.
That is according to a Motherboard report claiming that an Apple “representative, staffer, or lobbyist” will testify against the bill. One of the arguments it is considering deals with the danger of lithium batteries, according to the publication’s sources.
More: How to pick the best case to protect your device from Life’s daily hazards
Nebraska is one of eight states — the others include Minnesota, Massachusetts, Kansas, and Wyoming, Illinois, and Tennessee — considering the passage of “right to repair” bills, thanks in large part to aggressive lobbying. Repair.org, a trade organization of independent shops which argue they’ve been harmed by monopolizing manufacturers, hopes that by getting a single state to pass a right-to-repair bill will pressure manufacturers to cede the legal point.
It cites the car industry as precedent: “In 2012, a Massachusetts law guaranteeing the right to repair automobiles became de-facto national legislation after car manufacturers decided to comply with the law nationwide rather than continue to fight burgeoning legislation in other states.”
But Repair.org’s efforts have so far proven unsuccessful. Apple and computing behemoth IBM played a role in shutting down a similar bill in New York. Last year, industry lobbyists told lawmakers in Minnesota that broken glass could cut the fingers of consumers who try to repair their screens. Tractor manufacturer John Deere opposed the Kansas effort in a vehement letter to legislators, arguing that such bills could result in “unintended alterations” and damage “consumers’ significant investment in equipment.”
More: Your phone is busted, now what? How to get it fixed on a budget
That said, there appears to be a growing appetite for right-to-repair legislation nationwide. In January, the American Farm Bureau Federation, an influential political organization representing farmers, officially endorsed the legislation.
Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, dismissed manufacturers’ criticism of the proposed bills. “They should want to give people as much information about how to deal with a hazardous thing as they can,” Gordon-Byrne said. “If they’re concerned about exploding batteries, put warning labels on them and tell consumers how to replace them safely.”
Google’s ‘Andromeda’ looks to be hiding in plain sight
Fuchsia and Andromeda are certainly a thing, but it’s still not clear exactly where they will fit into Google’s plans.
Set your way back machines to August 2016, and one of the things you might see is talking about a mystery operating system from Google named Fuchsia. We took a look at it when people started noticing it was being worked on, and got some really cool clues about what might be going on.
More: ‘Fuchsia’ operating system project is interesting, lacking details that make it matter
Work on the project hasn’t slowed and now semiconductor analyst Daniel Matte’s blog Tech Specs has a new take on a more mature Fuchsia, and why it’s where Andromeda is going to start.
Matte has taken a second deep look into how Fuchsia is going to be built and what it might be able to do. The very basics are in place — a new LK-based microkernel dubbed Magenta will power an operating system designed from the ground up to be modular and adaptable to most any modern hardware. Combine Magenta with a new rendering engine (escher) and a user interface layer based on the Dart programming language with an all-new widget and application framework named Flutter to bring it all front and center and you have what Fuchsia needs to become an actual living piece of software.
To my naive eyes, rather than saying Chrome OS is being merged into Android, it looks more like Android and Chrome OS are both being merged into Fuchsia.
Matte says this is going to be Andromeda. And he has plenty of evidence to support his idea. Fuchsia isn’t hidden. All the work on the kernel, the framework, and associated bits and pieces is being done in the open where anyone with an interest can have a look. It’s been this way from the beginning, and as it evolves it becomes a bit easier to guess what Google is trying to do here.
More: How Google can use Andromeda to conquer everything
Based on the code that’s been checked into the project so far, Matte suggests we’re seeing a ground-up operating system designed to run on ARM, MIPS, and Intel x86 processors. It’s not a merging of Chrome and Android, but a new system that takes the best parts of both into itself and can support much of Google’s existing products — Chrome and Android — while furthering a new application platform.
I agree with his assessment. What I see tells me that this all-in-one OS will attempt to fix the pitfalls of shoehorning a PC system onto smartphone hardware or doing the opposite and using an Android style platform with more capable PC hardware. All-in-one systems will happen and are going to be the future, and Google is trying to find ways their existing products can fit into it.
Maybe everyone looking at Fuchsia and Andromeda is wrong. That’s certainly a possibility. But Google is working on something that’s going to be big. Whether or not it will also be successful is the question. We can’t wait to find out.
Android Nougat
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How Phil lost weight and got less fat with the Withings Body smart scale
A smart scale won’t do the work for you, but it makes keeping track of your daily weigh-ins so much easier.
OK, let’s get one thing straight. Knowing how much you weigh won’t actually cause you to lose weight. The scale is just the messenger, right? But I’ve been a HUGE fan of the Withings Body scale (it’s actually my second one, having upgraded from the older model) for a couple years now.
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The gist: You stand on it. It weighs you and uploads the data to The Cloud™. Weight, BMI, even things like air quality and how much of your body is made up of water. And it’s smart enough to handle multiple family members. (My wife and kids all weigh different enough so that we’re easily discerned, anyway.)
And then? You follow the trend line. Don’t worry so much about the daily numbers. Look at it weekly. If you’re losing weight, you’ll know it. Same if you’re gaining. It’s super smart, and super easy. An app for Android. And one for iOS. A web-based dashboard. HealthKit. Google Fit. Withings ties into it all, and made all of this super-easy for me.
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