Amazon reportedly wants one-time access to your home for deliveries

The extensive lengths Amazon goes to deliver packages can be stymied by a different kind of last-mile problem: Thieves nabbing stuff left on the doorstep. To combat these so-called ‘porch pirates,’ Amazon is considering a new program that would give its delivery employees one-time access to your car trunk or even inside your home, sources told CNBC. But Amazon has been toying with these ideas for years, making it uncertain whether either idea will make it to consumer deliveries soon.

For car deliveries, Amazon is in talks with Phrame, which makes smart license plates with a key-storing compartment unlocks via smartphone. Then users can remotely grant a delivery person access for them to pop open the trunk. Amazon is also toying with a smart doorbell that would recognize and allow delivery persons to enter on a one-time basis.

Amazon started trying out trunk deliveries in a pilot program back in 2015, following up on Volvo’s trial the year before. Reports surfaced a year later in September 2016 that two companies connected to the shipping giant, smart lock maker August and garage door firm Garageio, were both exploring allowing delivery persons temporary entry into homes to drop off packages. Like those earlier news points, Amazon’s latest forays into house or trunk delivery were only reported via unnamed sources, so it’s unclear how seriously the company is considering these alternative methods.

Source: CNBC

Google can add new features to Android Wear through its app store

One of Google’s most important decisions for Android was to separate key feature updates from new firmware — you don’t have to suffer through months of delays from your manufacturer and carrier just to get a new messaging app or a vital behind-the-scenes service. And now, that’s true for Android Wear as well. Google’s Hoi Lam has confirmed that Android Wear 2.0 can receive some updates through the Play Store, rather than waiting for monolithic firmware upgrades. An update this past week is proof positive: 2.0-equipped watches got support for third-party chat apps in contacts and fewer accidental launches for the watch face picker.

It’s good news if you’ve had a rough experience with Android Wear updates in the past and would rather not wonder if you’ll get features in a reasonable timeframe. It might also ease your mind if you were worried that Google’s decision to pull Android Wear devices from its store might be representative of a retreat from Android Wear as a whole. It’s not clear how often Google expects to patch its wearable platform, but it’s safe to say that improvements will arrive at a faster pace than they have in the past.

Via: Android Police

Source: Hoi Lam (Google+)

Apple reportedly taps Spielberg for new ‘Amazing Stories’

Looks like Apple found someone to spend some of that billion dollars it earmarked for original TV and movies on: Steven Spielberg. Each episode of the revived Amazing Stories anthology series will cost about $5 million, according to Wall Street Journal’s sources, and Spielberg will serve as executive producer for the show. Bryan Fuller (American Gods, Hannibal) is set to write according to Deadline, and the show has apparently been on ice for a few years. It’s a partnership between the filmmaker’s Amblin Television company, NBCUniversal and the iPhone maker.

Amazing Stories isn’t new. It ran on NBC during the ’80s, but given how popular anthology series are now, the Black Mirror effect, if you will, everyone seems to be getting in on the action. HBO has the excellent Room 104, Amazon Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams — it makes sense that Apple would want one to call its own as well. Cupertino’s just so happens to have one of the most revered filmmakers on the planet involved.

If you need more Spielberg in your life, HBO just debuted its documentary on the director and it’s streaming on HBO Go and Now.

Source: Wall Street Journal, Deadline

Cadillac’s Super Cruise maps are key to our robotaxi future

Cadillac is doing something new with LiDAR. Instead of sticking a puck on its cars, it’s using the sensors to map the highways of the United States and Canada and geofence its semi-autonomous Super Cruise feature, instead of letting drivers use it anywhere they want. It seems like a bold move, but in reality, it’s how self-driving cars will initially enter the market.

The realization of a fully autonomous-car future rests on regulations, sensors, high-powered computers and maps. While safety is the basis for most vehicle laws, it’s becoming increasingly important for there to be blanket federal regulations concerning these vehicles (instead of the current patchwork of laws that vary from state to state).

Sensors are increasing in accuracy while dropping in price and the silicon that crunches all that data is getting smaller and more powerful. In the middle of all that are the maps that are essential for actual navigation, both around town and within lanes. So while Cadillac is the first automaker to use high definition LiDAR maps, it certainly won’t be the last.

Nearly every car with some sort of semi-autonomous feature is using a map to help keep it on the road. Tesla has its community sourced information while Mercedes-Benz is using Here maps to help determine the appropriate speed to take an upcoming corner.

Yet, it’ll be highly detailed maps like the one used by Cadillac that’ll make robotaxis a reality. The LiDAR map used by Super Cruise and stored in the trunk of the CT6 is accurate within 10 centimeters. It sees 2,500 meters ahead of the car based on its trajectory and shares information with the computer that determines if the semi-autonomous feature should continue or if the driver should take over.

When Uber and Lyft finally drop their truly self-driving taxis onto the streets or cities, or unveil their fleets of autonomous buses they’ll need to be able to access a locally stored map like the CT6 does to navigate the complex roads of a metropolitan area.

The vehicles will need that data to be stored on the vehicle even if it is updated daily, hourly or even every few seconds. That’s because passengers won’t be happy if their ride to work suddenly stops working because it lost its network connection.

Even with all the data and sensors that’ll be available on the first autonomous vehicles, they’ll most certainly be geofenced. The cars travel along predetermined “routes” to reduce the chance of an incident. Maybe they’ll deviate slightly to pick up passengers, but if you’re way off the “grid” there’s a chance you’re going to need to walk to grab your first generation robotaxi. The technology for self-driving ride hailing services is something that’s already being developed at least at the chip level.

During the announcement of the new NVIDIA Drive Pegasus AI computer for level 5 vehicles the company’s senior director of automotive Danny Shapiro said that initially the cars will be geofenced. “That’s part of the evolution of these taxis.” But it won’t be that way for long.

In the future, thanks to techniques like Cadillac’s, cars will learn as they travel along their routes. The sensors will take in more data, feed it through even more powerful computers and the level of detail added to the maps will grow exponentially. Plus if more manufacturers adopt this technology, all our cars will start to figure out how to make smarter decisions based on the situations they’ve encountered on the road and during simulations.

But for now we have the Cadillac CT6, a luxury sedan that’s using LiDAR in a new that’ll help bring autonomous cars to all the roads, not just highways. Even if the first few years require you walk a few blocks to grab a robotaxi.

Dow Jones reported a fake story about Google buying Apple

As 9to5Mac reports, the Dow Jones newswires had a bit of a shakeup this morning after a “technical error” led to the announcement of some rather ridiculous fake news. Dow Jones reported that Google would be buying Apple for a mere $9 billion — which would be quite a steal if true — and that the deal was struck between Alphabet CEO Larry Page and the late Steve Jobs. The report when on to say that Google employees would be moving into Apple’s “fancy headquarters” and that Google employees said, “Yay.”

$AAPL $GOOG The algos will be puzzled pic.twitter.com/ReYWZorkZc

— Trader 53 (@trader_53) October 10, 2017

The story and accompanying headlines have all been taken down and Dow Jones told 9to5Mac, “Please disregard the headlines that ran on Dow Jones Newswires between 9:34 a.m. ET and 9:36 a.m. ET. Due to a technical error, the headlines were published. All of those headlines are being removed from the wires. We apologize for the error.” And in response to assumptions that it had been hacked, Dow Jones’ director of communications, Steve Severinghauss, told Gizmodo, “We absolutely were not hacked.” The company is reportedly conducting an internal review of the incident.

Update: Dow Jones just sent us the following statement:

“Dow Jones regrets the erroneous headlines published on its Dow Jones Newswires this morning between 9:34 and 9:36 A.M. ET. The items, which were never intended for publication, were accidentally published as part of a technology test. ‘I take today’s inadvertent and erroneous publication of testing materials extremely seriously. While immediate corrective action has been taken, I have also ordered a review of news and technology processes in this area,’ said William Lewis, CEO of Dow Jones and Publisher of The Wall Street Journal.”

Via: Gizmodo

Source: 9to5Mac

DefCon event shows how easy it is to hack voting systems

It’s no secret that it’s possible to hack voting systems. But how easy is it, really? Entirely too easy, if you ask researchers at this year’s DefCon. They’ve posted a report detailing how voting machines from numerous vendors held up at the security conference, and… it’s not good. Every device in DefCon’s “Voting Machine Hacking Village” was compromised in some way, whether it was by exploiting network vulnerabilities or simple physical access.

Multiple systems ran on ancient software (the Sequoia AVC Edge uses an operating system from 1989) with few if any checks to make sure they were running legitimate code. Meanwhile, unprotected USB ports and other physical vulnerabilities were a common sight — a conference hacker reckoned that it would take just 15 seconds of hands-on time to wreak havoc with a keyboard and a USB stick. And whether or not researchers had direct access, they didn’t need any familiarity with the voting systems to discover hacks within hours, if not “tens of minutes.”

The report writers reach a few conclusions. To begin with, it’s clear that dedicated hackers would have no trouble getting in — if neophytes can hack a system after a brief learning curve, it’d be a walk in the park for state-sponsored hackers. They also warn that foreign components or software could add to the risk by giving ne’er-do-wells a chance to slip in malware that compromises an entire platform. And crucially, politicians, non-government groups and other experts should be involved to make sure that voting system security is treated seriously.

The question is, will the right people listen? It’s hard to say. Key US officials did visit the voting machine village, including Homeland Security officials and Congress members like Rep. Jim Langevin and Rep. Will Hurd. And some states are already aware of security risks: Virginia is replacing one of the machines hacked at DefCon. The problem is that many politicians not only didn’t attend, but are sometimes clueless about security. A truly comprehensive fix would involve a major, nationwide rethink of election security practices, and that may not happen so long as many of those in power don’t take the problem seriously.

Source: DefCon (PDF), C-SPAN

Twitter’s ‘Happening Now’ feature groups tweets about ongoing events

Twitter is introducing a new feature to timelines that will keep you up to date on particular ongoing events. At the top of your timeline, you’ll start to see a Happening Now label that will show you all of the events and current topics Twitter thinks you’re interested in, which when clicked, will take you to tweets people have posted about them.

Feel the roar of the crowd, no matter where you are.

We’re rolling out a new way to see what’s happening now, starting with sports in 🇺🇸! Available on Android and iOS starting today. https://t.co/lmBFCK4DG0 pic.twitter.com/cv4wL8hCxA

— Twitter (@Twitter) October 10, 2017

Each event will have a little downward facing arrow in the top right corner. Tap that if you want to see why Twitter thinks you’re interested in it or to hide it from your timeline. This new feature joins other recent Twitter additions including expanded tweet limits and an upcoming bookmarking function. As of now, Happening Now will only include sports events, but Twitter says the feature will be expanded in the coming months to include things like breaking news and entertainment developments.

Source: Twitter

Meet Alice: The virtual assistant from Russian search giant Yandex

Russian search giant Yandex has unveiled its virtual assistant Alice. Like Alexa or Siri, Alice provides users with directions, weather forecasts and news as well as incorporating access to other Yandex offerings like its music service. And, of course, it does all of this in Russian, which Yandex points out isn’t an easy language for AI to tackle. “Speech recognition is especially challenging for the Russian language due to its grammatical and morphological complexities,” Yandex it said in a statement. “According to word error rate measurements, SpeechKit provides world-best accuracy for spoken Russian recognition, enabling Alice to understand speech with a near human-level accuracy.”

And that accuracy applies to Russian slang as well. Yandex says that when a user asks for the weather in Moscow, for example, and then follows that up with “And what about Peter?” Alice knows to give the weather forecast for St. Petersburg.

Yandex isn’t the only regional company to incorporate a voice-activated assistant into its repertoire. Chinese tech company Baidu did the same thing in 2015, demonstrating just how popular and in-demand virtual assistants have become. Alice is now available through the Yandex search app for iOS and Android. A Windows version is currently in beta testing.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Yandex

Medium expands its reading subscription to any author or publisher

Last March, publishing platform Medium introduced its Partner Program, a Netflix-style subscription model that gave members exclusive pieces of writing, access to features before anyone else, an offline reading list and an ad-free experience. The program left beta in August, and it expanded to more media partners like The New York Times, Bloomberg and Rolling Stone last month. Now, though, CEO Ev Williams has announced that Medium will allow any publisher or author to join the partner program, essentially democratizing its paywall and merit-based rewards system.

With the motto, “Words Matter,” publishing platform Medium has positioned itself as a place where thoughtful content trumps merely attention-getting content. It had to find a way to pay contributors, however, and monetize its own business. Williams says that his company wants to subvert the typical “Attention = Money” paradigm of most online sites and create a system that rewards “conscious choice” rather than reactive rubbernecking.

“By eschewing ads,” he wrote, referring to the ad-free subscription service, “we remove conflicts between serving our readers and serving those paying the bills.” It’s a pretty big idea, and whether it’s a naive take on internet publishing or self-centered virtue signaling, opening up to anyone who wants to publish on the service and get paid for it (if they can manage to get the right number of “claps”) could be the start of a new way to fund thoughtful, interesting content.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Medium

Hyundai hopes it can make online car shopping simpler

Dead-simple online shopping has spoiled us all, and Hyundai wants car shopping to feel just as painless. With its newly announced Shopper Assurance program (which launches first in Miami, Orlando, Dallas and Houston) potential car buyers visiting dealership websites will see more straightforward prices that factor in whatever company discounts and incentives may be applicable. According to a report from the AP, those local dealerships will also be encouraged to match prices ferreted out by resources like Edmunds and Kelley Blue Book. In theory, this means you’ll get just as good a deal from the dealership down the road — if not a little better — than further-flung car sellers.

More importantly, the process of actually buying that car won’t take hours inside a noisy dealership. Customers will be able to schedule test drives through the dealer website or through Hyundai’s Drive app (only in certain markets, sadly), and the car will be dropped off for a spin at their chosen location. And once a potential customer has chosen a car, they’ll be able to calculate monthly payments, estimate trade-in values for their existing cars and run loan applications from right inside their browser.

Sure, shoppers will still have to swing by their dealership to pick up the car, but at least they’re not wasting valuable hours inside of one. Oh, and the best part? There’s a three-day window in which folks can return their cars… as long they haven’t been damaged or driven for more than 300 miles.

Hyundai’s new approach might seem a little stodgy compared to Tesla’s streamlined sales model, but dragging the traditional dealership sales model into the age of ceaseless convenience is no small feat. Frankly, Shopper Assurance’s launch in all dealerships early next year can’t come soon enough — the carmaker has seen its sales seriously dip after eight consecutive years of growth, and it needs to engineer a fix now.