Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Amazon uses aggregated seller data to help business, it tells lawmakers
National retail framework for small stores to cope with competition from etailers
Facebook’s consortium to guard your child online
Official Monero website is hacked to deliver currency-stealing malware
(credit: Pixabay)
The official site for the Monero digital coin was hacked to deliver currency-stealing malware to users who were downloading wallet software, officials with GetMonero.com said on Tuesday.
The supply-chain attack came to light on Monday when a site user reported that the cryptographic hash for a command-line interface wallet downloaded from the site didn't match the hash listed on the page. Over the next several hours, users discovered that the mismatching hash wasn't the result of an error. Instead, it was an attack designed to infect GetMonero users with malware. Site officials later confirmed that finding.
"It's strongly recommended to anyone who downloaded the CLI wallet from this website between Monday 18th 2:30 AM UTC and 4:30 PM UTC, to check the hashes of their binaries," GetMonero officials wrote. "If they don't match the official ones, delete the files and download them again. Do not run the compromised binaries for any reason."
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Audi’s next all-electric vehicle, the e-tron Sportback, is a “coupé” SUV
Audi revealed Tuesday evening in Los Angeles the e-tron Sportback as the German automaker begins to chip away at its plan to launch more than 30 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids by 2025.
The e-tron Sportback reveal ahead of the LA Auto Show follows the launch earlier this year of Audi’s first all-electric vehicle, the 2019 e-tron.
Audi has delivered 18,500 of its all-electric e-tron SUVs globally since March 2019 when the vehicle first came to market. And the company is hoping to grab more, and different, customers with the Sportback.
Audi plans to offer two variants of the vehicle, a Sportback 50 and Sportback 55. The Sportback will come to Europe first in spring 2020. The Sportback 55 will come to the U.S. in fall 2020.
Audi calls this e-tron Sportback a SUV coupé, the latest evidence that automakers are comfortable pushing the boundaries of traditional automotive terminology. This is not a two-door car with a fixed roof and a sloping rear, although there are “coupé” elements in the design.
This is in fact a SUV with a roof that extend flat over the body and then drops steeply to the rear — that’s where the coupé name comes in — and into the D pillar of the vehicle. Then there’s the classic “Sportback” feature in the body where the lower edge of the side window rises toward the rear.
There are design details repeated throughout the exterior, specifically the four-bar pattern in the headlamps, front grille and wheels. And of course there are special interior and exterior finishes – 13 paint colors in all — and a first edition version customers can buy. The base price of the Sportback is 71,350 ($79,000).
But importantly, besides some styling and design changes, this vehicle boasts longer range and for everyone outside the U.S., futuristic looking side mirrors and new lighting tech.
The 2020 Audi e-tron Sportback has a 86.4 kilowatt-hour battery pack that has a range of up to 446 kilometers (277.1 miles) in the EU’s WLTP cycle. The EPA estimates aren’t out yet, but expect the range numbers to be slightly lower.
The company is targeting an EPA range of about 220 miles over the 204 miles of range that the regular e-tron gets.
Audi was able to improve the range by increasing the net battery capacity. It also decoupled the front motor and improved the thermal management.
Lighting and mirrors
Audi is known for its lighting and the company has made this a key feature in the Sportback. The vehicle has a new digital matrix headlights that breaks down light into tiny pixels. The result is precise lighting that has high resolution.
Inside the headlight is a digital micromirror device that acts like a video projector. Inside the DMD is a small chip from Texas Instruments that contains one million micromirrors. These micromirrors can be tilted up to 5,000 times per second.
The upshot: The headlights can project specific patterns on the road or illuminate certain areas more brightly. And for fun, animations like the e-tron or Audi logos can be projected on a wall when the vehicle is stopped.
Check out this video to see it in action.
The safety piece of this is the most interesting. For instance, on a freeway the light might creates a carpet of light that illuminates the driver’s own lane brightly and adjusts dynamically when he or she changes lane.
Then there are the virtual exterior mirrors. This wing-shaped side mirror doesn’t have an exterior mirror. Instead, it supports integrate small cameras. The captured images appear on high-contrast OLED displays inside the car between the instrument panel and the door.
If the driver moves their finger toward the surface of the touch display, symbols are activated with which the driver can reposition the image. The mirrors can be adjust automatically to three driving situations for highway driving, turning and parking.
Neither the mirrors of the digital matrix LED lighting is available in the U.S. and won’t be until the government changes its Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, or FMVSS, which are the regulations that dictate the design, construction, performance, and durability requirements for motor vehicles.
Sebi using AI, ML for social media surveillance
CyCognito, a cybersecurity platform that analyzes a company's entire spectrum of internet-connected devices for vulnerabilities, raises $18M Series A (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
CyCognito, a cybersecurity platform that analyzes a company's entire spectrum of internet-connected devices for vulnerabilities, raises $18M Series A — CyCognito, a cybersecurity platform that aims to give visibility into a company's security weak spots, has raised $18 million in its Series A round of funding.
CyberCube Analytics, a cyber risk analytics platform for cybersecurity insurance underwriters, raises $35M Series B (FinSMEs)
CyberCube Analytics, a cyber risk analytics platform for cybersecurity insurance underwriters, raises $35M Series B — CyberCube Analytics, a San Francisco, CA-based cyber risk analytics company for the insurance industry, raised $35m in Series B funding. — The round was led by HSCM Bermuda and ForgePoint Capital.
Redmi Note 8 Pro Set to Go on Sale in India Today
NTSB finds Uber's safety driver the primary cause of fatal Tempe crash, also blames lack of "safety culture" at Uber; AI not detecting jaywalkers played no role (Brad Templeton/Forbes)
NTSB finds Uber's safety driver the primary cause of fatal Tempe crash, also blames lack of “safety culture” at Uber; AI not detecting jaywalkers played no role — I cover robocar technology & previously worked on Google's car team. — The National Transportation Safety Board presented …
Realme X2 Pro, Realme 5s to Launch Today: How to Watch Live Stream
Digital verification startups see rising demand from niche consumer sectors
Google outlines plans for mainline Linux kernel support in Android
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Google's eventual plan for Android, one kernel for every device, instead of the device-specific kernels that exist now. [credit: Saravana Kannan ]
It seems like Google is working hard to update and upstream the Linux kernel that sits at the heart of every Android phone. The company was a big participant in this year's Linux Plumbers Conference, a yearly meeting of the top Linux developers, and Google spent a lot of time talking about getting Android to work with a generic Linux kernel instead of the highly-customized version it uses now. It even showed an Android phone running a mainline Linux kernel.
But first, some background on Android's current kernel mess.Currently, three major forks happen in between the "mainline" Linux kernel and a shipping Android device (note that "mainline" here has no relation to Google's own "Project Mainline"). First, Google takes the an LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel and turns it into the "Android Common kernel"—the Linux kernel with all the Android OS-specific patches applied. Android Common is shipped to the SoC vendor (usually Qualcomm) where it gets its first round of hardware-specific additions, first focusing on a particular model of SoC. This "SoC Kernel" then gets sent to a device manufacturer for even more hardware-specific code that supports every other piece of hardware, like the display, camera, speakers, usb ports, and any extra hardware. This is the "Device Kernel," and it's what actually ships on a device.
This is an extremely long journey that results in every device shipping millions of lines of out-of-tree kernel code. Every shipping device kernel is different and device specific—basically no device kernel from one phone will work on another phone. The mainline kernel version for a device is locked in at the beginning of an SoC's initial development, so it's typical for a brand-new device to ship with a Linux kernel that is two years old. Even Google's latest and, uh, greatest device, the Pixel 4, shipped in October 2019 with Linux kernel 4.14, an LTS release from November 2017. It will be stuck on kernel 4.14 forever, too. Android devices do not get kernel updates, probably thanks to the incredible amount of work needed to produce just a single device kernel, and the chain of companies that would need to cooperate to do it. Thanks to kernel updates never happening, this means every new release of Android usually has to support the last three years of LTS kernel releases (the minimum for Android 10 is 4.9, a 2016 release). Google's commitments to support older versions of Android with security patches means the company is still supporting kernel 3.18, which is five years old now. Google's band-aid solution for this so far has been to team up with the Linux community and support mainline Linux LTS releases for longer, and they're now up to six years of support.
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US coding boot camp graduates are facing a tough job market due to AI coding tools and mass layoffs; CompTIA: developer job listings are down 56% since 2019 (Sarah Kessler/New York Times)
Sarah Kessler / New York Times : US coding boot camp graduates are facing a tough job market due to AI coding tools and mass layoffs; Com...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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