Police in the Netherlands are exploring the use of trained eagles to protect against rowdy, unwanted drones. The birds of prey, after centuries of evolution, are uniquely suited to snatch smaller objects zipping through the air and bring them to the ground in humiliating fashion.
“It’s a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem,” said a police spokesman. “We use the birds’ age-old hunting instinct to intercept and neutralize drones.”
IoT search service Shodan.io has launched a new section of its site for searching Webcams that aren’t properly secured.
Anyone with a paid account can browse the service’s collection of Webcam images, taken from a variety of settings, from schools to people’s homes. According to Ars Technica, a security expert was able to find easily “marijuana plantations, back rooms of banks, children, kitchens, living rooms, garages, front gardens, back gardens, ski slopes, swimming pools, colleges and schools, laboratories, and cash register cameras in retail stores.”
IoT security represents a real and looming threat as we enable data gathering through more and more of our formerly dumb appliances, and regulations — as well as counter-tech — need to catch up quickly.
Read more: Ars Technica
A new study coming out of the World Economic Forum at Davos predicts that artificial intelligence and robots represent the vanguard of a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will destroy more than five million jobs globally by the end of 2020.
The report cites cloud computing, improved battery technology, crowdsourcing, and machine learning as other components that, within five years, will have severe disruptive impact on administrative functions, manufacturing, and transportation.
Read the report here (PDF): World Economic Forum
You’ve heard a lot about Amazon’s plan to have drones deliver your coffee pods every month, but Chinese startup EHang has revealed a new quad-copter drone that can carry humans.
The EHANG184 can carry a single passenger on 23-minute flights at speeds of nearly 62 miles per hour. Passengers can set waypoints for the journey, but the autonomous drone handles the rest of the navigation, take-off, and landing. While you may be dreaming of Drone Uber dropping you off on the roof of the hottest club in town, the likely near-term use is the military using the EHANG184 to deliver injured soldiers from the battlefield to the MASH unit behind friendlier lines.
Sampriti Bhattacharyya, founder of the drone startup Hydroswarm, explain how her company’s autonomous robots will search and analyze the world’s oceans by deploying swarms of small, autonomous robots carrying a variety of sensors. According to Forbes, the Unmanned Underwater Vehicles market is currently at about a $1 billion and is projected to grow to about $5 billion by 2019.
Time has posted an excellent piece by Stuart Frankel and Kristian Hammond, two execs from technology firm Narrative Science, giving us the rundown on what they see happening in A.I. in the coming year. The first prediction? A.I. is about to explode in a flurry of innovation thanks to huge bets on it placed in 2015 by the leading technology companies in the world.
This makes it likely that in 2016, new inventions will increasingly come to market from companies discovering new ways to apply AI versus building it. With entrepreneurs now having access to low-cost quality AI technologies to create new products, we’ll also likely see an explosion in new startups using AI.
Read the full article: Time.com
Internet of Things manufacturers are collectively digging themselves a hole lined with unimaginative and bad use cases, all tethered to yet another app the user needs to install, such as apps for changing light bulb colors, apps for knowing what’s in your fridge, apps for taking pics of your dog. Now we can chuck maybe the worst use case into that hole: Qualcomm’s connected pregnancy test.
Segway has partnered with Intel and China’s Ninebot to create a little mech to keep an eye on your beloved pet while you’re at work, and more. With voice recognition and the ability to schlep you around — yes, it’s a hoverboard, as well — the unimaginatively named Robot represents Segway’s first foray into smart devices.
Snark aside, the element of potential coolness here is the Robot’s extendability for developers; it has built-in hardware extensions, and there’s a software developer’s kit (SDK), so if you have an idea, more than a beer-fetching app, we hope, now you’ve got a platform to get that idea kickstarted.
Official site: Segway
The Wi-Fi Alliance, the consortium that decides on the standards by which your laptop lets you stream all those anime series on Netflix, has unveiled a new low-power protocol for Internet of Things devices.
The new standard, called HaLow, promises to double the range for your smart devices and do a better job of penetrating the walls and floors between your router and, say, your master bathroom. Standard Wi-Fi uses 2.4GHz and 5GHz connections, but HaLow will broadcast in the 900MHz band, consuming less power and making range less of an issue — both of which are important hurdles to overcome if wearables are to continue to gain traction in the marketplace.
Read more: Wi-Fi Alliance, Wired
Read more: Economic Times