Lumos bike helmet adds Apple Watch gestures to control turn signals
https://ift.tt/2rdTdpV
Engadget
It’s been almost three years since we first came across the Lumos smart cycling helmet, which got our attention with its cunning automatic brake lights and wirelessly-controlled turn signal indicators. The helmet has since been shipping as of late 2016, but the Hong Kong startup didn’t stop there. Today — which happens to be the first day of Bike Month — Lumos is releasing an update that adds gesture control for the helmet’s blinkers via Apple Watch, along with Apple HealthKit integration for automatic cycling tracking.
Gallery: Lumos cycling helmet with Apple Watch gesture control | 6 Photos
To enable gesture control, the user simply has to install the iOS and watchOS apps, pair the iPhone with the helmet over Bluetooth, calibrate the watch with your left- and right-turn gestures using your watch-wielding hand, then you’re good to go. The turn indicators will continue to blink until you shake your hand. All of these actions should be much more intuitive — or at least easier to access — than the original wireless remote control.
As part of the update, the Lumos helmet can also be integrated with Strava and Apple Health apps, which enables automatic cycling tracking in iOS. For those who want to check out this $180 helmet in person, you’ll soon be able to see it at one of the 300 Apple Stores across the US and Europe, or you can simply order online.
. It was repurposed to house a 10MW, MH-1A nuclear reactor, and it was stationed in the Panama Canal in 1968.
“The Sturgis enters Gatun Lake, which is 85 feet above sea level (1968).” Like Russia’s floating nuclear power plant, the Sturgis was unpowered and had to be towed to its destination.
The Sturgis only provided power in Panama between 1968 and 1976. This is a contemporary photo of the Sturgis, which was moored at the James River Reserve Fleet in Fort Eustis, Virginia.
In 2015, the Sturgis was towed from Virginia to Galveston, Texas, to start the decommissioning process.
The Sturgis at the Port of Galveston.
The US Army Corps of Engineers writes, “This sound-proof phone booth aboard the Sturgis… allowed crew members to communicate with each other more than 30 years ago.”
Sturgis reactor head (2001).
This photo shows low-level nuclear waste being removed from the Sturgis in 2015. “This removal of the spent fuel rod transfer cask and the spent control rod transfer cask was a significant milestone in the Sturgis decommissioning effort,” the US Army Corps of Engineers wrote.
US Army Corps of Engineers
The Reactor Pressure Vessel, which held nuclear fuel while the power plant was in operation, was slowly lifted out of the Sturgis during decommissioning. It was placed in a special container for shipping
and delivered to the Waste Control Specialists disposal facility in Andrews County, Texas. “With the removal of the Sturgis’ Reactor Pressure Vessel, approximately 98 percent of the radioactivity from the Sturgis and a total of 850,000 pounds of radioactive waste have been safely removed and disposed of,” the Army Corps of Engineers notes.
Here we see a contained Reactor Pressure Vessel. As the US Army Corps of Engineers writes: “With the removal of the Reactor Pressure Vessel, the Corps of Engineers has now safely removed and disposed of approximately 98 percent of the radioactivity that was present aboard the Army’s now-retired floating nuclear plant.”
Try as I might, I’m not perfect. My goal is to get every detail in every story right, but sometimes a post gets through with a factual error. Such was the case last night, in a story about Russia’s new floating nuclear power plant. Some background research led me to believe that it was the first of its kind.
A couple of Ars readers, thankfully, disabused me of that notion quickly (one cool thing about writing for Ars is you always know that you’re writing for a bunch of people who are dramatically smarter than yourself). Though such a power system is quite rare, there has been another floating nuclear plant that we can point to as an example: a US Army barge called the Sturgis, which was installed in Panama during the Vietnam War.
The 10MW floating nuclear power plant was a repurposed World War II Liberty ship. It was unpowered and had to be towed to its destination, where it provided electricity until 1976. While it floated in Panama’s Gatun Lake, it powered both civil and military operations on land nearby, “including powering the locks of the canal during drought to augment its traditional hydropower sources,” according to Christopher Augsburger, a spokesperson for the US Army Corps of Engineers, Baltimore District. In 1977, the Sturgis was decontaminated and readied for long-term storage, and in 2012 the power plant’s official decommissioning began at the Port of Galveston in Texas.
By early 2017, the decommissioning crews had begun to take apart portions of the radioactive Reactor Containment Vessel that had lived on the barge for 50 years. “During the process of dismantling portions of the Sturgis to gain access to and remove radioactive components, the team has been able to safely recycle approximately 600,000 pounds of lead,” the US Army Corps of Engineers wrote.
Augsburger told Ars in an email that the decommissioning process is expected to come to a close this summer. Currently, more than 99 percent of the vessel’s radioactive parts have been transported to waste facilities. “The major remaining effort for the Sturgis in Galveston is essentially radiological surveys confirming the vessel is ready to be released for shipbreaking,” Augsburger wrote. “One key note is that environmental monitoring has been continuous since prior to the arrival of the Sturgis in Galveston, and no evidence of radioactive material, lead, or increased radiation exposure from the STURGIS has been documented outside of the reactor containment area to date.”
Soon only the Sturgis‘ legacy (and recycled steel and lead) will remain.
Phone maker settles charges it let partner collect customers’ text messages
https://ift.tt/2FsOPss
Phone maker BLU is settling charges that it allowed a China-based partner to collect a mountain of customers’ personal data—including full content of text messages, real-time locations, telephone numbers, contacts, and installed apps—despite promises it would keep such details private.
Under a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission announced Monday, BLU agreed to implement a “comprehensive data-security program” to prevent similar privacy leaks in the future. Both the company as a whole and co-owner and president Samuel Ohev-Zion are barred from misrepresenting the extent to which they protect the privacy and security of personal information. The company further will be subject to third-party assessments of its security program every two years for 20 years and must comply with record-keeping and compliance-monitoring requirements.
The settlement stems from research published in November 2016 by security firm Kryptowire. It found that BLU phones were transmitting a massive amount of private customer data to AdUps Technologies, a Shanghai-based provider of firmware that ran on the affected devices. Kryptowire said AdUps appeared to gather the data to help phone manufacturers and carriers track the behavior of their customers for advertising purposes.
In a complaint filed Monday, FTC regulators said AdUps provides advertising, data mining, and FOTA—short for “firmware over the air”—update services to mobile and Internet of Things connected devices.
“BLU entered into a contract with AdUps to have the China-based company perform FOTA update services on their devices,” FTC attorneys wrote. “Respondents did not ask ADUPS to perform any other services.”
Despite the limited mandate, AdUps collected a wealth of customer information, including:
full contents of text messages
real-time cellular-tower location data
call and text message logs with full telephone numbers
contact lists
lists of applications used and installed on each device
AdUps collected text messages and transmitted them back to company servers every 72 hours while collecting location data in real-time and transmitting it to servers every 24 hours, the FTC’s complaint said.
Following the 2016 Kryptowire report, BLU notified customers that AdUps ceased its data collection activities. Even then, however, BLU “continued to allow AdUps to operate on its older devices without adequate oversight,” FTC attorneys wrote.
The FTC action made no mention of a follow-up report from Kryptowire in 2017. It said three models of BLU phones continued to collect a more limited set of users’ personal information and sent them to servers located in China. For instance, Kryptowire said that two models—the Grand M and Life One X2—sent phone numbers, IMEIs, IMSIs, Wi-Fi MAC addresses, device serial numbers, and lists of installed applications, as well as cell-tower IDs and locations. The security firm said the BLU Advance 5.0 contained code-execution and logging capabilities that could be used by third-party apps.
A BLU executive responded to the Kryptowire update at the time by saying the data collection was standard for over-the-air functions. “This is in line with every other smartphone device manufacturer in the world,” BLU Marketing Director Carmen Gonzalez wrote in the response. “There is nothing out of the ordinary that is being collected,” she wrote, and she also asserted that BLU “certainly does not affect any user’s privacy or security.”
At the time of the Kryptowire update, Amazon said it was suspending sales of BLU phones. A quick search on Monday showed a variety of BLU phones available from the online retailer.
This Master Bulder is the Undisputed King of Geeky LEGO Builds
https://ift.tt/2FvTlX6
Michael Nieves is what we’d call a "big deal" in the LEGO builder communities. In 2016 he became the sanctioned "Master Model Builder" for the Philadelphia LEGOLAND Discovery Center". Drawing upon his degree in mechanical engineering as well as his personal collection of over 30,000 pieces, he’s made constructions that defy expectations. Oh yeah, and before somebody in the comments chimes in, many of these builds feature heavy use of Technic and Bionicle pieces, but it’s that techno-organic energy that raises the game for what’s possible with pre-molded plastic bits fastened by friction.
