Day: January 9, 2020

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Amazon Takes a Swipe at PayPal’s $4 Billion Acquisition

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-honey-security-warning

“We only use data in ways that directly benefit Honey members — helping people save money and time — and in ways they would expect. Our commitment is clearly spelled out in our privacy and security policy,” a spokesperson for Honey told WIRED.

Honey also says that it doesn’t sell the shopping data it gleans from customers. The company makes money by charging some retailers a small percentage of sales made with the coupons it finds—but Amazon has never been one of them.

Is there something you think we should know about these companies? Email the writer at louise_matsakis@wired.com. Signal: 347-966-3806. WIRED protects the confidentiality of its sources, but if you wish to conceal your identity, here are the instructions for using SecureDrop. You can also mail us materials at 520 Third Street, Suite 350, San Francisco, CA 94107.

Amazon’s security warning last month caught Honey by surprise, and the company scrambled to respond. It was forced to temporarily disable several of Honey’s features—like Droplist, which tracks the price of specific items—to prevent the message from appearing to more people. The changes weren’t announced in an official blog post or message to users.

“We’re aware that Droplist and other Honey features were not available on Amazon for a period of time. We know these are tools that people love and worked quickly to restore the functionality. Our extension is not – and has never been – a security risk and is safe to use,” a Honey spokesperson said.\

Browser extensions can be incredibly invasive, and it’s still a good practice to be wary of any that you install in your browser. Amazon warned Honey users that the extension can “read or change any of your data on any website you visit,” but this is a basic functionality of many extensions—which is why only installing ones you can trust is important. In fact, Amazon has a browser extension of its own called Amazon Assistant. It also tracks prices, just like Honey, and allows you to compare items on other retailers to those on Amazon. When users install Amazon Assistant from the Chrome Store, Google also notifies them it can “read and change all your data on the websites you visit.”

Honey says it regularly engages with security firms to assess its protections. Last summer, researchers from the cybersecurity firm Risk Based Security documented a vulnerability in Honey’s extension that malicious websites could exploit to steal user information. But the bug didn’t concern Honey’s own data collection practices, and it was patched on Firefox and Google Chrome in early 2019, according to Risk Based Security. “If ever an individual or independent researcher contacts us about a potential vulnerability, we engage with that person to understand and remedy the issue (if there is one),” the Honey spokesperson said.

There’s still the possibility that Amazon found a legitimate security problem with Honey, but it won’t say what. WIRED also reached out to Google and Firefox, which each host extension stores for their popular web browsers, but neither company could immediately comment.

Amazon is extremely protective of its shopping and customer data. While Honey may not have been a concern when it was only a small startup, it’s now owned by the financial behemoth PayPal, which used to be part of eBay, an Amazon competitor. Amazon still doesn’t accept PayPal as a direct payment option. In the ecommerce world, there’s no incentive to play nice.

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January 9, 2020 at 02:06PM

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HP May Finally Stop Screwing You When It Comes to Printer Ink

https://gizmodo.com/hp-may-finally-stop-screwing-you-when-it-comes-to-print-1840903355

Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)

HP might finally be changing its printer business plan according to a new note by Morgan Stanley analysts. Typically HP sells printers for super cheap and then charges exorbitant prices for the required ink, leaving consumers paying hundreds a year if they want to keep this printer printing well.

This style of doing business, which nearly all printer businesses engage in, is called the “razor blade model” after the practice of razor companies selling the handle for cheap but charging high prices for the required blades.

Kif Seward of CNBC first tweeted this morning that HP is considering moving away from this business model. Gizmodo confirmed the contents of the Morgan Stanley note and an HP spokesperson told us they’re looking into the report.

According to the note, 20-percent of HP’s customers aren’t printing enough or buying enough ink to make the business model profitable. Which makes sense. As other home office stuff, like your computer, monitor, and mouse, have improved exponentially since the 90s, the printer has kind of stayed stuck. It’s good for printing a term paper or a travel itinerary, but affordable printers aren’t nearly as good at printing photos, and a lot of the other things we once printed, like directions, plane tickets, or tickets to movies or shows, can be stored much more easily on a phone.

Two years ago HP recognized that printers weren’t everyday devices anymore and released the very lovely HP Tango X. This printer was designed to be packed up and stuck in a closet when not in use.

However, it has a flaw. The ink dries up. Back in 2018 HP told me the ink should last over a year, but I found issues with ink clogs within months. Here’s a picture printed after just six months of very minimal use.

Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)

Why on earth would anyone want to buy a printer if this is what’s happening after six months? Especially if the best solution is to restock the expensive ink cartridges.

The bad news—for anyone looking to buy a new printer—is that Morgan Stanley claims the price of HP hardware will be going up.

HP’s move, if true, just makes a helluva lot of sense. We’ll update this post once we learn more from HP.

via Gizmodo https://gizmodo.com

January 9, 2020 at 12:21PM

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Sony’s Concept Car Puts Entertainment in the Driver’s Seat

https://www.wired.com/story/sony-concept-car-puts-entertainment-drivers-seat

With a pair of 200-kilowatt motors sending power to all four wheels, Sony’s first car can go from 0 to 62 mph in 4.8 seconds. It can hit a top speed of 149 mph, even though it weighs a hefty 5,180 pounds. The company hasn’t revealed how far the all-electric concept can go between charges, but that doesn’t much matter. Nor, really, do the rest of these specs, since Sony isn’t going to produce this car, which it revealed this week at CES. What’s important and interesting about the Vision-S is how it emphasizes the role Sony can play in an age where performance matters far less than how a vehicle treats its passengers.

The rapid shift of the auto industry toward self-driving and connected vehicles has pulled players like Google, Apple, and Amazon into the car business, mostly with regard to infotainment systems. General Motors plans to use Android software in its future vehicles; Amazon just landed Lamborghini as the latest user of its embedded Alexa system.

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Sony already has a place in the auto industry. It provides speaker systems to a variety of automakers. Toyota and its luxury arm, Lexus, use its CMOS image sensors in some models to underpin automatic emergency braking features. But now, the company is looking to ramp up its offerings. “We will accelerate our efforts to contribute to the future of mobility,” president and CEO Kenichiro Yoshida said at a press conference in Las Vegas. “This prototype embodies our contribution.” So it’s no surprise to see that the Vision-S plays up two Sony strengths: consumer entertainment and sensors.

Like most of today’s concept cars, this one comes packed with screens ready to stream Sony’s voluminous collection of music and movies.

Courtesy of Sony

The first is the easier to see here. The Vision-S features a bevy of screens, including one that stretches the length of the dashboard, like that in the upcoming Byton M-Byte SUV. These, of course, offer up access to the music, games, and movies in the company’s vast library. (The latter two are for when, as Sony says, you are “relieved from car operations.”) “We believe that the evolution of mobility will also redefine cars as a new entertainment space,” Yoshida said.

A 5G connection will ensure everything comes through with nary a moment of buffering. The two backseat passengers each get their own headrest-mounted screen. With speakers all around the car, including one in each seat, everyone can enjoy Sony’s immersive “360 Reality Audio” system, which debuted at CES 2019.

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January 8, 2020 at 06:54PM

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Cuttlefish perceive depth—and they wore 3D glasses to prove it

https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/cuttlefish-depth-perception-3d-glasses/

Ready for the movies.

Ready for the movies. (R. Feord/)

3D movies are a love-hate experience. You absolutely adore the feeling of something plummeting out of your screen so close you think you can nearly touch it, or the whole thing completely freaks you out. Either way—the only way it works is being able to use both of our eyes at the same time to capture the image and perceive its illusory depth.

But as a new study shows cuttlefish experience this phenomenon as well. When equipped with little 3D glasses and placed in front of a screen with a 3D movie of a shrimp passing by, they actually tried to grab it with their tentacles.

These new findings are laid out in a study in Scientific Advances, and it demonstrates more than just a cuttlefish’s ability to “hunt” virtual prey—it show’s that their vision systems are capable of stereopsis or “binocular vision”.

Binocular vision is the way that the brain uses images from both of our eyes to create a perception of depth. Humans have this ability—it’s how we know when something is about to smack us in the face, or if we need to reach out to grab something. For a while, it was thought that only primates and people could manage this because of our front-facing eyes. But it turns out that quite a few other creatures judge distance this way as well.

One other invertebrate, the praying mantis, evolved this way, as proven in their own tiny 3D glasses study from about a year ago. A cuttlefish is another complex invertebrate, so author Trevor Wardill, an ecology professor at the University of Minnesota had the idea of using them to further figure out stereopsis.

“To be fair when we proposed the project … they thought it was a little bit crazy,” Wardill says of first proposing the project to his partners at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts. “They did not really expect it to work, but we were pretty convinced that we should try.”

The initial act of getting cuttlefish to willingly wear the glasses without trying to take them off and actually watch the screen was tough enough, Wardill says. This process required gluing velcro to the top of its mucus-covered body, placing the glasses on their heads, and keeping the creatures happy and distracted enough to not mess with them (or ink all over the experiment).

But when the animals finally focused on the screen, creating an illusion of depth that can only be seen when using binocular vision, they accurately “hunted” the shrimp on screen.

“Putting little glasses on a slimy, tentacled invertebrate may sound both adorable and funny, but it’s actually an amazing accomplishment,” says Kate Thomas, a visual ecologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.

This illusion of depth is created by using two different colored images that are seen through the two different lenses, which the brain then calculates the distance between. Even though cuttlefish are colorblind, the colored filters in the glasses send the accurate color from the monitor to the right eye. They only see the image in each eye as a variety of greyscale intensities, Wardill adds.

Strangely enough, most animals with stereopsis have “yoked” eyes—meaning they look at the same thing at the same time. Cuttlefish’s eyes move separately, except for the moment they notice their prey.

The cuttlefishes weren’t great at “yoking” their eyes, Wardill says, but they still were able to hunt. It’ll take more investigation on what the cuttlefish’s eyes are actually doing to see how they use cues and spacial information to capture their meals.

Their lack of yoked eyes is not the only thing that’s different about a cuttlefish’s stereopsis. The study found that critters can also detect the distance from an “anticorrelated” stimulus, where the image seen in each eye was completely the opposite of the other (think black on white in one eye, white on black on the other).

Humans need the brightness in each image to match up in order to tell distance, so the contrast in this kind of stimulus makes it tough for us to perceive. But the teensy brain of a praying mantis can see depth in these stimuli easily.

This study demonstrates convergent evolution, Thomas says, as these creatures are so far off the evolutionary pathway from humans, but are in some ways similar to us. “I think it’s fascinating that an animal more closely related to a clam than to us has not only evolved eyes similar to ours, but also processes images from those eyes in a similar way to produce depth perception.”

Though they’re interesting results, they shouldn’t be super surprising—and they actually make a lot of sense in the context of the cuttlefish’s daily needs. Binocular vision makes predation easier, Wardill says, since you can see your prey in front of you without moving around or making a bunch of attempts to capture a meal. After all, a cuttlefish probably wouldn’t be catching very many shrimp if it was continually scaring them off.

If anything, Wardill says, it was more surprising that the animals kept their glasses on.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

January 9, 2020 at 12:37PM

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Ebikes might soon speed past electric cars in sales

https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/ebike-sales-electric-cars/

Madison, Wisconsin, converted its entire bike share fleet to ebikes in June.

Madison, Wisconsin, converted its entire bike share fleet to ebikes in June. (Courtesy Madison BCycle/)

This story originally featured on Cycle Volta.

Worldwide, more than 130 million ebikes will be sold from 2020 to 2023, representing a value of $20 billion, according to a new report from the Technology, Media, and Telecommunications practice at Deloitte. The consulting and advisory firm also predicts that annual global ebike sales will reach 40 million units in 2023, far eclipsing the 12 million electric automobiles and trucks Deloitte is forecasting to be sold in 2025.

Deloitte attributed the aggressive ebike growth forecast to recent strides in lithium-ion battery (LIB) technology, pricing, and power in the ebike market.

“Although more than 80 percent of the ebikes sold each year were using heavy lead-acid batteries as recently as 2016, the falling price of much lighter LIBs has shifted the market. Over the entire four-year forecast period between 2020 and 2023, we expect about two-fifths of all ebikes sold globally to feature LIBs, with the proportion of LIB-powered ebikes starting out at about 25 percent in 2020, and rising to more than 60 percent in 2023,” study author Paul Lee wrote for Deloitte.

Advancements in lithium-ion batteries have helped spur ebike sales growth, Deloitte posits.

Advancements in lithium-ion batteries have helped spur ebike sales growth, Deloitte posits. (Jeff Allen/)

The report also states that ebikes have a much broader charging network than electric cars, speeding their uptake by users.

“Unlike electric cars, ebikes do not require a new network of fast chargers or the installation of specialized chargers in parking lots: Recharging an ebike merely requires plugging the battery into a standard power socket for a few hours. A modern house is likely to have more than 60 electricity sockets; a modern office building housing 1,000 workers may have more than 5,000. In contrast, only 150,000 public fast chargers for vehicles were available globally as of the end of 2018, of which 78 percent were in China,” Deloitte’s Lee wrote.

Citing ebike industry data drawn from a variety of media sources, the Deloitte report highlighted strong recent ebike sales momentum in a number of global markets:

  • In Germany, ebike sales jumped 36 percent to nearly 1 million units in 2018, and the nation reached that number of units in just the first half of 2019.
  • More than half of all adult bikes sold in the Netherlands in 2018 were electric.
  • In the US, ebike unit sales at specialty stores rose 73 percent last year to more than 400,000 ebikes.
  • Ebike unit sales in Spain rose 55 percent last year to more than 111,000 ebikes—selling for an average of 2,165 euros each.

More than 300 million ebikes, including electric share bikes, will be on the world’s streets by 2023, Deloitte forecasts.

More than 300 million ebikes, including electric share bikes, will be on the world’s streets by 2023, Deloitte forecasts. (Jordan Rosen Photography/Presidio Trust/)

With all those units being sold, the Deloitte report goes on to predict that about 300 million ebikes will be in circulation by 2023, up 50 percent from 200 million this year. Those figures include both privately owned ebikes and electric bikes deployed in bike share systems around the world.

In the US, where bike share usage has lagged that of many other countries, ebikes could give a significant boost to share systems in the coming years, Deloitte predicts. “Of the 192 cities in the United States with bike sharing schemes, more than 40 already include ebikes in their fleet. Madison, Wisconsin, for example, converted all of the bikes in its bike share program to electric in June 2019. In trials, the Madison ebikes had generated up to five times as many trips as standard bikes … Conversely, in cities where ebikes have been withdrawn, bike sharing usage has declined."

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

January 9, 2020 at 08:04AM