This week at Lenovo’s Tech World ‘23, Motorola introduced its Adaptive Smartphone Concept, an Android-powered device that features flexible hardware. Could this be the next step in the foldable hardware evolution?
Building on Motorola’s existing work in the foldable and rollable device space, this concept phone features a 6.9-inch FHD+ pOLED display that can be bent and shaped into varying forms. When used in an upright position, shown below, you have 4.6-inches of usable display running a “more compact form of full Android.”
Motorola even showcases the ability to fully wrap the device around your wrist which then toggles a user experience similar to the one found on the external display of the Razr+ smartphone. If it stays well wrapped, I imagine this could be very nifty when hitting the running trails.
Given the conceptual nature of the device, there’s no guarantee we’ll ever see this hit the market, but dang it, it’s still awesome. Whether you think it practical or not, companies need to show that innovation and creativity is happening. Personally, I think this looks very cool.
The year is 1998. You clutch your Game Boy Color, focusing on your fourth run of the Elite Four in Pokemon Blue, back propped against the couch while your parents watch the season four finale of Frasier on the 32-inch “big-screen” CRT TV in your living room. It is a canon event, crystalized in your memory, as you beat your creature-catching rival while Kelsey Grammer’s eternally befuddled psychiatrist gets romantically crushed by a post-Terminator 2 Linda Hamilton.
With a questionably necessary reboot of Frasier arriving thirty years later, now’s the perfect time for an equally anachronistic Game Boy RPG for the original series. And indie developer Edward La Barbera has delivered it. Frasier Fantasyis a bite-sized RPG following the beloved radio host as he putters around Seattle, lovingly crafted in the style of the Game Boy Color.
The graphics and sound don’t just evoke the GBC, they’re actually made for the hardware — you can download and play it on one if you have the right flash cart. The rest of us can play it on an emulator, or even better, just load the entire game in a browser window (spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun).
In Frasier Fantasy, you’ll make your way across the famous locations of the show, including the geographically impossible Elliot Bay Towers apartment, the Cafe Nervosa, and the KACL radio station. Your goal: To do your radio psychiatry show, rid the apartment of your father and the real star, Eddie, and retrieve your antique grape scissors before hosting a dinner party. The game nails the strange fusion of these cultural artifacts, giving you a whirlwind tour of the show’s cast interspersed with minigames and turn-based RPG battles. Frasier can employ special moves like “Freudian Slap” or simply drone his enemies to sleep with faux-posh psych patter.
The whole game can be cleared in under an hour, and might just be worth it for the Frasier super-fan. Deep cuts, like a battle with Star Trek-obsessed coworker Noel and Niles’ never-seen wife Maris in her sensory deprivation tank, show that this is truly a labor of love. The final boss, featuring a pale, frigid monster that makes Sephiroth look like a pansy, is a particular highlight.
Amazon is splashing out on new vehicle inspectors to watch for damage or wear to its vast fleet of delivery vans—and they’re not human. The retailer is installing camera-studded inspection stations equipped with artificial intelligence-powered technology called AVI, or automated vehicle inspection, at hundreds of its distribution centers worldwide.
When a driver working out of any of the 20 delivery centers currently equipped with the tech returns their vehicle at the end of a shift, they slowly drive it through a sensor-laden archway made by startup UVeye, which has headquarters in the US and Israel.
The technology is made up of three separate high-res camera systems: One scans a vehicle’s undercarriage, another checks tire quality, and another focuses on the vehicle exterior. The data they gather is compiled into a 3D image of the vehicle and used by machine-learning software to identify whether the vehicle is damaged or needs maintenance. The algorithms should pick up every nail in a tire, fluid leak, dent on a fender, or crack in the windshield.
UVeye’s AVI technology scans an Amazon delivery van.Courtesy of UVeye
Aziz Makkiya, Amazon’s senior manager of last-mile products and services, declined to discuss company financials, but said in an interview at an Amazon event last week that the technology shaves about four minutes off what is usually a five-minute inspection process. That could add up to a lot when multiplied over Amazon’s roughly 100,000-strong global fleet. Makkiya said the technology should make the vehicles safer, in part by catching vehicle maintenance issues early. “The safety aspect is what we really care about,” he said.
Amazon says it’s been testing the automated vehicle inspection system for nearly two years, and has now rolled it out to 20 delivery stations in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK, with the goal of installing hundreds of units in the next few years.
The automated inspections will give Amazon a new window into the operations of the independent companies known as DSPs that it contracts to make deliveries, and which lease Amazon-branded vehicles from the company. Drivers employed by DSPs are usually responsible for inspecting their own vehicles. Amazon pays for maintenance such as tires and brakes, but DSPs have to cover damage from collisions. Maya Vautier, a spokesperson for Amazon, says the inspection technology only scans the outside of vehicles and doesn’t collect data on vehicle performance or utilization.
Got a tip?
Do you work for an Amazon contractor? What do you think of the new inspection technology? Email the author at aarian_marshall@wired.com. WIRED protects the confidentiality of its sources.
Makkiya says the data can be used to inform wider company decisions. If vehicles driven on certain routes or roads show consistent patterns of damage, Amazon might let a city know that trees need cutting or potholes fixing, for example. Amazon also plans to start using automated vehicle scans to guide its vehicle purchases or provide terrain-specific feedback to manufacturers. At some point in the next year, Makkiya says, the company should be able to go to a vehicle manufacturer and say, “Hey, you’ve got a problem with the tires in this area, or the suspension of the vehicle in this area.”
The idea of using AI to inspect vans and other vehicles is not new, but the Amazon deal adds validation to a concept that has become more prominent amidst investor enthusiasm for generative AI. UVeye announced a $100 million funding round in the spring from investors including automaker GM and used vehicle retailer Carmax, which is also using the AI inspection technology. Its previous investors include Hyundai, Volvo, and Toyota.
Tractable, a London-based AI inspection company that has significant partnerships with insurers, recently raised $65 million of new investment, and another company, Monk, was acquired by online used car auction company ACV last year. In general, tech providers offer to speed up the process of evaluating vehicle damage or predicting when maintenance might be needed, a task once left to workers with experience in vehicle management and repair.
William Demaree, who directs fixed operations at the Tom Wood dealership network in Indiana, Kentucky, and Minnesota, likes the 10 UVeye units his company leases for another reason: They demonstrate to customers that they’re not getting fleeced. Every customer who comes in for a repair or trade-in at shops with the technology installed drives their vehicle through the portal, he says. “The automotive industry has a rough name sometimes,” he says.
Drivers might not always trust car dealers, but they seem more comfortable with the new, hulking, machine-learning-powered inspector. Demaree says the technology “shows that we can be more transparent with our customers.” People also like exploring images of their vehicles on the unit’s big screens, he says, and love to take photos of their vehicle’s undercarriages.
Automated inspections aren’t perfect, Demaree says. Workers occasionally have to flag that something labeled as a bump or scratch is just a normal feature of the car. The feedback is collected by UVeye to train its inspection algorithms for future vehicles. Amazon’s partnership with the company promises to provide a new flood of such feedback.
At 9:30 am on a Wednesday in late September, a hacker who asked to be called Tom Smith sent me a nonsensical text message: “query voltage recurrence.”
Those three words were proof of a remarkable feat—and potentially an extremely valuable one. A few days earlier, I had randomly generated those terms, set them as the passphrase on a certain model of encryptedUSB thumb drive known as an IronKey S200, and shipped the drive across the country to Smith and his teammates in the Seattle lab of a startup called Unciphered.
Unciphered’s staff in the company’s Seattle lab.
Photograph: Meron Menghistab
Smith had told me that guessing my passphrase might take several days. Guessing it at all, in fact, should have been impossible: IronKeys are designed to permanently erase their contents if someone tries just 10 incorrect password guesses. But Unciphered’s hackers had developed a secret IronKey password-cracking technique—one that they’ve still declined to fully describe to me or anyone else outside their company—that gave them essentially infinite tries. My USB stick had reached Unciphered’s lab on Tuesday, and I was somewhat surprised to see my three-word passphrase texted back to me the very next morning. With the help of a high-performance computer, Smith told me, the process had taken only 200 trillion tries.
Smith’s demonstration was not merely a hacker party trick. He and Unciphered’s team have spent close to eight months developing a capability to crack this specific, decade-old model of IronKey for a very particular reason: They believe that in a vault in a Swiss bank 5,000 miles to the east of their Seattle lab, an IronKey that’s just as vulnerable to this cracking technique holds the keys to 7,002 bitcoins, worth close to $235 million at current exchange rates.
For years, Unciphered’s hackers and many others in the crypto community have followed the story of a Swiss crypto entrepreneur living in San Francisco named Stefan Thomas, who owns this 2011-era IronKey, and who has lost the password to unlock it and access the nine-figure fortune it contains. Thomas has said in interviews that he’s already tried eight incorrect guesses, leaving only two more tries before the IronKey erases the keys stored on it and he loses access to his bitcoins forever.
Varda Space Industries plans to eventually land its spacecraft in Australia, but the company is still waiting on approval to bring down its already-launched first vehicle in Utah next year, according to a media report.
Varda launched its debut mission on SpaceX‘s Transporter-8 mission in June, and the capsule remains operational in space. Varda will land its future spacecraft at the Koonibba Test Range northwest of Adelaide, Australia under a newly announced agreement with Southern Launch. The first missions to use the site will land as soon as 2024, SpaceNews said in a report.
But the company, which is developing systems that will allow customers to manufacture products (for example, pharmaceuticals) in orbit and bring them down to Earth, is still awaiting approval from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Air Force to land its first spacecraft at the Utah Test and Training Range.
“We got very, very close,” Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said in an Oct. 20 interview with SpaceNews. The situation was related to “a coordination problem amongst three different groups that had not worked through this operation before,” he added, referring to the Utah range, the Air Force and the FAA.
California-based Varda is the first company to apply for an FAA reentry license through Part 450, a new set of regulations that were put in place to make the approval process easier. Asparouhov declined to comment on whether his company would have secured approvals faster under older FAA rules.
The spacecraft is fully operational in orbit. Asparouhov said that onboard experiments are finished, and that the FAA and Air Force have expressed no concerns about safety.
Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.
While companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are all-in on the power of next-generation machine learning algorithms, some regulators are dreading what it might mean for our already-stressed communication networks. The chairwoman of the US Federal Communications Commission, for one, who’s just proposed an investigation into what “AI” could mean for even more spam calls and texts. The FCC will vote to adopt a multi-tiered action in November.
Chairwoman Rosencworcel, who’s served on the Commission since 2012 and as its executive since being confirmed late in 2021, is particularly concerned with how newly empowered AI tools could affect senior citizens. The FCC’s initial press release (PDF link) lists four main goals: determining whether AI technologies fall under the Comission’s jurisdiction via the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, if and when future AI tech might do the same, how AI impacts existing regulatory frameworks, and if the FCC should consider ways to verify the authenticity of auto-generated AI voice and text from “trusted sources.”
That last bullet point would seem to contain the potential for the most problems. Auto-generated text and natural-sounding voice algorithms are already fairly easy tools to use, albeit not quite as fast as necessary for real-time back-and-forth in a phone call setting. Combine it with some “big iron” data centers, whether wholly created for the purpose of mass calls and texts or merely rented from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Replacing human-staffed call centers around the world in scammer hotbeds like India and Cambodia with fully automated AI systems could exponentially increase both the volume and the efficacy of scams, which are already being sent hundreds of billions of times every year. While filters and blocks exist, it’s estimated that billions of dollars are lost to scams each year in the US alone, many of which target senior citizens specifically.
The FCC’s brief does mention that AI technology could also be used to fight against spammers and scams, presumably with some kind of real-time scanning system alerting users that they’re talking to a computer. But the details of this, and the potential evolution of the threat posed by AI tools, will have to wait for the Commission’s November 15th session.
