Three things in life are certain: Death, taxes, and cloud-based IoT gear bricked by vendors
On 29 May, global peripheral giant Belkin will flick the "off" switch on its Wemo NetCam IP cameras, turning the popular security devices into paperweights.
Suffice to say, many Wemo NetCam users are pissed off. El Reg reader Gerard said: "Why are only those with a warranty given a refund? There is nothing wrong with the webcam. It is working fine."
Coming Soon: Open-Source Blueprints for a Tiny Nuclear Reactor
A mechanical engineer-turned-tech entrepreneur has plans to, well, empower people around the world to build their own 100-megawatt nuclear power reactors.
Smaller reactors like this one have purported benefits in safety and regulatory time, but that’s only true if the rigorous testing required of a nuclear solution ends up in their favor, and that itself will still take time.
Simple Systems Have Less Downtime
As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups, I found that the same principle that lets a 13-person crew navigate the world’s largest container ship to a port halfway around the world without breaking down also applies to startups working towards aggressive growth goals.
There’s no question things will break along the startup journey, just as surely as they do on a ship crossing the globe. However, if the onboard systems are simple, those issues won’t leave the startup drifting helplessly in the middle of the ocean.
Hackers can trick a Tesla into accelerating by 50 miles per hour
The researchers stuck a tiny and nearly imperceptible sticker on a speed limit sign. The camera read the sign as 85 instead of 35, and in testing, both the 2016 Tesla Model X and that year’s Model S sped up 50 miles per hour.
Tesla has since moved to proprietary cameras on newer models, and Mobileye EyeQ3 has released several new versions of its cameras that in preliminary testing were not susceptible to this exact attack.
“I was just shaking”—new documents reveal details of fatal Tesla crash
The case attracted wide attention because Banner had engaged Tesla's Autopilot technology. Not only that, the circumstances of Banner's death were almost identical to the first Autopilot-related death in the United States: the death of Josh Brown in 2016. Brown was also killed when Autopilot failed to stop for a semi truck crossing in front of him on a Florida highway.
The momentum of Banner's Model 3 carried the vehicle far down the road—apparently so far that Wood didn't see it when he got out of his truck. Wood says it was only a few minutes later, as he saw the lights of emergency vehicles in the distance, that he realized the awful truth.
Tesla remotely disables Autopilot on used Model S after it was sold
The company now claims that the owner of the car, who purchased it from a third-party dealer — a dealer who bought it at an auction held by Tesla itself — “did not pay” for the features and therefore is not eligible to use them.
Unbeknownst to the dealer, Tesla had independently conducted a software “audit” of the car after selling it, and disabled those features in a December update.
The value of the self-driving features that were supposed to remain active in the Model S comes out to about $8,000. Alec paid for the car under the assumption that the features were bundled into the car’s price. Tesla now says Alec has to pay the company for the features to get them re-enabled.
Smart scale goes dumb as Under Armour pulls the plug on connected tech
In an announcement dated sometime around January 8, Under Armour said that not only has the app been removed from all app stores, but the company is no longer providing customer support or bug fixes for the software, which will completely stop working as of March 31.
The company would instead go back to its roots as a clothing line and focus on actual wearables, such as connected running shoes, along with doubling down on the MyFitnessPal app, which it acquired in 2015.
Current device owners also can't export all their data. While workout data can be exported and transferred to some other tracking app, Record users cannot capture weight or other historical data to carry forward with them.
Amazon sees Alexa devices more than double in just one year
The e-commerce titan announced Monday that there are now "hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices" in customers' hands worldwide, a massive increase from the 100 million it announced last January.
One issue that may stifle Alexa's popularity is privacy. Amazon and other major voice developers faced mounting criticism last year for failing to let their users know they use human reviewers to listen to a small number of user recordings.
Ring, Amazon's video doorbell company, has also faced criticism for security lapses and its partnerships with local police departments.
We calculated emissions due to electricity loss on the power grid
We calculated that worldwide, compensatory emissions amount to nearly a billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents a year, in the same range as the annual emissions from heavy trucks or the entire chemical industry.
Surprisingly, very few countries included transmission and distribution losses in their national commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emission as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Our analysis found that only 32 countries mention grid efficiency.
Spectrum Customers Stuck With Thousands In Home Security Gear They Can't Use
Customers received a good reminder last week of why it's not worth buying home security and automation services and products from their ISP. Charter Spectrum, the nation's second biggest cable provider, has announced it's shuttering its home security services as of February.
The problem: customers spent thousands of dollars on much of this Spectrum-branded gear, and while the hardware they received supports smart home standards like Zigbee, they're built in such a way as to be locked to Charter's (soon to be nonexistent) systems, rendering them useless.