The electronic reader marketplace keeps getting more crowded: electronics retailer Best Buy has announced it will varry the DR800SG iRex Digital Reader in its U.S. retail locations this fall for a retail price of $399. The iRex Reader will compete with electronic readers from the likes of Amazon and Sony, as well as the forthcoming digital reader from Plastic Logic. However, unlike the market-leading Amazon Kindle, the iRex will have a presence in one of America’s top electronic brick-and-mortar retailers, enabling customers to get a hands-on experience with the device before buying it.
Although detailed specs aren’t available for the DR800SG iRex Digital reader, the unit sports an 8.1-inch eInk display, and will come with integrated 3G wireless connectivity that will enable users to download titles wirelessly from the Barnes & Noble electronics bookstore, and tap into newspapers via Newspapers Direct. The unit supports both Adobe PDF and the open standard Epub format, and reports have the unit supporting HSDPA wireless connectivity, meaning the unit should work on networks outside the United States; overseas connectivity will apparently be handled by Vodafone. The 3G connectivity means that, in areas where users can access good network service, books and periodicals should be very quickly downloadable.
The DR800SG will feature a touchscreen display—the unit will ship with a stylus—and users will be able to adjust the text size on the iRex Reader, as well as dynamically change the unit’s orientation.
Best Buy didn’t offer any specific date when the iRex reader would be available for sale.
iRex is a spin-off of Royal Philips Electronics.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.