Icely done, Google. Today’s Google Doodle celebrates what would have been the 112th birthday of Frank Zamboni, the creator of the Zamboni ice resurfacing machines. Remember when you used to go to the rink as a kid and got kicked off the ice so some old burly dude can make it all smooth and slippery again? With this Google Doodle game, you get to be that burly dude. And man, how I feel his pain.
The adorable little game (found straight off the Google homepage) starts with a sole ice skater making a quick loop on the rink, and it is your task to clean up after the skater’s tracks. Keep an eye on the gas tank, however, as you will run out if you drive around irrelevant parts of the rink. As the game level continues, more skaters hop on the ice (by that, I mean an actual hockey and ice dancer team of skaters), gas tanks appear to help replenish your supply, and some of the skaters have the audacity to drop ice cream cones and banana peels on your freshly-cleaned surface. Every time you finish a level and the skaters come back out to scrape your pristine rink, you’re left feeling like, “Dang it, I just cleaned this ice,” which is probably a pretty accurate depiction of what life as a Zamboni driver must have been like.
But, for all intended purposes, interactive Google Doodles are some of our favorite and the Frank Zamboni edition is no different. If you don’t feel like playing the actual game and getting into the road rage mood, I don’t blame ya. Here’s a video of what you’re missing. By the way, my one and only high score currently stands at 950 if anyone wants a crack at beating it.
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.
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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.
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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.