IEEE 1394, also known as FireWire and Sony’s i.LINK interface, isn’t just for PC’s anymore. According to In-Stat, IEEE 1394 is working its way into more CE products, like your television, DVD player, and set-top boxes. The older 1394a spec which provides 400 Megabits/second of bandwidth, is the interface often being used for new CE products, while the newer, higher bandwidth 1394b which supports 800 Megabit/second of data, is starting to make its way onto PC motherboards.
“Recent member surveys indicate that all the leading CE manufacturers are taking advantage of 1394 as they develop new generations of HDTVs, set top boxes, digital video recorders, and other innovative new products,” says James Snider, executive director of the 1394 Trade Association.
Who needs HDMI when you can use FireWire?
In-Stat also found the following:
— 2004 saw the first release of 1394 in the automotive market;
— The 1394c specification is close to completion;
— Devices with Wireless 1394, a specification to transmit 1394 wirelessly over Ultra Wideband, should begin to hit the market in 2006.
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.