Microsoft wants Zune customers—and, of course, the multitude of potential Zune customers—that the ecosystem for accessories and peripheral products to enhance and augment the experience of Microsoft’s Zune is alive and well. To that end, Microsoft is not only blowing the horns of of partners who’ve made accessories that work with Zune portable media players, but it’s seeding the market with its own collection of accessories, which are now available at retail.
“Zune is committed to providing customers with choice,” said Zune senior director of product development Scott Erickson, in a statement. “By working only with licensed partners, we ensure that consumers have everything they need to enjoy a seamless, end-to-end Zune experience—Microsoft is one of the few companies that can offer this depth of support.”
Zune accessories now available from Microsoft under the Zune brand are:
Microsoft is also offering Zune Premium Headphones ($39.99; the same ones that ship with the 80 GB Zune), Zune Leather Cases ($49.99, for the flash-based Zune, 30 GB Zune, and 80 GB Zune), plus extra sync cables and AC adapters.
Microsoft’s Zune accessories should all be available at retailers in early November; some are available now.
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.