Microsoft has released details of the first products to ship under its new Zune brand of portable media players. The first devices will sport 30 GB hard drives, wireless sharing capabilities, and come in three colors in time for the end-of-year holiday buying season.
“The digital music entertainment revolution is just beginning,” said J. Allard, Microsoft VP of design and development. “With Zune, we are not simply delivering a portable device, we are introducing a new platform that helps bring artists closer to their audiences and helps people find new music and develop new social connections.”
The first Zune devices, made by Toshiba, will include a 30 GB hard drive, built-in FM tuner, 3-inch, 320 by 240 pixel LCD display, and offer wireless Zune-to-Zune connectivity. Users can wirelessly share full-length sample tracks of selected songs (up to three times over three days) along with homemade recordings, playlists, and images. The players will tie in directly with the Zune Marketplace, an iTunes-like online store which will serve as a purchase point for music and videos as well as a foundation for a Zune online community. Zune Marketplace will enable users to purchase tracks individually, or download as many songs as they like for a flat fee. On the format front, the Zunes look to support Windows Media (naturally), along with AAC, MP3, and H.264 video.
Zunes will be available in three colors—black, white, and brown—and will ship with pre-loaded content from EMI, Sub Pop, V2/Artemis, Quango, Ninja Tune, Astralwerks, and more.
Microsoft has also announced three accessory packs to “enhance the Zune experience.” A Car Pack lets Zune users hit the road with FM autoseek and a Zune Car Changer; a Home A/V Pack provides a dock, AC adapter, wireless remote, and AV cabling to connect Zunes to televisions, stereos, and home theater setups. Finally, a Travel Pack includes earphones, dual-connect remote, sync cable, AC adapter, and a gear bag.
What’s missing from Microsoft’s announcement? No hard numbers on prices (expect about $300), and hard dates on availability (except “in time for the holidays”). For now, we think it’s safe to assume the first Zune units will land at North American retailers before major end-of-year festivities…and they won’t be free.
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.