At a conference for online advertisers at its Redmond headquarters today, computing titan Microsoft plans to announce it’s bringing video back to its MSN online service, this time focussing on free made-for-MSN programming dubbed “MSN Originals.”
The shows will be produced in conjunction with Hollywood production company Reveille (behind The Office, as well as reality shows The Biggest Loser and Bravo’s Blow Out) and Be Jane, a producer of branded women’s home-improvement and do-it-yourself programming.
MSN Originals ties in directly with Microsoft’s efforts to increase traffic flow (and eyeballs) for advertising revenue carried on the service, and to that end advertisers will have an opportunity to be integrated with the new MSN programming beginning at the early stages of production.
Microsoft produced its own in-house “shows” for MSN back in the mid-1990s before online advertising was a major force on the Internet, but drifted away from the idea when the shows, for the most part, failed to catch on, in part due to the limited bandwidth available to most MSN users at the time. This time around, nearly half of U.S. Internet households have access to broadband, and Microsoft is partnering with established production houses to make the content, rather than doing it themselves.
No date for MSN Originals has been announced, although shows produced by Be Jane could appear as early as mid-2006. Microsoft’s multi-million dollar deal with Reveille gives them first-look at any Internet programming developed by the company in the next year.
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.