Ever been in a bar or a restaurant with someone who just can’t stop fidgeting with their phones? Whether they’re texting, checking in on Foursquare, or reading Facebook statuses, it’s a socially rude thing to do to those who’ve made time to hang out in person. To encourage people to drop their phones and come back to real life for a quick second, advertising agency Fischer & Friends has proposed the concept of the Offline Glass – a beer glass that will only stand up straight when placed on a phone.
The Offline Glass looks like your average wheat beer glass except that a wedge from the bottom has been cut out. This is designed for drinkers to insert their smartphones to help the glass stand up straight. With the phone needed under the glass, the drinker is restricted from touching their phones at risk of spilling their beer. Technically you could try to multitask, but using a phone with just one hand is harder now that phone sizes increase every year. Holding your beer all night long can also cause it to warm up faster, and can be tiresome.
It’s a neat idea, but not one without flaws. Smartphones generally aren’t designed to be waterproof, and everyone knows cold drinks condensate. And what if the phone has a case which makes it thicker than average, making the glass unleveled anyway? Perhaps this is a bar strategy to not only be kitschy and trendy, but also trick customers into spilling drinks more often, resulting in more sales. Whether all the clean up is worth this sale tactic is another story.
So far, the ad campaign has only taken place at a bar called Salve Jorge in San Paolo, Brazil and the agency has no plans to implement the Offline Glass elsewhere. But if you walked into a bar that uses the Offline Glass, would you find this encouraging for your real world social life? Or is it all too gimmicky and people should just accept that gadget addiction is a part of our current culture?
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.