Paranoid about stores, banks, and airlines recognizing your face and recording your spending habits or social network activities the moment you step into a venue? Strap this privacy visor on and you’ll become virtually undetectable by computers. Who’s smarter now, robots?
The privacy visor prototype unveiled earlier this week at Tokyo’s National Institute of Informatics, using near-infrared sensors to essentially confuse facial recognition software from, well, recognizing you. In total, the visor sport 11 LED light that surround your main facial features: Eyes and nose. Since the infrared sensors sit on the visor before your eyes, the lights won’t do much to affect your vision and instead obscure camera sensors from reading your face.
“As a result of developments in facial recognition technology in Google images, Facebook, etc. and the popularization of portable terminals that append photos with photographic information [geotags]… essential measures for preventing the invasion of privacy caused by photographs taken in secret and unintentional capture in camera images is now required,” Professor Isao Echizen of the privacy visor design team explained.
While there are no words on whether the privacy visors will ever hit the market, BBC does advise cheap alternatives for those who still don’t want stores and banks creeping around with your face.
“Heavy make-up or a mask will also work, as will tilting your head at a 15-degree angle, which fools the software into thinking you do not have a face, according to an online guide produced by hacktivist group Anonymous,” the article says. Now envision yourself walking into every store in the mall with your head lopsided or pretending to attend a masquerade ball. To that, we bid good luck to you, paranoid friends. The privacy visor will work fashionable well with those handcrafted tinfoil hats we know you have hiding in your bedside drawer.
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.