What if sandwiched between the Cheetos and gum the next time you walked up to a vending machine you also had the option of buying marijuana, a beer, or a handgun? Well, that is a real possibility thanks to a so-called “smart vending machine” developed by American Green, a Phoenix-based company working on technological advancements in the legal cannabis industry.
Yes, weed is why the company decided the world needs this vending machine — but the machine itself is designed to sell just about anything that you’d otherwise have to buy from a human who can verify you’re of a certain age, have a necessary prescription, or have a clean enough history to purchase a firearm.
How? Well, for starters, you’ll have to register online with an official ID so that American Green knows who you say you are. You then couple your profile with your vein architecture. A biometric vein scanner on the front seems like it takes your fingerprint, but developers insist vein architecture, as in how the veins are stacked, shaped, and run through your finger, is an equally unique attribute. Plus, unlike a fingerprint, which can be spoofed in a few ways, vein scanners are harder to cheat, and wont work if someone decides they’re willing to cut your finger off to get your share of weed or alcohol or whatever.
American Green says it’s just producing the vending machines, and that it’s up to the actual vendors to determine what goes inside and fight whatever legal battles come with, say, putting an unmanned box full of guns on the street. Creators say, though, that with its sturdy construction, extra layers of metal, a camera up front, and an alarm that’s trigger the second someone starts messing with it; this vending machine is at least as safe as a convenience store — if not more.
The company insists you’ll start seeing these out in the wild in as soon as a couple months as it finalizes talks with some casinos, professional sports teams, and marijuana dispensaries.
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.