Microsoftseems to be planning to support audio books from Audible.com on its Zune line of portable media players by the end of 2008. According to sources at both companies, Microsoft and Audible have worked out a deal that will enable Microsoft to support Audible’s audio book format. Neither company has offered any information on when Audible support might be available to Zune owners, save to note that it should be available by the end of 2008 (by which point, Microsoft will also no doubt have debuted new Zune models.
There’s also no word about whether Microsoft will offer Audible.com books for sale directly in the Zune Marketplace, or whether users will be able to purchase them through other venues (potentially including Amazon.com, which acquired Audible for $300 million earlier this year) or even Apple’s iTunes store. Apple’s iPod has long supported Audible’s audiobook format, contributing to the iPod’s popularity among audiobook listeners.
No details are yet available about how Zune’s might support Audible audiobooks: presumably bookmarking and chapter markers will be supported, but it seems unlikely Zune users would be allowed to share limited plays of Audible.com content with other Zune owners. In other works, audiobooks will likely remain a “non-social” activity.
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.