A few high-end cars already come with technology that will issue a warning—or even brake automatically—if the dashboard computer thinks a crash is imminent. Now, for those of us who can't afford this luxury extra, there's a smart-phone app that aims to do something similar.

iOnRoad for Android detect and tracks cars on the road ahead using a phone's camera and machine vision software. It also draws on a phone's GPS, accelerometer, and orientation sensors to calculate the distance to other cars, and the speed at which they are traveling.

Just place your device in a mount on the dashboard and start up the app. Then your phone will diligently watch the road ahead, and beep a warning if you get too close to the vehicle ahead, alerting you to hastily brake before any damage occurs.

iOnRoad is a clever idea, and it highlights just how powerful and capable smart phones have become. Just few years ago, such an app would struggle on the fastest smart phone.

In practice, however, I found it a bit distracting. During a drive to Cape Cod last week, with the phone mounted beneath the GPS, my windshield felt cluttered. I kept glancing at the phone whenever a car outline changed from green to yellow (depending on how close I was), in addition to checking the GPS. With continued use of the app my eyes would probably stop drifting over to check how far away each vehicle was. Thankfully, I didn't get into any near-collisions, and the road was pretty traffic-free.

The app can also work in background mode, so it'll only sound and show a warning if it detects an imminent collision. So iOnRoad could run behind a GPS app while driving.

The Israeli company behind the app, Picitup, has previously created vision recognition software for to automatically cataloging products (which eBay uses). At first, iOnRoad will be free; and it will be available next month.

The app is programmed to beep if the user is tailgating (at speeds over 10 mph) or if it detects the user is under .7 seconds from crashing (with an accuracy of .1 to .2 seconds). It also has night vision mode, though I wonder how well it could make out cars in foggy or snowy conditions.

"I think early warning systems are likely to take the same track [as GPS]," Alon Atsmon, CEO of Picitup. "It starts in high-end cars and moves into dedicated devices and smart phones."

He may be right, and overall I think this type of technology could help save lives. But I can't help wondering if the proliferation of collision-avoidance technology might also breed less careful drivers.

Images courtesy of Picitup

On the heels of the announcement of Google Wallet yesterday, PayPal and eBay have filed a lawsuit (pdf) against the company and two former employees who are now Google's leads on mobile payment system, for poaching employee PayPal employees and sharing secrets with Google. Just hours after the announcement, PayPal wrote on its blog:

We treat PayPal's "secrets" seriously, and take it personally when someone else doesn't. So we made a decision today. We filed a lawsuit against Google and two former colleagues who now work there, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius.

Tilenius, Google's vice president of commerce, previously worked at PayPal and eBay. She is accused of poaching Bedier while he was PayPal's Vice President of Platform, Mobile, and New Ventures.

The two announced Google Wallet yesterday.

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch posted Google's response to the lawsuit:

"Silicon Valley was built on the ability of individuals to use their knowledge and expertise to seek better employment opportunities, an idea recognized by both California law and public policy. We respect trade secrets, and will defend ourselves against these claims."

Schonfeld suggests this is a knee-jerk reaction from PayPal, and points out this isn't the first of employment disputes in Silicon Valley:

When Apple poached IBM's Mark Papermaster to head up its chip development, IBM sued. The two companies eventually settled out of court. In many ways, this is a PR move on PayPal's part more than anything else. It is not like they are going to get an injunction to stop Google from going into mobile payments. But it's a bad PR move because it shows exactly how scared they are that Google is going to succeed.

Though malware is not yet common on mobile phones, experts are taking a hard look at how it could appear down the road, hoping to find solutions before real attacks emerge.

Researchers from Rutgers University recently identified a series of possible attacks on smart phones, including one that would grant the attacker the ability to eavesdrop on a user. They will present these proof-of-concept attacks tomorrow at HotMobile 2010, a conference taking place in Annapolis, MD.

The researchers didn't exploit any vulnerabilities to get it onto the phone--instead, they pre-installed a rootkit. This is a piece of software that buries itself deep in a device's operating system, where it can take control of most of the software running on the machine. Though there are some legitimate uses for rootkits, for the most part they're a particularly nasty type of malware.

The researchers demonstrate their system on the NeoFreeRunner phone, running the open-source software stack OpenMoko. Their attacks used malicious text messages to give instructions to the rootkit. Because the rootkit is able to control so much of the phone's software, it could hide the text messages from the legitimate user and carry out instructions without interference.

In one attack, the researchers instructed the phone to call a specified number, which might allow them to use the smart phone to listen in on a confidential meeting attended by the legitimate user. They were also able to instruct the phone to report its location to the attacker, and to drain its battery by turning on energy-hogging features without the user's knowledge.

The Rutgers researchers believe that smart phones will soon need to have tools for detecting rootkits and other malicious software. This could be a challenge, they say, because the algorithms used to search for such software use a lot of processing power and would reduce battery life. So they propose offloading that processing to the service provider, following the model of cloud-based antivirus that has been gaining traction on desktop computers.