The Download

Driverless cars need superhuman senses. And for the most part they seem to have them, in the form of lidar, radar, ultrasound, near-infrared, and other sensors. But regular cameras, often forgotten about in favor of more exotic technologies, are incredibly important given they’re used to collect data that’s used to, say, read the messages on road signs. So Sony’s new image sensor is designed to give regular camera vision a boost, too.

The new $90 IMX324 has an effective resolution of only 7.42 megapixels, which sounds small compared to your smartphone camera. But with about three times the vertical resolution of most car camera sensors, it packs a punch. It can see road signs from 160 meters away, has low-light sensitivity that allows it to see pedestrians in dark situations, and offers a trick that captures dark sections at high sensitivity but bright sections at high resolution in order to max out image recognition. The image above shows how much sharper the new tech than its predecessor from the same distance.

Don’t expect a beefed-up camera to eliminate the need for other sensors, though: even with strong low-light performance, cameras don't work well in the dark, and they can't offer the precise ranging abilities of other sensors. That means lidar and radar will remain crucial complements to humble optical cameras, however fancy they get.

Actually, maybe you should fear the Reaper. At least the one that takes the form of a freshly discovered botnet, which threatens to become far larger than the one that took down a big chunk of the Internet last year.

Researchers from Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 and Israeli firm Check Point have published details of a new botnet of things—those collections of devices hacked to work with one another to send debilitating surges of data to servers, which we named one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2017. The new one, called Reaper, is based on the Mirai botnet that caused so much havoc in October 2016.

But unlike its predecessor, which simply guessed default passwords of connected devices in order to ensnare them in its network, Reaper uses software exploits to hack into them. That could help it grow to be very large indeed. Maya Horowitz, from Check Point, tells Wired that the exploits make it “much easier to recruit into this army of devices,” and says that “millions” of pieces of hardware are already lined up for conscription by Reaper. Gulp.

The company that designed the chip in your smartphone hopes an entire industry will adopt its new set of rules to lock down connected devices.

When Japanese telecom company SoftBank acquired British chip designer Arm last year for $32 billion, it did so with an eye on more than just phones and tablets. Instead, it hoped that the firm’s chips would help it get one trillion devices online by 2035. But when we spoke to Chris Doran, Arm’s director of research collaborations, last month, he pointed out that security was by far the biggest obstacle facing that push. If there are missteps early on with security, he said, “people will lose faith, so we have to crack those problems.”

He has a point. In the past, we’ve seen hackers take control of cars, compromise children’s toys, and corral vast swaths of devices as an Internet-crippling botnet of things. Security experts have even warned Congress that the Internet of things could end up actually killing people. Connected devices aren’t exactly what you’d call secure, and until now the only real suggestions to improve the state of affairs has been heightening consumer awareness.

But Arm hopes that a new system, called Platform Security Architecture, will change that. Essentially, it’s a set of free, open-source documents and code that define how a device’s software and firmware should be designed to make it secure—a kind of checklist and corresponding set of tools that should, in theory, help device makers build wares that are harder to hack.

Among its recommendations will be that firms use security certificates rather than passwords on connected hardware, so that hackers can’t use default passwords to easily take control of large numbers of devices. It will also suggest that all hardware be equipped to receive over-the-air software updates, so that security flaws can be patched with little effort. And, among other things, it will urge manufacturers to use better forms of hardware identification, so that a device’s credentials can’t be spoofed.

These may sound like commonsense safeguards. But they are all addressing problems that currently leave many devices wide open to attack.

Arm is hoping that by providing checklists and source code to the industry for free, it will be able to get device makers, many of which currently pay little attention to security, to lock down their devices. “This will reduce cost to the industry, making it affordable even in low-cost microcontrollers,” explained Rob Coombs, IoT security director at Arm, in a telephone briefing ahead of the announcement.

So far, big names like Google, Baidu, Cisco, and Sprint have already decided to “endorse or support” the platform, whatever that means. But, as Arm well knows, it will need everyone to get on board if the vision of a trillion secure connected devices can become a reality. And it remains to seen whether “free” will be cheap enough for some device makers.

Previous complaints about the complexity of the task appear to be crumbling, at least a little.

Last month, British prime minister Theresa May called for tech firms “to go further and faster in automating the detection and removal of terrorist content online.” At the time, Alphabet’s general counsel said that would be a struggle, because the “haystacks are unimaginably large and the needles are both very small and constantly changing.”

Now, something’s changed. At least that's the news coming out of this week’s G7 talks in Ischia, Italy. The talks, which involve officials from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.S., appear to have included a session with representatives from Google, Facebook, and Twitter. And, according to the BBC, the tech firms  agreed to “do more to remove extremist content within hours of it being posted.”

Speaking to the news agency AFP, Italy’s interior minister, Marco Minniti, said that “these are the first steps towards a great alliance in the name of freedom.” So far, though, it’s not clear what the steps actually are: the only official word seems to be from Twitter’s public policy team, which tweeted that it had an “important and productive conversation on tackling shared objectives” with G7 ministers.

It’s unlikely that the Internet firms have suddenly achieved a step-change in the way they automatically identify extremist content online. But a commitment to buckle down is still progress compared with gesticulating at just how hard a problem it is to solve.

Forget the stores; just grab your headset. Retail Dive reports that the world's biggest retailer held a glitzy gala event in Los Angeles Thursday night to showcase the way it thinks people will buy its wares in the future. And that way, it seems, is virtually—because Walmart's in-house innovation team, Store No. 8, rounded up a bunch of VR, 3-D imaging, and immersive-content startups to show off as part of its quest to redefine consumerism.

The Washington Post, which also reported on the event, describes some of the applications that Walmart thinks could be a hit with its customers. How about taking a 3-D picture of yourself on a smartphone, then seeing different outfits draped over your torso in VR? Stepping into a virtual shop with matching virtual sales assistants to help you choose what to buy? Or visualizing the hazards around your home so you can make things safer for your curious child?

Sure, those aren't bad ideas. But Walmart is certainly not the first to see augmented and virtual reality as the future of shopping, and yet it's not really developed beyond a concept so far. One of biggest hurdles right now, of course, it the total lack of adoption that VR has so far achieved among the public.

The other, as Store No. 8's chief Katie Finnegan tells Retail Dive, is the tech itself. "VR is still a clunky experience from a user perspective," she says. "There's a lot of wire, the field of view is still not really great. Sometimes there is a slight delay which causes some people to describe this as a seasick feeling, but it's going away drastically."

A lot of people, and not just retailers, are hoping those headaches are eased, and soon. But even if they are, will consumers buy the idea of buying in VR?

So says a study by the Lancet, which found that one in every six deaths around the world is linked to toxic air, water, soil, or workplaces. That’s more deaths than are caused annually by smoking, AIDS, or malaria.

Sadly, though perhaps predictably, 92 percent of those deaths occur in poor nations. That’s a problem exacerbated by the fact that international welfare costs linked to pollution are estimated to total $4.6 trillion a year, which places particular strain on developing economies. And all these figures may be an underestimate, the researchers note, because many links between health and pollution remain too poorly defined to be included in the analysis.

The report shows that so-called “traditional” forms of pollution, such as water contamination and poor indoor air quality from cooking over open fires, are in decline, thanks to development initiatives meant to increase basic living standards. But “modern” pollution, from such sources as fossil-fuel power plants and internal-combustion engines, continues to rise.

Tech advances may help with that. As we’ve reported in the past, for instance, the expense of renewables is outweighed by the savings they provide inthe form of improved public health, while a push toward electric cars could soon begin to clean up city air. But in practice, governments will need to make firm commitments to encouraging the rollout of such technologies if they’re to have a noticeable impact.

Given its push to quickly roll back environmental regulations, the news should, perhaps, give the Trump administration cause to shift uncomfortably in its seat. “Should” being the operative word.

Robotic earth movers are starting to break ground.

A startup called Built Robotics, founded by an ex-Google engineer and currently backed by $15 million of venture capital, has announced that it’s currently building a robotic tractor that digs and moves earth. Wired explains that the vehicle uses special heavy-duty, vibration-proof lidar sensors and GPS to help it navigate construction yards. A stack of computers in a roof-mounted box allow it to make sense of what it sees, so that it can dig up a site according to a set of coordinates from building plans.

Built Robotics is not alone in blending autonomy and heavy equipment. Elsewhere, Cyngn—the company formerly known as Cyanogen, which used to make ultra-nerdy alternative Android operating systems for smartphones—is also rumored to be trying its hand at automating vehicles. According to Recode, the firm, which is still in stealth mode, may also be developing the technology required to make self-driving construction equipment.

And some mining companies are already rolling out driverless trucks in quarries. Those made by the Japanese firm Komatsu, for example, find their way around using precision GPS and look out for obstacles using radar and laser sensors.

The FDA has approved its second CAR-T cell therapy. This kind of treatment, which reprograms the DNA of a patient's T immune cells so that they attack cancer, has shown huge early success in trials and is widely anticipated to change the way many variants of the disease are dealt with in the future.

The lucky recipient of the new license to sell is Kite Pharma, and the therapy, called Yescarta, has been developed to treat specific types of the blood cancer non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It's particularly heartening news for the pharmaceutical firm Gilead Sciences, which put up a cool $11.9 billion to acquire Kite Pharma in August.

Second place is sometimes said to be the first loser. That would seem especially so here, given that the first treatment to be approved, earlier this year, was Novartis's Kymriah—another CAR-T therapy thattargets a kind of blood cancer, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

But consider this: even though both therapies treat blood cancer, Novartis's can theoretically treat around 600 people a year, while Kite's could benefit as many as 7,500. At $373,000 a time for a treatment of Yescarta, that could prove very lucrative indeed.

Over 15 miles from the coast of Scotland, a wind power project could foreshadow a major part of our clean-energy future. Hywind Scotland, situated in Buchan Deep, is the world’s first floating wind farm, with its five six-megawatt turbines now generating electricity. On shore, a one-megawatt-hour lithium battery also helps smooth its potentially erratic supply of electricity to the grid.

The project, which is a collaboration between the Norwegian oil firm Statoil and Masdar Abu Dhabi Future Energy, makes use of turbine towers that are 253 meters tall, with 78 meters of that submerged in the North Sea. Each tower is tethered using three cables that are anchored to the seabed. 

Floating wind farms far out at sea hold a lot of promise for future energy generation. A recent analysis showed that they operate more efficiently than those on land or close to the coast, to the extent that three million square kilometers of floating wind turbines could supply the entire world’s current energy demand. It’s also a concept that’s catching on elsewhere, with a scheme similar to the Scottish project under consideration in California.

The sticking point, for now at least, is cost. Bloomberg reports that the Buchan Deep project cost a total of $263 million to complete. It currently receives $185 per megawatt-hour of subsidies from the British government, on top of the $65 per megawatt-hour it earns for the wholesale price of the electricity it creates. In other words, it’s damned expensive.

Statoil says that it hopes floating wind farms could produce energy for between $50 and $70 per megawatt-hour by 2030. That’s terribly ambitious—but if it manages the feat, expect to see more wind turbines popping up in the middle of the ocean before long.

And, frankly, it’s about damn time. If you’ve been following the swift progress being made in using drones for commercial applications like delivery, you’ll have noticed few of the trials ever take place in the U.S. Iceland, Switzerland, Britain, Australia, Rwanda, Tanzania? Sure. But America, not so much.

Now, though, Bloomberg reports that CNN has received the first FAA waiver to let it perform unlimited drone flights over people. David Vigilante, senior vice president of legal for CNN, tells Bloomberg that it “signifies a critical step forward not only for CNN’s [unmanned aerial system] operations, but also the commercial UAS industry at large.”

That’s because while the FAA’s chief has admitted that the government needs to move fast in order to help the nascent industry grow, the agency has done little to push things forward so far. Rules introduced in 2016 made it easier for drone operators to make low-risk, low-altitude flights, but waivers are still required for flying over crowds, at night, and even out of an operator's line of sight.

The FAA is worried, predominantly, about collisions and crashes. But sensing, drone flight control, and crash safety are all improving, which only serves to make American authorities look like even greater laggards. The news from CNN, though, provides some hope that this could change—at some point, at least.