Tech News - IoT and Hardware

Yesterday, Uber and GM Cruise announced that they are open sourcing their respective Autonomous Visualization Systems (AVS). It is a new way for the industry to understand and share its data. AVS has become a new standard for describing and visualizing autonomous vehicle perception, motion, and planning data while offering a web-based toolkit for building applications. AVS makes it easier for developers to make a decision with respect to their development. It is free for users, so it might encourage developers to come up with interesting developments for the autonomous industry. AVS acts as a standardized visualization layer that frees developers from building custom visualization software for their autonomous vehicles. Developers can now focus on core autonomy capabilities for drive systems, remote assistance, mapping, and simulation, with the help of AVS abstracting visualization. There is a need to have operators understand why their cars make certain decisions. The visualization system helps engineers to break out and playback certain trip intervals for closer inspection. AV operators rely on off-the-shelf visualization systems that aren’t designed with self-driving cars in mind. They are usually limited to bulky desktop computers that are difficult to navigate. Uber has taken a move towards its web-based visualization platform so operators don’t have to learn complex computer graphics and data visualization. Uber opted for XVIZ and streetscape.gl Autonomous vehicle development is rapidly evolving with new services, data sets, and many use cases that require new solutions. The team at Uber had unique requirements that needed to be addressed. The team wanted to manage the data while retaining performance comparable to desktop-based systems. So the team built a system around two key pieces: XVIZ, that provides the data (including management and specification) and streetscape.gl which is the component toolkit to power web applications. Uber’s new tool seems to be more geared to AV operators specifically. While talking about its Autonomous Visualization System, the company said, “It is a customizable web-based platform that allows self-driving technology developers — big or small — to transform their vehicle data into an easily digestible visual representation of what the vehicle is seeing in the real world.” XVIZ XVIZ provides a stream-oriented view of a scene changing over time and also a user interface display system. Users can randomly seek and understand the state of the world at that point. Just like an HTML document, it’s presentation is focused and structured according to a schema that allows for introspection. It also allows for easy exploration and interrogation of the data. streetscape.gl streetscape.gl is a toolkit used for developing web applications that consume data in the XVIZ protocol. It also offers components for visualizing XVIZ streams in 3D viewports, charts, tables, videos, and more. It addresses common visualization challenges such as time synchronization across data streams, coordinate systems, cameras, dynamic styling, and interaction with 3D objects and cross components. Voyage co-founder Warren Ouyang said, “We’re excited to use Uber’s autonomous visualization system and collaborate on building better tools for the community going forward.” Last week, in a Medium post, Cruise introduced its graphics library of two- and three-dimensional scenes called “Worldview.” It provides 2D and 3D cameras, keyboard and mouse movement controls, click interaction, and a suite of built-in drawing commands. Developers can build custom visualizations easily, without having to learn complex graphics APIs or write wrappers to make them work with React. In a statement to Medium, Cruise said, “We hope Worldview will lower the barrier to entry into the powerful world of WebGL, giving web developers a simple foundation and empowering them to build more complex visualizations.” Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI toolkit that simplifies training deep learning models for non-experts Automation and Robots – Trick or Treat? Home Assistant: an open source Python home automation hub to rule all things smart  

Last month, Firedome Inc announced the launch of the world’s first endpoint cybersecurity solutions portfolio, specifically tailored to home IoT companies and manufacturers. Firedome has developed business models that allow companies to implement top-quality endpoint cybersecurity solutions to close critical security gaps that are a byproduct of the IoT era. Home IoT devices are susceptible to cyber attacks due to the lack of regulation and budget limitations. Cryptojacking, DDoS and ransomware attacks are only a few examples of cyber crimes threaten the smart home ecosystem and consumer privacy. The low margins in this industry have led to manufacturers facing trouble in implementing high-end cybersecurity solutions. Features of ‘Firedome ‘Endpoint Protection’ solution: A lightweight software agent that can easily be added to any connected device (during the manufacturing process or later on, ‘over the air’), A cloud-based AI engine that collects and analyzes aggregated data from multiple fleets around the world, produces insights from each attack (or attack attempt) and optimizes them across the board. An accompanying 24/7 SOC team that responds to alerts, runs security researches and supports Firedome customers. Firedome solution adds a dynamic layer of protection and is not only designed to prevent attacks from occurring in the first place but also to identify attack attempts and respond to breaches in real time, thereby eliminating damage potential until a firmware update is released. The Firedome Home Solution enables industry players to provide their consumers with cyber protection and security insights for the entire home network. Moti Shkolnik, Firedome’s Co-founder and CEO says that: “We are very excited to formally launch our suite of services and solutions for the home IoT industry and we strongly believe they have the potential of changing the Home IoT cybersecurity landscape. Device companies and other ecosystem players are craving a solution that is tailored to their needs and business constraints, a solution that will address the vulnerability that is so evident in endpoint devices. Home IoT devices are becoming a commodity and the industry must address these vulnerabilities sooner rather than later. That’s why our solution is a ‘must-have’ rather than a ‘nice-to-have’” These solutions provided by Firedome has led to its selection by Universal Electronics Inc., the worldwide leader in universal control and sensing technologies for the smart home, to provide Cybersecurity Features to the Nevo® Butler Digital Assistant Platform product. To know more about this news in detail, head over to Firedome’s official website. California passes the U.S.’ first IoT security bill IoT Forensics: Security in an always connected world where things talk AWS IoT Greengrass extends functionality with third-party connectors, enhanced security, and more

Last week, Intel released a big patch series to introduce the concept of memory regions to the Intel Linux graphics driver, which is being added to the Intel "i915" Linux kernel DRM driver. Intel stated that these patches were in “preparation for upcoming devices with device local memory”, without giving out any specific details of these “upcoming devices”. It was in December 2018, that Intel had made its plans clear that it's working on everything from integrated GPUs and discrete graphics for gaming to GPUs for data centers. Fast forward to 2019, Intel is now testing the drivers required to make them run. Phoronix was the first to speculate that this device-local memory was for Intel's discrete graphics cards with dedicated vRAM; expected to debut in 2020. Specifying their motivations behind the release of the new patches, Intel tweeted: https://twitter.com/IntelGraphics/status/1096537915222642689 Amongst other features once implemented, the patches will allow a system to: Have different "regions" of memory for system memory as for any device local memory (LMEM). Introduce a simple allocator and allow the existing GEM memory management code to allocate memory to different memory regions. Providing fake LMEM (local memory) regions to exercise a new code path. These patches will lay the groundwork for Linux support for the upcoming dedicated GPU’s. According to Phoronix’s Michael Larabel, "With past generations of Intel graphics, we generally see the first Linux kernel patches roughly a year or so out from the actual hardware debut." Twitter users have expressed enthusiasm towards this announcement: https://twitter.com/benjamimgois/status/1096544747597037571 https://twitter.com/ebound/status/1096498313392783360 You can head over to Freedesktop.org to have a look at these patches. Researchers prove that Intel SGX and TSX can hide malware from antivirus software Uber releases AresDB, a new GPU-powered real-time Analytics Engine TensorFlow team releases a developer preview of TensorFlow Lite with new mobile GPU backend support

The WoA Installer for Raspberry Pi 3 enables installing Windows 10 on the credit card size computer. The WoA Installer for Raspberry Pi 3 is made by the same members who brought Windows 10 ARM to the Lumia 950 and 950 XL. Where to start? To get started, you need Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or B+, a microSD card of at least class 1, and a Windows 10 ARM64 Image which you can get from GitHub. You also need a recent version of Windows 10 and .NET Framework 4.6.1. The WoA Installer is just a tool which helps you to deploy Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 3. WoA Installer needs the Core Package in order to run. You can find them listed on the GitHub page. Specification comparison Regarding specifications, the minimum requirements for Windows 10 is: Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC. RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit. Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS The Raspberry Pi 3B+ has specifications just good enough to run Windows 10: SoC: Broadcom BCM2837B0 quad-core A53 (ARMv8) 64-bit @ 1.4GHz RAM: 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM While this sounds good, a Hacker news user points out: “Caution: To do this you need to run a rat's nest of a batch file that runs a bunch of different code obtained from the web. If you're going to try this, try on devices you don't care about. Or spend innumerable hours auditing code. Pass -- for now.” You can check out the GitHub page for more instructions. Raspberry Pi opens its first offline store in England Introducing Strato Pi: An industrial Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi launches it last board for the foreseeable future: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ available now at $25

The Android Things platform was launched in 2018 to power third-party smart displays and other speakers. Last year, a number of major manufacturers, including, Lenovo, JBL, and LG Smart Displays, released Smart Displays and speakers powered by Android Things. With the success achieved because of the smart displays and speakers over the past year, Google is now refocusing Android Things as a platform for OEM partners to build devices in those categories with Assistant built-in. They announced an update to Android Things in a blog post by Dave Smith, Developer Advocate for IoT, yesterday. Android Things uses the Android Things SDK on top of hardware like the NXP i.MX7D and Raspberry Pi 3B. According to Google’s blog post, Android Things is a platform for experimenting with and building smart connected devices. System images will be available through the Android Things console where developers can easily create new builds and push app updates for up to 100 devices for non-commercial use. Though, support for production System on Modules (SoMs) based on NXP, Qualcomm, and MediaTek hardware won’t be available through the public developer platform currently. This refocus doesn’t seem to be on lines with Google’s original vision for Android Things which is Internet-of-Things. Even Google’s Internet-of-Things OS called Brillo got rebranded to Android Things in late 2016. The focus seems to be on smart displays and smart speakers now. https://twitter.com/stshank/status/1095434162977165312 Google’s official post states that the team will continue to provide the platform for IoT devices, including turnkey hardware solutions. It is also pushing developers interested in turnkey hardware solutions to Cloud IoT Core for secure device connectivity at scale and the upcoming Cloud IoT Edge runtime for managed edge computing services. Google hasn’t stated any reasons for the shift of Android Things from general purpose IoT devices to smart displays and speakers, but the rising competition could be one of the reasons. According to a few users, it is bad news as Google keeps killing its good projects. https://twitter.com/aliumujib/status/1095416461345124352 https://twitter.com/gregoriopalama/status/1095591673445433344 Google announces the general availability of a new API for Google Docs Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Youtube promises o reduce recommendations of ‘conspiracy theory’. Ex-googler explains why this is a ‘historic victory’

Raspberry Pi has opened a retail brick and mortar store in Cambridge, England. The mini computer maker has always sold its products online and ships to many countries. This offline store is a first for the company. Located at the Grand Arcade shopping, the Raspberry Pi store was started yesterday. It is not just a boring store with Raspberry Pi boards. Their collection includes boards, full setups with monitors, keyboards and mouses for demo, books, mugs and even soft toys with Raspberry branding. You can see some of the pictures of the new store here: https://twitter.com/Raspberry_Pi/status/1093454153534398464 A user shared his observation of the store on HackerNews: “I had a minute to check it out over lunch - most of the floorspace is dedicated to demonstrating what the raspberry pi can do at a high level. They had stations for coding, gaming, sensors, etc. but only ~1/4th of the space was devoted to inventory. They have a decent selection of Pis, sensor kits, and accessories. Not everyone working there was technical. This is definitely aimed at the general public.” Raspberry Pi has a strong online community with people coming up with various DIY projects. But the community is limited to people who have a keen interest on. More stores like this will help familiarize more people with Raspberry Pi. With branded books, demos, and toys this store is aimed to popularize the mini computer. Introducing Strato Pi: An industrial Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi launches it last board for the foreseeable future: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ available now at $25 Introducing Raspberry Pi TV HAT, a new addon that lets you stream live TV

Last week, Western Digital made Verilog sources for its open source RISC-V core publically available on GitHub under Apache 2.0. What is SweRV Core? ‘SweRV Core’ was made by Western Digital for internal use which they decided to contribute to the open source community. The SweRV Core is a 32-bit, nine stage pipeline core which is two-way superscalar. It is small in size and has a simulation performance of up to 4.9 CoreMarks/Mhz. SweRV Core comes supports data-intensive applications like storage controllers, industrial IoT devices, real-time analytics in surveillance systems etc., Running on a 28mm CMOS battery, the power-efficient design has clock speeds up to 1.8Ghz. This core will be seen in future and upcoming WD products. Martin Fink, CTO of Western Digital, says to the Business Wire: “As Big Data and Fast Data continues to proliferate, purpose-built technologies are essential for unlocking the true value of data across today’s wide-ranging data-centric applications. Our SweRV Core and the new cache coherency fabric initiative demonstrate the significant possibilities that can be realized by bringing data closer to processing power.” What do you need for SweRV Core? Verilator 3.926 or newer Espresso needs to be installed if you want to add or remove instructions To start using it, Core clone the GitHub repo, setup RV_ROOT pointing to the path of your system, and run make with tools/Makefile. Last year Western Digital had also open-sourced SweRV Instruction Set Simulator (ISS). It is a program for designers to simulate code on SweRV core. Optionally, you can determine your config before running make. To get started, you can check out the GitHub repository. The Linux and RISC-V foundations team up to drive open source development and adoption of RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) A libre GPU effort based on RISC-V, Rust, LLVM and Vulkan by the developer of an earth-friendly computer LLVM officially migrating to GitHub from Apache SVN

Last week, the AMD team released v-2019.Q1.2 version of AMD Open Source for Vulkan (AMDVLK). This release comes with fairly small updates including a DXVK fix, one new Vulkan extension, and some more updates. What’s new in v-2019.Q1.2 The XGL code exposes YUV planes directly to allow applications to implement their own color conversion. Symbols are now not included when building the driver in its release confirmation, which could help with performance. The default WgpMode is updated from wgp to cu The performance regression introduced by the updates that added support for the LOAD_INDEX path for handling pipeline binds is now fixed. AMDVLK architecture: The following diagram shows its architecture: Souce: GitHub AMD open-sourced AMDVLK in 2017, which was earlier the part of AMDGPU-PRO driver. It is a Vulkan driver for Radeon graphics adapters on Linux and is built on top of AMD’s Platform Abstraction Library (PAL). PAL provides hardware and OS abstractions for Radeon (GCN+) user-mode 3D graphics drivers. It also provides users with a consistent experience across platforms, including support for recently released GPUs and compatibility with AMD developer tools. As PAL does not come with a shader compiler, clients are expected to use an external compiler library that targets PAL's Pipeline ABI to produce compatible shader binaries. Shaders compile a VkPipeline object as a single entity by shaders using the LLVM-Based Pipeline Compiler (LLPC) library. LLPC is built on the existing shader compilation infrastructure of LLVM for AMD GPUs to generate code objects that are compatible with PAL’s pipeline ABI. To know more in detail about AMDVLK, you can check out its GitHub repository. AMD ROCm GPUs now support TensorFlow v1.8, a major milestone for AMD’s deep learning plans AMD open sources V-EZ, the Vulkan wrapper library AMD’s $293 million JV with Chinese chipmaker Hygon starts production of x86 CPUs

Last week, Google decided to stop manufacturing its audio dongle, Chromecast Audio that allowed users to connect speakers to their Google cast setup since the company has a variety of new audio products for users.The remaining stock of the Chromecast Audio is being sold for $15 instead of $35. The Chromecast Audio dongle is designed such that it could be plugged to a regular speaker via a 3.5 mm audio cable. The device works smoothly as it can get audio from plenty of apps at a louder volume without resorting to Bluetooth. In 2015, Chromecast Audio was launched along with the second-generation Chromecast. Over the years, the Chromecast Audio evolved and also featured multi-room support. Google will still support its Chromecast Audio users for the time being. In a statement to TechCrunch, Google said, “Our product portfolio continues to evolve, and now we have a variety of products for users to enjoy audio. We have therefore stopped manufacturing our Chromecast Audio products. We will continue to offer assistance for Chromecast Audio devices, so users can continue to enjoy their music, podcasts and more.” It seems Google is more inclined towards getting people to purchase its home products, Google Assistant or cast enabled speakers from its partners. Users are giving mixed reviews to this news. Few users are now scared to invest in Google products as they think, Google often cans its products. One of the users, commented on HackerNews, “Google is really developing a reputation for starting and canning projects. I’d recommend not getting too invested in their products when possible.” Google has previously shut down a lot of services in recent years, with the latest one being the ‘Inbox’ which will shut in March, this year. Users were also unhappy when Google decided to discontinue Google Reader in 2013. But this somewhere hints Google’s tendency of shutting down its popular products. One of the comments on HackerNews, reads, “Google Reader was damn useful and is a poster child of Google's habit of hyping up useful products and then canning them.”  Few users are still in support of Google and its decision. One of the users commented, “I don't know who out there is heavily invested in a $35 audio dongle. I love mine, but it still works just as well today as it did yesterday and not being able to order more isn't causing me any anxiety.” Another user commented, “The 3-something year old hardware dongle is no longer being made, that's it. That's the entirety of the news. The Cast project as a whole is not being canned. Cast-enabled speakers, receivers, etc... are all still widely available from a wide number of manufacturers, that's not changing.” TLS comes to Google public DNS with support for DNS-over-TLS connections Researchers release unCaptcha2, a tool that uses Google’s speech-to-text API to bypass the reCAPTCHA audio challenge Google’s secret Operating System ‘Fuchsia’ will run Android Applications: 9to5Google Report

According to a report by The Intercept, Ring, Amazon’s smart doorbell company gave access to its employees to watch live footage from cameras of the customers. As per the claim, Ring engineers and executives were allowed to watch the unfiltered footage of the users. Last year in February, Amazon acquired Ring for $1 billion. Amazon had been in the news last year for its data breach where the company leaked out the customers’ email addresses. Ring markets its cameras, mounted as doorbells as a security means that act like a privatized neighborhood watch while the user was away. The staff at Ring was able to gain access to the cameras inside as well as outside the home, depending on where the devices were positioned. Ring has been accused of mishandling videos collected by the smart device and failing to protect the footage with encryption. The Ring customer’s email address is enough to get access to cameras from user’s home. According to The Information and The Intercept, Ring’s video annotation team would watch camera footage and tag objects, humans and other things in the video clips so that its object recognition software could better itself. In 2016, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that had unencrypted videos created by Ring cameras. Ring’s Neighbors app, that lets users receive real-time crime and safety alerts, doesn’t include any mention of image or facial recognition in its description. Ring’s terms of service and its privacy policy don’t mention any details about the manual video annotation being conducted by humans. Ring tried to justify that the videos weren’t shared by the company. Ring responded to this post stating, “We take the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information extremely seriously. In order to improve our service, we view and annotate certain Ring video recordings. These recordings are sourced exclusively from publicly shared Ring videos from the Neighbors app (in accordance with our terms of service), and from a small fraction of Ring users who have provided their explicit written consent to allow us to access and utilize their videos for such purposes. Ring employees do not have access to livestreams from Ring products. We have strict policies in place for all our team members. We implement systems to restrict and audit access to information. We hold our team members to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our policies faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties. In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them.” https://twitter.com/briankrebs/status/1065219981833617408 Because of the privacy concerns, users are now skeptical about using Ring’s smart doorbell. One comment on HackerNews read, “The ring doorbell is installed at your front door. It records pretty much all movement to and from your house. It records audio at the doorstep, so if you're having a conversation with anyone at your doorstep, that gets recorded too.” Another user commented, “If some rando gets my ring doorbell footage and figures out where I live, that's hard to undo. If someone steals my stuff and gets away with it because I didn't have a ring doorbell, that's annoying but much easier to recover from. We are talking about the difference between an insurance claim and moving house.” According to a few users, this device is prone to DDOS attacks. One of the users commented, “Aside from the 700 person team given access to live video feeds and customer databases, the lack of proper security of this product makes it a PRIME target for DDOS attacks that could cripple infrastructure.” But few users are in the favor of such devices as they find them safe and convenient to use. One user commented, “These devices are extremely popular in my neighborhood, and cost/convenience is the only thing keeping them from being universal.” Another user commented, “I'd say, yes. I've been able to watch that many people see the ring (they see the camera), and they back right off the porch. It's been awesome in this respect, people simply ring it less.” Some users believe such surveillance devices shouldn’t use cloud but instead have data stored locally. Others are now looking out for alternatives like Xiaomi Dafang camera, RCA doorbell camera, and Blue Iris. This news surely makes one reflect on how home appliances could get monitored by companies or hackers and personal data might get misused. Note: We have edited this news to include the response from the Ring team to our post. AWS introduces Amazon DocumentDB featuring compatibility with MongoDB, scalability and much more Amazon confirms plan to sell a HIPAA eligible software, Amazon Comprehend Medical, which will mine medical records of the patients US government privately advised by top Amazon executive on web portal worth billions to the Amazon; The Guardian reports

CES 2019 is kicking off in Las Vegas, Nevada today, January 8, Monday for 3 days. The conference unofficially kicked off on Sunday, January 6 and you may have a look at the announcements made on that day. Yesterday was the main press day when the majority of the announcements were made with a lot of companies showcasing their latest projects and announcing new products, software, and services. HTC HTC announced their partnership with Mozilla, bringing Firefox’s virtual reality web browser to the Vive headset. Mozilla first announced Firefox Reality as a dedicated VR web browser in April. In September, they announced that the browser is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream. Now, it is available for the HTC Vive headset. As part of the deal, HTC is also teaming up with Amazon to make use of Amazon Sumerian. HTC also announced the Vive Pro Eye virtual reality headset with native, built-in eye tracking. It uses “foveated rendering” to render sharp images for wherever the human eye is looking in a virtual scene and reduces the image quality of objects on the periphery. Intel Intel made a number of announcements at CES 2019. They showcased new processors and also released a press release with updates on Project Athena. With this project, they are getting PC makers ready for “a new class of advanced laptops.” These laptops will be Ultrabooks part two with 5G and artificial intelligence support. New Intel processors: New 9th Gen Core processors for a limited number of desktops and laptops. A 10nm Ice Lake processor for thin laptops. A 10nm Lakefield processor using 3D stacking technology for very small computers and tablets. A 10nm Cascade Lake Xeon processor for data processing. 3D Athlete Tracking tech which runs on the Cascade Lake chip and shows data about how fast and far athletes are traveling. Intel’s 10nm Snow Ridge SOC for 5G base stations. Lenovo Lenovo has made minor updates to their ThinkPad X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga laptops with new designs for 2019. They are mostly going to have a material change, and are also going to be thinner and lighter this year. Lenovo has also released two Lenovo is two large display monitor. The first is Lenovo’s ThinkVision P44W, which is aimed at business users, and the second is the Legion Y44w Gaming Monitor. They both have a 43.4-inch panel. Uber One of Uber’s partners in the air taxi domain, Bell, has revealed the design of its vertical takeoff and landing air taxi at CES 2019. Their flying taxi, dubbed the Bell Nexus, can accommodate up to 5 people and is a hybrid-electric powered vehicle. CES 2019 also saw the release of the game Marvel's Avengers: Rocket's Rescue Run. This is the first demo product from startup Holoride, which has Audi as one of its stakeholders. It's the result of Audi and Disney's new media format, which aims to bring virtual reality to passengers in cars, specifically to Uber. More announcements: Harley-Davidson gave a preview of their first all-electric motorcycle. It will launch in August 2019 and will cost $29,799 TCL announced its first soundbars and a 75-inch version of the excellent 6-Series 4K Roku TV Elgato announced a professional $199 light rig for Twitch streamers and YouTube creators Hisense announces its new 2019 4K TV lineup and the Sonic One TV Griffin introduces new wireless chargers for the iPhone and Apple Watch Amazon is planning to let people deliver packages inside your garage Kodak’s release a new instant camera and printer line GE announced a 27-inch smart display for the kitchen that streams Netflix. Google Assistant will soon be on a billion devices. Their next stop - feature phones Vizio announces the most advanced 4K TV ever and support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 Toyota shared details of it’s Guardian Driver-Assist System which will mimic a technique used in fighter jets to serve as a smart intermediary between driver and car. CES 2019: Top announcements made so far HTC Vive Focus 2.0 update promises long battery life, among other things for the VR headset Intel unveils the first 3D Logic Chip packaging technology, ‘Foveros’, powering its new 10nm chips, ‘Sunny Cove’

Last week, Automotive Grade Linux, a collaborative project for developing an open platform for the connected car announced that Hyundai joined Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) and the Linux Foundation for innovation through open source. It is a cross-industry effort that brings together automakers, suppliers and technology companies to accelerate the development and adoption of an open software stack for the connected car. Automotive Grade Linux Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation said, “Hyundai has been active in open source for years, and their experience will benefit the entire AGL community.”  He further added, “This is a significant milestone for us, as the rapid growth of AGL proves that automakers are realizing the business value that open source and shared software development can provide. We look forward to working with Hyundai as we continue on our path to develop open source solutions for all in-vehicle technology.” With Linux being at its core, AGL is focused on In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI). It is the only organization, which is planning to address all software in the vehicle, including heads-up display, instrument cluster, telematics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. The Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects which power collaborative development to bring in innovation across industries and ecosystems. AGL Unified Code Base The AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) platform is an open source software platform for telematics, infotainment, and instrument cluster applications. It provides 70% of the starting point for a production project and also includes a middleware, an operating system, and application framework. Suppliers and automakers can easily customize the platform with features and service to meet their product and customer needs. The AGL Unified Code Base has been recognized as the CES 2019 Innovation Awards Honoree in Software and Mobile Apps category. Paul Choo, Vice President and Head of Infotainment Technology Center at Hyundai Motor Company, said, “Open collaboration is essential as we realize our connected car vision. AGL has built a robust platform that offers the flexibility to design and build new services on top of it, and quickly bring them to market.” In 2019, the  AGL booth will feature open source technologies from AGL members AISIN AW, Audiokinetic, DENSO, Cognomotiv, DENSO TEN, EPAM Systems, Fiberdyne Systems, SafeRide Technologies, Tuxera, and VNC Automotive and many more. This booth will be open during CES show hours from January 8-11, 2019. Read more about this news on Linux Foundation website. Chromium blacklists nouveau graphics device driver for Linux and Ubuntu users An update on Bcachefs- the “next generation Linux filesystem” The Linux and RISC-V foundations team up to drive open source development and adoption of RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA)  

CES 2019, the annual consumer electronics show in Las Vegas will go from Tuesday, Jan. 8 through Friday, Jan. 11. However, the conference has unofficially kicked off on Sunday, January 6, followed by press conferences on Monday, Jan. 7. Over the span of these two days, a lot of companies showcased their latest projects and announced new products, software, and services. Let us look at the key announcements made by prominent tech companies so far. Nvidia Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled some "amazing new technology innovations." First, they announced that over 40 new laptop models in 100-plus configurations will be powered by NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. Turing-based laptops will be available across the GeForce RTX family — from RTX 2080 through RTX 2060 GPUs, said Huang. Seventeen of the new models will feature Max-Q design. Laptops with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs will also be equipped with WhisperMode, NVIDIA Battery Boost, and NVIDIA G-SYNC. GeForce RTX-powered laptops will be available starting Jan. 29 from the world's top OEMs. Nvidia also announced the first 65-inch 4K HDR gaming display that will arrive in February for $4,999. LG LG Electronics, which have a major press release today, has already confirmed a variety of their new products. These include the release of LG's 2019 TVs with Alexa and Google Assistant support, 8K OLED, full HDMI 2.1 support and more. Also includes, LG CineBeam Laser 4K projector for voice control, new sound bars included with Dolby Atmos and Google Assistant and LG Gram 17 and new 14-inch 2-in-1. Samsung Samsung announced that their Smart TVs will be soon equipped with iTunes Movies & TV Shows and will support AirPlay 2 beginning Spring 2019. AirPlay 2 support will be available on Samsung Smart TVs in 190 countries worldwide. Samsung is also launching a new Notebook Odyssey to take PC gaming more seriously posing a threat to competitors Razer and Alienware. HP HP also announced HP Chromebook 14, at CES 2019. It is the world's first AMD-powered Chromebook running on either an AMD A4 or A6 processor with integrated Radeon R4 or R5 graphics. It has 4GB of memory and 32GB of storage and support for Android apps from the Google Play Store. These models will start shipping in January starting at $269. More announcements: Asus launches a new 17-inch, 10-pound Surface Pro gaming laptop, the Asus ROG Mothership. It has also announced Zephyrus S GX701, the smallest and lightest 17-inch gaming laptop yet. Corsair’s impressive compact gaming desktops come with Core i9 chips and GeForce RTX graphics L’Oréal’s newest prototype detects wearers’ skin pH levels Acer’s new Swift 7 will kill the bezel when it launches in May for $1,699. It is one of the thinnest and lightest laptops ever made Audeze’s motion-aware headphones will soon recreate your head gestures in-game Whirlpool is launching a Wear OS app for its connected appliances with simplified voice commands for both Google Assistant and Alexa devices. Vuzix starts selling its AR smart glasses for $1,000 Pico Interactive just revealed the Pico G2 4K, an all-in-one 4K VR headset based-on China’s best-selling VR unit, the Pico G2. It’s incredibly lightweight, powerful and highly customizable for enterprise purposes. Features include kiosk mode, hands-free controls, and hygienic design. You can have a look at all products that will be showcased at CES 2019. NVIDIA launches GeForce Now’s (GFN) ‘recommended router’ program to enhance the overall performance and experience of GFN NVIDIA open sources its game physics simulation engine, PhysX, and unveils PhysX SDK 4.0 Uses of Machine Learning in Gaming

Yesterday, the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the organization that supports the adoption of USB technology, launched a USB Type-C Authentication Program. The USB Type-C Authentication specification defines cryptographic-based authentication for USB Type-C chargers and devices. The USB Type-C has been introduced on leading notebooks, smartphones, and other connected devices as it allows faster data transfer and more power delivery than the widely deployed USB Type-A interface. These USB devices while being extremely helpful in the computing landscape have also introduced new risks that result from simply plugging in a malicious USB device. With the new authentication program, host systems can protect against non-compliant USB chargers and also mitigate risks from malicious firmware/hardware in USB devices that attempt to exploit a USB connection. The protocol also helps the host systems to confirm the authenticity of a USB device, USB cable or USB charger. All of this happens right at the moment a connection is made before inappropriate power or data can be transferred. USB-IF President and COO Jeff Ravencraft said, “USB-IF is excited to launch the USB Type-C Authentication Program, providing OEMs with the flexibility to implement a security framework that best fits their specific product requirements. As the USB Type-C ecosystem continues to grow, companies can further provide the security that consumers have come to expect from certified USB devices.” Characteristics of the USB Type-C Authentication program: A standard protocol for authenticating certified USB Type-C chargers, devices, cables, and power sources Support for authenticating over either USB data bus or USB Power Delivery communications channels Products that use the authentication protocol retain control over the security policies to be implemented and enforced Relies on 128-bit security for all cryptographic methods Includes accepted cryptographic methods for certificate format, digital signing, hash, and random number generation USB-IF selected DigiCert to manage the PKI and certificate authority services for the USB Type-C Authentication Program. Geoffrey Noakes, Vice President, IoT Business Development at DigiCert said, “DigiCert is excited to work with USB-IF and its CA Program Participants from the industry at large to provide the technical expertise and scale needed for the USB Type-C Authentication Program, and we look forward to implementation.” To know more about this news head over to the USB Type-C Authentication specification. Apple USB Restricted Mode: Here’s Everything You Need to Know According to a report, Microsoft plans for new 4K webcams featuring facial recognition to all Windows 10 devices in 2019 DragonFly BSD 5.4.1 released with new system compiler in GCC 8 and more  

Today, Reuters reported that Google has won an approval from U.S. regulators for deploying a radar-based motion sensing device known as project Soli. According to the report, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) specified in an order late on Monday that it will grant Google a waiver for operating the Soli sensors at higher power levels than currently allowed. The FCC said, “the decision will serve the public interest by providing for innovative device control.” These Soli sensors help in capturing motion in 3D space with a radar beam for enabling touchless control of functions that help users with mobility and speech impairments. According to Google, the Soli sensor can allow users to press an invisible button between the thumb and index fingers or a virtual dial that turns by rubbing a thumb against the index finger. Google says“even though these controls are virtual, the interactions feel physical and responsive”, as the feedback is generated by the haptic sensation of fingers touching. According to Google, the virtual tools can approximate the precision of natural human hand motion and the Soli sensor can be embedded in wearables, computers, phones, and vehicles including aircraft. Last year in March, Google asked the FCC to allow its short-range interactive motion-sensing Soli radar to operate in the 57 to 64 GHz frequency band at power levels consistent with European Telecommunications Standards Institute standards. In July, Facebook Inc raised concerns that the Soli sensors operating in the spectrum band at higher power levels might have issues coexisting with other technologies. In September, post the discussions, Reuters writes, Google and Facebook collectively told the FCC agreeing that the sensors could operate at higher than currently allowed power levels without interference. In September, Facebook told FCC that it expected a “variety of use cases to develop with respect to new radar devices, including Soli.” Users are excited about this news and are appreciating Google’s efforts towards experimenting something new. One user commented on HackerNews, “Go big or go home. That's one thing I like about Google/Alphabet. Not being afraid to try completely new things outside the normal comfort zone of their traditional product space, and aiming for the most radical potentially game-changing ones at that.” Another user commented on Reddit, “Will be interesting to see if this makes it into new watches/phones by the end of the year.” This news was first reported by  Reuters. Google Cloud releases a beta version of SparkR job types in Cloud Dataproc Google shares initiatives towards enforcing its AI principles; employs a formal review structure for new projects France to levy digital services tax on big tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon in the new year