Inspecting a ship’s cargo is a dull, tedious, time-consuming task. So a pair of researchers at MIT, including graduate student Sampriti Bhattacharyya and her advisor Harry Asada, created a small robot that resembles a squished foam ball to inspect ship cargo quickly, cheaply, and silently. They presented their findings earlier this month at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
Google is daring, creative, and by multiple accounts an enviable place to work—but is the way it’s run a model for other companies to follow? After all, quintessentially Googley practices like giving people free time to pursue projects are easier to follow if you enjoy very large profits from a product that has remained unbeatable for a decade.
Apple on Thursday announced it's preparing iOS 8.0.2 -- which will include a fix for problems triggered by iOS 8.0.1 -- and plans to release it in the next few days. In a rare move, Apple on Wednesday suspended downloads of iOS 8.0.1, which aimed to fix problems uncovered after the launch of iOS 8.
Banks and businesses toiled over the weekend to crush a bug in a widely used open source operating system. The flaw has been in Unix for some 25 years, but it was revealed just last week. If exploited by an attacker, the vulnerability in BASH (Bourne-Again SHell) could be used to inject malicious code or take command of a system or device.
FBI Director James Comey on Thursday strongly criticized Apple and Google for hardening information stored in smartphones by encrypting data, making it inaccessible to law enforcement even with a court order.