Car and pedestrian collision? There’ll soon be an app for that

A safety system that ties cars and smartphones together to stop those heart-stopping near misses between cars and pedestrians could be standardized by the end of this year.The technology involves smartphones broadcasting data over a short-range radio channel to nearby cars, so the cars can determine if a collision is likely. Unlike today’s radar-based systems, this has the ability to warn around blind corners and can alert both the driver and pedestrian.It’s being developed by engineers at Honda and was demonstrated last week at the company’s new research and development center in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley.In the demonstration that took place in a parking lot, a car was slowly cruising a row looking for a space. Ahead, and unseen to the driver, a pedestrian was walking between a car and SUV while listening to music, and about to step into the path of the oncoming vehicle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Car and pedestrian collision? There’ll soon be an app for that

A safety system that ties cars and smartphones together to stop those heart-stopping near misses between cars and pedestrians could be standardized by the end of this year. The technology involves smartphones broadcasting data over a short-range radio channel to nearby cars, so the cars can determine if a collision is likely. Unlike today’s radar-based systems, this has the ability to warn around blind corners and can alert both the driver and pedestrian. It’s being developed by engineers at Honda and was demonstrated last week at the company’s new research and development center in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley. In the demonstration that took place in a parking lot, a car was slowly cruising a row looking for a space. Ahead, and unseen to the driver, a pedestrian was walking between a car and SUV while listening to music, and about to step into the path of the oncoming vehicle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Someday your phone may stop an oncoming car

Self-driving cars will try to avoid robot pedestrians in a simulated city as part of an effort to make real-world streets safer.M-City, a test facility that the University of Michigan opened this month in Ann Arbor, packs a range of street configurations and road conditions into a 32-acre (13-hectare) facility for testing emerging automotive technologies. The site includes stoplights, traffic circles, gravel and brick roadways and movable building facades. It will play host to some of the testing for vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P) detection systems that Verizon Communications hopes to turn into a commercial reality.V2P uses DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications), the same radios as vehicle-to-vehicle technology that could prevent crashes between cars that approach each other unexpectedly around a blind corner. In the pedestrian safety system, the smartphones people carry would talk to specialized radios in cars or even just to drivers’ phones. Those wireless exchanges are part of a broader effort to prevent vehicle accidents that killed 30,000 people per year in the U.S., according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The agency estimates 14 percent of those accidents involve pedestrians.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA will lose access to ‘historical’ phone surveillence data Nov. 29

The U.S. National Security Agency will lose access to the bulk telephone records data it has collected at the end of November, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Monday.Congress voted in June to rein in the NSAs mass collection of U.S. phone metadata, which includes information such as the timing and location of calls. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court then gave the NSA 180 days to wind the program down.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook opens Internet.org to more mobile operators

Facebook is inviting additional mobile operators to take part in Internet.org, its project to bring Internet access to poorly connected parts of the world.Internet.org turns one year old this week, and Facebook says it’s ready to scale the project to reach more people.The company is making it easier for more mobile operators to join the project by launching an online portal where they’ll find technical tools and best practices to help them get started.So far, Facebook has been working with about a dozen operators in 17 countries to provide an app that gives people free access to a set of basic Internet services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Vote for Our OpenStack Summit Presentations!

Since Cumulus Linux first shipped, OpenStack and Cumulus Networks have grown together to deliver a vibrant ecosystem of solutions and multiple go-to-market options that make open networking a reality for customers.

The last OpenStack Summit in Vancouver showed that we have a lot to share with the OpenStack community.

That is why with our partners and customers, we submitted several speaking sessions. We would be thrilled to present them at OpenStack Summit Tokyo.

Support us to make this happen!

The voting period is open for a short period of time only and will close on July 30 at 11:59PM PST.  Check out our submission below and Vote now to hear us at OpenStack Summit Tokyo!


VTEP: Your High-throughput Bridge from Virtual to Physical

Speakers: Adam Johnson, VP of Business, Midokura and Leslie Carr, DevOps Engineer, Cumulus Networks

Abstract:  In this session, we will use a real-world case study to show how VXLAN tunnel endpoints (VTEPs) and VXLAN offloading can increase network throughput while reducing CPU overhead — overcoming two significant hurdles facing virtualized data centers.  We will demonstrate typical applications and workloads deployed on physical and virtualized machines.  On the network layer, the switches will utilize Continue reading

Network Break 46: Car Hacks, Cloud Natives

Network Break 46 analyzes car hacking, a new Google-driven open source project for container orchestration, Cisco news and VMware financial results, an exuberant VC market, and a Chrome project promoting the Physical Web.

Author information

Drew Conry-Murray

I'm a tech journalist, editor, and content director with 17 years' experience covering the IT industry. I'm author of the book "The Symantec Guide To Home Internet Security" and co-author of the post-apocalyptic novel "Wasteland Blues," available at Amazon.

The post Network Break 46: Car Hacks, Cloud Natives appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Drew Conry-Murray.

The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2015 (so far!)

Your wackiestIn 2015 the science world has been dominated by space event – NASA’s flyby of Pluto and subsequent deluge of information about that dwarf planet. Then we have another NASA probe – Kepler – pointing out one closest-to-Earth planet discoveries to date. There have been tons of other interesting stories though regarding 3D printed cars, drones, high-tech singers and more. Take a spin:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google to decouple Google+ from some of its sites

Google is severing the ties between its social network and other of its services, so that users will not need to log in to other sites like YouTube using a Google+ account.In the coming months, people will only need a standard Google account—not a Google+ account—to do things like share content, communicate with contacts, and create a YouTube channel, the company announced Monday. YouTube will be one of the first products to adopt the change.Since launching Google+ in 2011, the company has tried to integrate it into its various other properties, partly in an aim to unify people’s identities across them. But the integrations have not always gone smoothly. Google sparked outrage from users when in 2013 the company began requiring people to hold a Google+ account to post YouTube comments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Security researchers take aim at Roku streaming media players

If you are sick of your ever-increasing cable bill, have you considered becoming a cord cutter? If you spent a bundle on your TVs but they aren't smart TVs, you likely aren't planning to abandon them. PCMag has a decent cord cutter's guide; for folks without a smart TV, TechHive's media streamer buyers' guide compared Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Nvidia Shield Android TV, and Roku 3 before recommending Roku 3 "as the best all-around option." TechHive explained:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thank You SysAdmins!

With SysAdmin Day coming up on Friday, July 31st, now is a great time to thank our SysAdmins for everything they do! Without them, who knows what we would do when a server is down. For setting up servers, monitoring for stability, … Continued

IDG Contributor Network: Robots could wipe out the human race, expert says

Robots will become smarter and faster than humans, an Oxford University professor said recently. And not only will robots be better than us at a lot of things, they'll eventually take over and make humans redundant, the professor reckons.Predictions Dr. Stuart Armstrong, of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, thinks the future relationship between humans and robots is not going to turn out well for the humans. Among the prophecies? Armstrong thinks humans could be wiped out because robots' Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) comprehension is going to be too literal. For example, the robots could interpret an instruction such as "prevent human suffering" as "kill all humans."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Where to start with Cisco & SourceFire

Since Cisco announced EoX for both it’s traditional IPS and it’s CX-Modules it’s been time to start looking at the new SourceFire modules, however that can be quite an undertaking since SourceFire is a completely different beast from its predecessors. Which raises the question where do you start to begin getting familiar with this new system. […]

Good Enough

catalog-rack
Looking at my desk in the late 1990’s, that little haven where I came in early in the morning, and left ealry’ish in the afternoon, you’d see a catalog rack. Only it wasn’t full of catalogs, it contained a full set of the latest Cisco IOS documentation. We whined when a new version of the docs came out that wouldn’t fit in the catalog racks we already owned, and ordered another one. There was a bookcase on the side which contained the documentation from the last two or three versions of the IOS code, and then every hardware manual I could find. Another stack of books would be lying in a corner, the “quick reference” stuff that wouldn’t fit in one of the catalog racks. All over the walls were pieces of paper, carefully crafted shortcut sheets, shared around the TAC, pinned up. Given the nature of cubicle walls, we either bought special cubicle clips, or we made to do with various sorts of push pins. Just a few years later, the ISO auditors came along and made us throw it all away. Every last scrap. The dumpsters were filled to the max. Extra dumpsters were brought in, and we Continue reading