Euractiv: Deal on new ‘ecodesign’ rules to make EU products greener, easier to repair. “The European Parliament and the Council of EU member states reached a provisional deal on Monday (4 December) on new ‘ecodesign’ rules to make products easier to repair and recycle while fighting planned obsolescence and banning the destruction of unsold textiles.”
LiveScience: Smart glasses could boost privacy by swapping cameras for this 100-year-old technology. “Smart glasses of the future could swap out optical cameras for sonar, which uses sound to track the movements of its wearer, according to a new study. The sonar-based tech could improve accuracy and privacy, as well as make them cheaper to produce.”
Ars Technica: Thousands of routers and cameras vulnerable to new 0-day attacks by hostile botnet. “Miscreants are actively exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities to wrangle routers and video recorders into a hostile botnet used in distributed denial-of-service attacks, researchers from networking firm Akamai said Thursday.”
404 Media: Consumer Rights Groups Petition Government to Create Formal Rules Protecting Right to Repair. “Consumer rights groups have formally petitioned the federal government, asking the Federal Trade Commission to finally create and enforce rules on right to repair after years of studying the issue of manufacturer repair monopolies and their cost to consumers.”
How-To Geek: Old Nook eReaders Are Losing Book Store Access. “The book retailer Barnes & Noble has announced that it is ending support for the Nook Simple Touch (released in 2011), Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight (released in 2012), and the Nook GlowLight (released in 2013). The official end of support will come in April 2024, and in June 2024, the devices will lose the ability to register or sign in with a B&N account, and no new content can be purchased. However, downloaded books will continue to work, and PDF and ePub books can still be copied to the storage.”
American Chemical Society: ’Indoor solar’ to power the Internet of Things. “From Wi-Fi-connected home security systems to smart toilets, the so-called Internet of Things brings personalization and convenience to devices that help run homes. But with that comes tangled electrical cords or batteries that need to be replaced. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Energy Materials have brought solar panel technology indoors to power smart devices. They show which photovoltaic (PV) systems work best under cool white LEDs, a common type of indoor lighting.”
Ars Technica: The Humane AI Pin is a bizarre cross between Google Glass and a pager. “Not since Magic Leap has a ‘next-generation’ hardware company been so hyped while showing so little. Everyone in the tech world has been freaking out about this new pocket protector thing that wants to ‘replace your smartphone.’ It’s called the “Humane AI Pin.” As far as we can tell, it’s a $700 screenless voice assistant box and, like all smartphone-ish devices released in the last 10 years, it has some AI in it. It’s as if Google Glass had a baby with a pager from the 1990s.”
Space: Watch NASA build its VIPER moon rover with these free online watch parties. “The rover, called VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover), will explore the moon and collect water-ice samples from permanently shadowed areas near the lunar south pole. VIPER has an expected launch date of November 2024, and its mission team has begun final assembly and testing procedures, which NASA will broadcast live during monthly watch parties for the public to follow along in the final stages of preparing the rover for space.”
The Register: Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool. “You might have missed it in the excitement over the announcement of the Raspberry Pi 5 at the end of September, but a couple of weeks later, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also updated Raspberry Pi OS. The new release is quite significantly different from previous versions, so we thought we should take it for a spin.”
Washington University in St. Louis: WashU Expert: Your smart speaker data is used in ways you might not expect. “We’ve all had the uncanny experience of searching for something on the internet and then suddenly ads for that very thing are popping up everywhere we look online. It’s no coincidence, said Umar Iqbal, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.”
Hackaday: A Paper Printer For Q Code Menus. “Do you miss the days of thumbing through a sticky, laminated booklet to order your food? Sick of restaurants and their frustrating electronic menus? Fear not, for [Guy Dupont] and his QR code menu printer are here to save the day.” I don’t miss sticky menus, but I really do not like scanning unknown QR codes with my phone.
University of Michigan: New phone case provides workaround for inaccessible touch screens. “A new smartphone case could soon enable folks with visual impairments, tremors and spasms to use touch screens independently. Developed at the University of Michigan, BrushLens could help users perceive, locate and tap buttons and keys on the touch screen menus now ubiquitous in restaurant kiosks, ATM machines and other public terminals.”
MIT News: A new way to integrate data with physical objects. “StructCode, at least in its original version, relies on objects produced with laser-cutting techniques that can be manufactured within minutes, rather than the hours it might take on a 3D printer. Information can be extracted from these objects, moreover, with the RGB cameras that are commonly found in smartphones; the ability to operate in the infrared range of the spectrum is not required.”
University of Michigan: Choosing exoskeleton settings like a Pandora radio station. “Of course, what’s simple for the users is more complex underneath, as a machine learning algorithm repeatedly offers pairs of assistance profiles that are most likely to be comfortable for the wearer. The user then selects one of these two, and the predictor offers another assistance profile that it believes might be better. This approach enables users to set the exoskeleton assistance based on their preferences using a very simple interface, conducive to implementing on a smartwatch or phone.”
New York Times: What Happens When an Artist’s Technology Becomes Obsolete?. “A museum’s task of protecting art in perpetuity has remained fixed, even as artists’ materials have changed. Art institutions are likely the only places in the world that are currently planning how they might be able to fix an Oculus Rift 50 years from now. Rather than keep stockpiles of expensive and obsolete technology in storage, museums have to find clever ways around software updates, from video game emulators to server farms to niche businesses like CTL.”
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