Hackaday Links: July 28, 2024

What is this dystopia coming to when one of the world’s largest tech companies can’t find a way to sufficiently monetize a nearly endless stream of personal data coming from its army of high-tech privacy-invading robots? To the surprise of almost nobody, Amazon is rolling out a paid tier to their Alexa service in an attempt to backfill the $25 billion hole the smart devices helped dig over the last few years. The business model was supposed to be simple: insinuate an always-on listening device into customers’ lives to make it as easy as possible for them to instantly gratify their need for the widgets and whatsits that Amazon is uniquely poised to deliver, collecting as much metadata along the way as possible; multiple revenue streams — what could go wrong? Apparently a lot, because the only thing people didn’t do with Alexa was order stuff. Now Amazon is reportedly seeking an additional $10 a month for the improved AI version of Alexa, which will be on top of the ever-expanding Amazon Prime membership fee, currently at an eye-watering $139 per year. Whether customers bite or not remains to be seen, but we think there might be a glut of Echo devices on the second-hand market in the near future. We hate to say we told you so, but — ah, who are we kidding? We love to say we told you so.

Having Google offer to write you a check for $23 billion is pretty much the dream of every startup slogging it out in the tech trenches. Such princely offers are few and far between, but even rarer is the startup that says, “Nah, we’re good.” But that’s effectively what cloud security concern Wiz just did, rebuffing a buyout offer from Google that would roughly double the company’s current valuation, in favor of taking the company public. That’s a gutsy move, and given Google’s seeming propensity to buy technology only to sit on it or kill it off, probably a smart one.

Speaking of gutsy, one thing we never considered as a potential bottleneck to grid decarbonization is a lack of qualified wind turbine technicians. Or rather, finding people willing and able to climb hundreds of meters straight up to install, maintain, and repair the monstrous machines. It’s not exactly for everyone, but those who are willing to give it a go need proper training, and it turns out that at least one US community college has a wind turbine technician training program. Not only that, the college has a 90-meter-tall wind turbine that students can train on. It’s not a bad deal, either; a training program that costs around $10,000 dollars could help land a job paying up to $90,000 a year.

First, there was “DoS,” then we had “DDoS.” Now there’s “DDDoS” — a dog-distributed denial-of-service attack. It’s officially called NEO by the US Department of Homeland Security, which developed the system to provide law enforcement officers with protection against IoT hazards. The robot, which is built on a Boston Dynamics Spot chassis, provides a mobile observation and intelligence-gathering platform that can infiltrate an area without risking a meat-based officer. In addition to providing eyes and ears on the (hopefully) bad guys, NEO is also equipped with antennas and powerful transmitters that can swamp signals in the WiFi and cellular bands, rendering nearby nefarious wireless devices useless. We’ve heard wireless jammers are quite illegal to own or operate, so we assume there is some exception for law enforcement to use them. Or maybe it’s a “rules for thee and not for me” situation.

And finally, let your geek flag fly — on your car, at least. This collection of geeky custom license plates from MIT grads and faculty is pretty good, and shows some real creativity — especially “DSKDRV,” the plate on Samuel Klein’s floppy-festooned 1998 Honda Civic. There are some clever ideas here, and we especially like the “MITGRAD” Idaho plate, for reasons. But check out Omar Abudayyeh’s “CRISPR” plate; who knew biology could score you a ride like that?

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