Author: Megan Geuss

Last year, Delphi demoed a self-driving car that drove across the country autonomously. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Today, auto parts supplier Delphi and sensor-maker Mobileye announced a plan to build a fully autonomous car system that auto manufacturers can use to make their cars self-driving without investing a lot of expensive R&D. The companies say the system will be production-ready for OEMs by 2019.

On a conference call with Delphi CEO Kevin Clark and Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua, the two executives estimated that car-buyers would likely see such a system in new cars between late 2019 and 2021.

Delphi has been working on building self-driving software for years now—Ars went down to its Silicon Valley garage last spring to see an Audi that Delphi had tricked out with its own autonomous system prior to embarking on a self-driving cross-country road trip. Mobileye, too, has a lot of experience—most recently it announced a partnership with BMW and Intel to build self-driving BMW platforms. It also had a falling out with Tesla earlier this year after a driver was killed when his car struck a left-turning truck while the Tesla was in autonomous mode.

Enlarge

Those of us with difficult last names are accustomed to quietly bearing the indignities of constant mispronunciation, especially from digital assistant programs like Apple's Siri. My last name (Geuss) is pronounced "Gice," but that pronunciation is so far from being phonetically logical in English that if people get close—calling me Guess or Goose—I generally don't correct them. Siri insists on calling me "Megan Juice," which is not even close (and is also a beverage). I let it slide. After all, what recourse do I have?

None. That's how much recourse I have. But I am no Barbra Streisand.

Streisand, it seems, went on NPR this weekend to talk about her tour and her upcoming album Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, and she told host Scott Simon that she was frustrated by the fact that Siri kept calling her Streizand rather than Streisand.

Mozilla is trying a rebranding. Back in June, the browser developer announced that it would freshen up its logo and enlist the Internet's help in reaching a final decision. The company hired British design company Johnson Banks to come up with seven new "concepts" to illustrate the company's work, as shown in the gallery above.

The logos rely on vibrant colors, and several of them recall '80s and '90s style. In pure, nearly-unintelligible marketing speak, Mozilla writes that each new design reflects a story about the company. "From paying homage to our paleotechnic origins to rendering us as part of an ever-expanding digital ecosystem, from highlighting our global community ethos to giving us a lift from the quotidian elevator open button, the concepts express ideas about Mozilla in clever and unexpected ways" Mozilla's Creative Director Tim Murray writes in a blog post.

Mozilla is soliciting comment and criticism on the seven new designs for the next two weeks, but this is no Boaty McBoatface situation. Mozilla is clear that it's not crowdsourcing a design, asking anyone to work on spec, or holding a vote over which logo the Internet prefers. It's just asking for comments.

(credit: Thomas Hawk)

Volkswagen isn’t the only company that's been caught in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) crackdown on emissions.

On Thursday, motorcycle company Harley-Davidson reached an agreement with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in which Harley will pay $12 million in fines for selling some 340,000 “super tuners” that allowed US bike owners to modify emissions control systems.

The company will also no longer sell the offending aftermarket tuners in the US, and units sold outside the US will be marked to say that customers should not install them on motorcycles to be driven in the US. Harley will have to buy back and destroy existing aftermarket tuners that don’t meet Clean Air Act requirements, and it will have to spend a separate $3 million on a mitigation project “to replace conventional woodstoves with cleaner-burning stoves in local communities,” according to an EPA press release.

(credit: Windell Oskay)

Tesla is making headlines this week over some of its communications choices. First Reuters reported that the company dropped the translated term “Autopilot” and “self-driving” on its Chinese language website. Then, the AP reported that Tesla had reversed course and said that removing the term "Autopilot” was a mistake, though the company admitted it had revised some language on the site.

Next, in an unrelated report, the Wall Street Journal did some communications analysis of its own, finding that CEO Elon Musk has made 20 projections for the company that haven’t quite panned out in the timeframe he stated.

The Chinese Autopilot debacle

This weekend, Reuters reported that Tesla had removed the Chinese translation for the terms “self-driving” and “Autopilot” from the company’s website, after a 33-year-old Tesla owner side-swiped an illegally parked Volkswagen. The accident took place in Beijing earlier this month while the car was in Autopilot mode.

(credit: Erik B)

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal wrote that investigators from the US Department of Justice have evidence to support criminal charges against Volkswagen Group for installing illegal software on 600,000 diesel vehicles sold in the US between 2009 and 2015. The illegal software circumvented emissions regulations.

Those same sources for the WSJ say that prosecutors are torn between seeking a guilty plea from the company or negotiating a deferred prosecution agreement. The deferred prosecution agreement would dismiss charges against VW as long as the automaker signs an agreement to stick to certain settlement terms.

Reuters confirmed the situation with two sources. Reuters reported earlier this summer that a consent decree between the US and VW Group could involve “an independent monitor overseeing the German automaker's conduct and significant yet-to-be determined fines for emissions violations.”

(credit: HEI Hotels & Resorts)

The chain that owns Starwood, Marriott, Hyatt, and Intercontinental hotels—HEI Hotels & Resorts—said this weekend that the payment systems for 20 of its locations had been infected with malware that may have been able to steal tens of thousands of credit card numbers and corresponding customer names, expiration dates, and verification codes. HEI claims that it did not lose control of any customer PINs, as they are not collected by the company’s systems.

Still, HEI noted on its website that it doesn’t store credit card details either. “We believe that the malware may have accessed payment card information in real-time as it was being inputted into our systems,” the company said.

The breach appears to have hit 20 HEI Hotels, and in most cases, the malware appears to have been active from December 2, 2015 to June 21, 2016. In a few cases, hotels may have been affected as early as March 1, 2015. According to a statement on HEI’s website, the malware affected point-of-sale (POS) terminals at the affected properties, but online booking and other online transactions were not affected.

Security researchers are eager to poke holes in the chip-embedded credit and debit cards that have arrived in Americans' mailboxes over the last year and a half. Although the cards have been in use for a decade around the world, more brains trying to break things are bound to come up with new and inventive hacks. And at last week's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, two presentations demonstrated potential threats to the security of chip cards. The first involved fooling point-of-sale (POS) systems into thinking that a chip card is a magnetic stripe card with no chip, and the second involved stealing the temporary, dynamic number generated by a chip card and using it in a very brief window of time to request money from a hacked ATM.

Double trouble

Chip card technology—often called EMV for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa for the three companies that developed the chip card standard—is supposed to offer significant security benefits over the old magnetic stripe card system. Magnetic stripe cards have a static card number written into their magnetic stripe, and if a POS system is infected with malware, as was the case in the infamous Target and Home Depot hacks, then a malicious actor can take those card numbers and make counterfeit purchases with them. An EMV card, by contrast, uses a chip to transmit a dynamic number that changes with each purchase. That makes it a lot harder to steal a card number and reuse it elsewhere.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Late last year, security researcher Samy Kamkar demonstrated that he could calculate a replacement American Express card number based on the previous card number, replicate the credit card’s magnetic stripe information on a programmable chip, and use it to make purchases around town, much like the now-defunct Coin card. Kamkar was even able to do this with chip cards—the magnetic stripe on the back of every card has two tracks of data that tell card readers information like cardholder name, the card’s number, its expiration date, etc. Track 2 data will tell a card reader if the card has a chip and needs to be dipped—otherwise it can be swiped. Kamkar’s solution was to alter the Track 2 data and spoof the card reader to tell it that the card only has a magnetic stripe, no chip, thus bypassing the entry of a dynamic number.

(credit: Scott Beale)

A US District Judge in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit against Twitter that claimed the social networking platform had provided “material support” to terrorists from ISIS. An American woman whose husband was working as a contractor in Jordan filed the suit after her husband and several others were shot and killed by a terrorist who allegedly was inspired by extremist propaganda disseminated on Twitter.

The lawsuit, Fields v. Twitter, claimed that Twitter violated the Anti-Terrorism Act by providing Twitter accounts to the terrorist group. The plaintiffs did not allege that any specific tweets instigated the terrorist to kill the US contractors, nor did they allege that ISIS recruited or trained the terrorist over Twitter. The plaintiffs did, however, say that the terrorist in question had been inspired by an execution publicized by ISIS, which crowd-sourced the method of execution on Twitter. The plaintiffs also accused Twitter of failing to “detect and prevent” violent, terroristic tweets on its platform.

Twitter argued that is protected from liability as a publisher of content by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Facebook thinks headlines need to sober up. (credit: Jon S)

In 2014, Facebook said it was going to take steps to favor clear headlines over so-called clickbait, which it defines as headlines that try to cultivate interest in a story by omitting key pieces of information, or by misrepresenting what’s in the actual post. Now, the social media giant has revised its clickbait-tackling scheme, which for the past two years has been downgrading posts based on the amount of time Facebook users spend on the article after they click the headline.

In a post today, Facebook said that its current plan of attack involved cataloging “tens of thousands” of headlines, which were then analyzed by a team of employees that decided if the headlines withheld pertinent information or were misleading about the accompanying article. The team apparently double-checked its work, and “from there, we built a system that looks at the set of clickbait headlines to determine what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines,” Facebook wrote in a press release today. “This is similar to how many e-mail spam filters work.”

Facebook added that its new system, instructed by the categorizations of human employees, would continue to actively learn which sites and Facebook Pages produce clickbait.