…with hundreds of these scooters abandoned and rotting in impound lots, likely never to be recovered, maybe now is a good time to invest in a $30 scooter “conversion kit”, which ships direct from China, and plugs-and-plays to convert one of these scooters to a “personal scooter,” with all recovery and payment components permanently disabled.
Source: $30 plug-and-play kit converts a Bird scooter into a “personal scooter” / Boing Boing
Super interesting maker/prototyping experiment from Google…use a few pieces of cheap hardware and paper construction to build a device that listens to your voice, and acts as an ambient information sensor. Potentially really useful for maker programs in libraries (if you don’t mind the creepy Google factor).
Paper Signals are build-it-yourself objects that you control with your voice.
Yep. IoT for Cows. I can’t wait for this to be hacked somehow, and used a a distributed cownet.
Tie the cowlar on the cow’s neck. The Cowlar simply consists of a strap designed to comfortably fit around your cow and a small magic box that measure temperature, activity and cow behaviour, i.e. whether it’s eating, sleeping, ruminating or showing lameness.
Source: Cowlar – How It Works
The connected denim smart jacket made in partnership between Levi’s and Google’s ATAP division now has a price tag, but its release date has been pushed from this spring to the fall. The jacket, which will cost around $350 when it goes on sale, is the first commercial product containing ATAP’s Project Jacquard technology, which uses conductive fabric to turn a standard article of clothing into a connected device of sorts that can send instructions to your smartphone, like pausing or skipping a song that’s playing by double tapping your wrist.
Source: Google and Levi’s connected smart jacket will come out this fall and cost around $350 – The Verge
Created in partnership with creative agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the Tostitos Party Bag is outfitted with sensors to detect alcohol on a person’s breath. If you’re in the clear, the bag turns green and you’re free to go about your night. If alcohol is detected, the bag turns red with the message, “Don’t drink and drive,” and offers a $10 Uber credit for a discounted ride home. It’s even got near-field communication technology that lets you tap your phone to the bag to hail the ride, if you’re that blasted.
Source: Tostitos made a bag that can tell you’ve been drinking and call you an Uber – The Verge
The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders and other easily hackable devices.
Source: Source Code for IoT Botnet ‘Mirai’ Released — Krebs on Security
Get used to this, because here’s the future of computer security….
A giant botnet made up of hijacked internet-connected things like cameras, lightbulbs, and thermostats has launched the largest DDoS attack ever against a top security blogger, an attack so big Akamai had to cancel his account because defending it ate up too many resources.
Source: Largest DDoS attack ever delivered by botnet of hijacked IoT devices | Network World
