Tag Archive for Michigan

| July 9, 2013
Comments Off on Brake Lights That Can be Seen Around Corners

Brake Lights That Can be Seen Around Corners

Kevin Fitchard at GigaOM reports that the Ford Motor Company (F) is testing a new concept in the connected car world. The Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker is experimenting with wireless brake lights that can be seen around corners. Ford is testing the vehicle-to-vehicle safety research in Germany with experimental radio-equipped S-MAX vehicles that communicates with other vehicles. The S-Max alerts nearby vehicles when the car is braking, long before drivers can see it.

The Ford test is really part of a larger vehicle-to-vehicle communications effort that Ford and other global automakers have pursued for years. (rb- I have covered connected cars many times here, here, and here). The author claims the idea is to connect every vehicle on the road into a massive automotive network. Each car itself would be an individual actor, but they would also become aware of the actions and intentions of the vehicles around them.

In such a network, the article states that drivers are no longer dependent solely on their senses to react to road and traffic conditions. An electronic brake light is the most obvious use case for such a system. GigaOM says that eyes and feet can only act so fast, but a dashboard light warning the driver of a pile-up just out of sight could be a lifesaver. Chief technical officer and vice president of Ford Research and Innovation, Paul Mascarenas, told Australia’s Car Advice that “Car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communications represent one of the next major advancements in vehicle safety.”

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The Ford system is one of 20 being tested in Germany so it will be many years before a standard system emerges. Ford is also involved with the University of Michigan’s Safety Pilot Model Deployment, a field test of more than 2800 vehicles.

1963 Mercury Comet Brake LightsThen there are the privacy concerns. I wonder what Ford or worse yet the Feds will do with all the data generated by these vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems. I think it is likely the automakers will make the data available to GPS or navigation providers of traffic problems on a road if too many smart brake lights go off.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| June 27, 2013
Comments Off on Energy Harvesting Displays

Energy Harvesting Displays

Energy Harvesting DisplaysOver 90 percent of the displays sold will use liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology. However, LCDs are tremendously energy inefficient, converting only about 5 percent of the light produced by a backlight into a viewable image. The LCD in a notebook computer consumes one-third of its power. MIT’s Technology Review reported on efforts at the University of Michigan to improve the efficiency of LCD panels and boost the battery life of phones and laptops.

Benq LCD monitorThe LCD screen remains dominant because manufacturers can make LCDs inexpensively on a vast scale. More energy-efficient displays are either too expensive to manufacture or cannot produce high-quality images. “The LCD is very inefficient, but it works,” Jennifer Colegrove at Display Search, a market research and consulting firm, told TR.

At Michigan, they are tackling one of the biggest culprits of wasted light in LCDs: color filters. The group, led by Jay Guo, is developing energy-harvesting color filters. Color filters are used in many displays, but the ones by Professor Guo’s team are appropriate for use in reflective “electronic paper” screens. These contain sub-pixel arrays that absorb ambient light and reflect red, green, or blue light.

Energy efficiency at Michigan

University of MichiganDr. Guo and his U of M colleagues combined a common polymer solar cell material with a color filter that his group invented last year. The photovoltaic color filter converts about two percent of the light that would otherwise be wasted into electricity.

U of M’s Guo estimates that full displays incorporating this photovoltaic filter could generate tens of milliwatts of power, enough to extend the life of a cell phone battery. The photovoltaic color filter is described in a paper published online in the journal ACS Nano.

“It’s an intriguing idea,” says Gary Gibson, a scientist developing reflective color displays at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California. Low brightness is a recurring problem for color electronic paper. If the color filter proves practical, says Gibson, energy harvested from ambient light could power a backlight and make the display brighter.

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Go BlueHarvesting energy from the environment with the device is a trick that could boost the battery life of phones and laptops. Oh yeah, the article also talked about similar work at UCLA. Go Blue!

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| March 19, 2013
Comments Off on Detroit Tech City

Detroit Tech City

Detroit Tech CityDetroit has become the only two-time winner on the top five list of fastest-growing tech cities, says Dice.Com. According to MiTechNews, Detroit was No. 5 on the Dice list this year, with year-to-year growth of 10 percent in tech job listings. The Motor City was No. 1 on Dice’s list in 2011.

Back in 2011, Dice said Detroit had more than 800 tech jobs posted on any given day; now it’s more than 1,100. Automation Alley ranked the greater Detroit region among the best for its strong record of students completing science, technology, engineering, and math degrees.

The article says that annual salaries for Detroit-based tech pros are rising at above-average rates, up 7 percent from last year to $76,515 on average.

Dice says St. Louis, Mo. was No. 1 on this year’s Dice survey at 25 percent year-over-year growth in tech job listings, followed by:

“Detroit is a great place to be, and that’s what’s driving it,” said Dice.com senior vice president Tom Silver. “I think what’s contributing to it is a growth in opportunity as well as a pretty good cost of living. Increasingly, people are moving from more traditional tech centers like the Valley and NYC where it’s really expensive, to cities like Detroit, which are a great place to live.”

Employers are also discovering a “rich pool of talent” in cities like Detroit too — that they can get for more reasonable salaries, given the lower local cost of living.

Dice noted that Quicken Loans, Domino’s Pizza (DPZ) and New World Systems are high-profile Motown-based companies with listings on Dice.com.

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I have covered what I have called the Detroit Miracle for a while here and here.

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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| February 16, 2013
Comments Off on UP EAS Warns of Zombie Attack

UP EAS Warns of Zombie Attack

UP EAS Warns of Zombie AttackEmergency Alert Systems at northern Michigan television stations sent out a fake emergency alert warnings. The alters warned the UP of a zombie attack after being hacked. The fake broadcast warned that bodies were rising from the grave and alerted people to avoid contacting the walking dead.

MLive Zombiereports the message went on Monday about 8:30 p.m.. The zombie attack warning interrupted “The Bachelor” on WBUP, ABC 10 and “The Carrie Diaries,” a prequel to “Sex and The City,” on CW. The same person got into Northern Michigan University’s public television station WNMU-TV 13. That message interrupted “Barney and Friends” at about 4 p.m., reports NMUstation manager Eric Smith.

“People panicked and it was crazy and we didn’t know how to stop it,”  Cynthia Thompson, station manager and news director at ABC 10 and CW 5 in Marquette, MI said. The suspected hacker has been caught, according to MLive, Ms. Thompson could not release any further details on the suspect.

Attacks around the nation

Security leakSimilar attacks were reported at Great Falls, MT station KRTV and KNME/KNDM in Albuquerque, NM. The security breach’s occurred at stations that didn’t have their login names or passwords reset from factory default settings, said Ed Czarnecki, senior director for strategy and regulatory affairs for Monroe Electronics Inc., a Lyndonville, NY based manufacturer of EAS equipment. “We are very aggressively working with authorities … to ensure that all broadcasters have updated their passwords on their critical equipment,” he said.

Michigan Association of Broadcasters CEO Karole White said the MAB is taking the issue very seriously and working with the Michigan State Police and Federal Communications Commission on the case. “Though this was kind of a pranksters joke, they could have used a different code that could have caused people to be very concerned and possibly even panic,” CEO White said.

HackerInfoSecurity says the problem goes beyond just passwords. Mike Davis, a security expert with IOActive, submitted a report to US-CERT detailing flaws in the equipment used by the EAS system a month before the incident. “Changing passwords is insufficient to prevent unauthorized remote login. There are still multiple undisclosed authentication bypasses,” he told Reuters via email. “I would recommend disconnecting them from the network until a fix is available.”

Really, really, terrible software

According to Kaspersky’s ThreatPost, the flaws Mr. Davis unearthed allowed him to do exactly what Monday’s hacker did. “There is some really, really, terrible software on the other side of that box,” Davis said. “There are some known issues like authentication bypasses and what I would call back doors, although I don’t know if they were meant that way. While I can’t provide authenticated messages [from the EAS system itself], I can log into all of them and insert authenticated messages.”

“The problems that Davis found,” warns ThreatPost, “represent a serious weakness in the EAS system. Some of the ENDECs (encoder-decoder) are networked together in a way that enables them to relay messages to one another, so an attacker who could compromise one could conceivably cause problems on others, as well.”

 rb-

Umm Networking 101, change your default passwords.

Haven’t the dead been roaming the halls of Congress for years? Brain dead anyway!?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| February 14, 2013
Comments Off on School Kids’ Data at Risk

School Kids’ Data at Risk

School Kids' Data at RiskGerry Smith writes about the growing amount of school kids’ data being stolen across the country. In the Huffington Post article, “In Push For Data, Schools Expose Students To Identity Theft” the author explains why.  Data thieves want this information to commit identity theft. The author cites several recent cases:

Child identity theftThe article says these incidents highlight the growing risk of school kids’ vulnerability to identity theft. Across the country, schools have become conduits for children’s pristine Social Security numbers. The students’ numbers are increasingly falling into the hands of credit-hungry identity thieves. The frequent data breaches have prompted calls for schools to stop collecting sensitive student data. The breaches have angered parents like Art Staehling, whose 14-year-old daughter was among 18,000 Nashville students who had their Social Security numbers accidentally exposed online for three months in 2009.

They left the gate wide open for data theft

“They left the gate wide open,” Mr. Staehling told The Huffington Post. “It’s clumsiness. There’s no excuse for it. If schools want that information, there should be some sort of penalty paid if they don’t guard it with their lives. I haven’t found a reason why they honestly need it.”

Schools collect students' Social Security numbersSchools collect students’ Social Security numbers as part of a campaign to more precisely track their progress. But privacy experts told Huff Post there are less risky ways to identify students. The privacy experts accuse schools of needlessly exposing children to identity theft by gathering their Social Security numbers. Mn then not securing them.

The push for collecting student data began under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Financial incentives in the 2009 stimulus package, including Race to the Top‘s $250 million in competitive grants drove schools to collect student social security numbers, according to Reidenberg.

No Child Left Behind Act drove schools to collect student social security numbersThe U.S. Department of Education has warned schools not to use students’ Social Security numbers in their databases. The Huff Post says the Feds urge schools to create other unique identifiers. The National Center for Education Statistics warned schools last fall that. They told educators that Social Security numbers are “the single most misused piece of information by criminals perpetrating identity thefts.”

School abuses student’s Social Security numbers

Despite the warnings, the collection and use of student’s Social Security numbers in K-12 schools remain “widespread.” An audit last year by Patrick O’Carroll, the Social Security Administration‘s inspector general. The IG found students’ Social Security numbers printed on transcripts, tests, and athletic education forms. According to the article, the audit concluded that schools were using the numbers “as a matter of convenience.” Mr. O’Carroll found there have been at least 40 data breaches of confidential student information at K-12 schools since 2005.

In his report, O’Carroll wrote.”We believe the unnecessary collection and use of Social Security numbers is a significant vulnerability for this young population. Each time a student provides his or her Social Security number, the potential for a dishonest individual to unlawfully gain access to, and misuse, the number increases.”

Read Part 2 here.

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Consumers Unions points out that Michigan law restricts how Social Security numbers can be used. In Michigan, SSNs cannot be printed on ID cards, intentionally communicated to the public, and/or publicly displayed or mailed within an envelope.

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  • Young children can be identity-theft targets (goerie.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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