What Internet-Connected War Might Look Like
A technician hurriedly slings his backpack over his
shoulders, straps on his M9 pistol, and bolts out of the transport with his
squad of commandos in a hail of gunfire. As soon as his team reaches the compound, he
whips out a laptop and starts deploying a rootkit to the target server, bullets
whizzing overhead all the while.
This might sound like the action movie of a hacker's
dreams, but The Army Cyber Institute at West Point is training its
recruits to do just that. At Chicago's Thotcon hacker conference
last week, attendees got a glimpse of what its elite units might look like.
… "A lot of
it is us trying to figure out how, in a training environment, we can show
[soldiers] the effect that ... the digital domain can have on tactical
operations," Vanatta told LinuxInsider in an interview following the session.
Also present at the interview were Waage
and their colleague, Brent Chapman, cyber operations officer at the Defense Innovation Unit
Experimental, or DIUx.
Interesting.
How an Online Grocery Platform Could Reshape Retail as We
Know It
… Online grocery
delivery requires dealing with irregularly shaped products with many different
form factors, multiple storage temperature regimens, short shelf lives, and
food technology constraints about what can be packed with what. Then there are the many vulnerable products
and the ways they can (negatively) interact with each other: if you load a
six-pack of beer on top of a box of strawberries, you will most likely end up
delivering a smoothie, which is probably not what the customer had in mind.
Then there’s the fact that an average online grocery order
is typically fifty items and customers are sometimes ordering more than once a
week, both of which have significant implications for how smart and
low-friction the ordering process has to enable customers to complete their
orders in just a few minutes. Most
customers don’t get up in the morning and say to themselves: “Hurray! Today is my online grocery shopping day!” Most people subliminally dream of the day
when, thanks to the power of data-fueled machine learning, the right groceries
will turn up at the right time, as if by magic, without the customer having to
do anything — a broadband of grocery.
Finally, there’s the challenge of creating a profitable
ecommerce business: you have grocery products with an average item price of
around $3 and typically 30 percent gross margin, leaving only $0.90 to pay for
all handling, selling, and delivery. Brick-and-mortar
stores are used to their customers doing this work for them; in the online
space, that is obviously not an option.
… The great thing
about having an online grocery delivery pipeline into customers’ homes is that,
once it’s in place and being used regularly, all manner of other products and
services can potentially flow up and down it. If you can do online grocery,
then you can do some other forms of online retail; but the reverse definitely
does not implicitly follow. The potential size of the worldwide online grocery
market combined with these spin-off opportunities is why grocery really is the holy grail of online retail.
Disruption or disaster? The end of telecom companies?
Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices
with Alexa Calling
Amazon may have flopped with the Fire Phone, but don’t count it out of the telephony
game just yet. Alongside Amazon
unveiling its newest Echo device earlier today — the Echo Show with a seven-inch video screen — the company also
announced Alexa Calling, free voice
calls and messaging services that you use through all Echo devices
(not just the Show), as well as for users of the Alexa app for smartphones.
… Meanwhile, users
of that newest Echo, the Echo Show, which has the screen and video feature,
will get added services, it seems. The
one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a
call to someone without them even answering the phone first. Think of it as the 21st century tech
equivalent of someone coming to your house and either peeking through the front
window as they’re knocking, or maybe just walking straight in, 1970s
sitcom-style.
… Amazon
emphasizes that it is opt-in, and a way to communicate with only the very
closest members of your family.
With this, we could ‘print’ a Corvette body, aircraft
wings or one of those Batman chest armor things.
Start-up unveils 3D printer that can build carbon fiber,
Kevlar, fiberglass parts
Start-up Impossible Objects on Tuesday
unveiled its Model One 3D printer, which it claims is the first such printer that can build
parts from composite materials including carbon fiber, Kevlar and fiberglass.
Give ‘em what they want!
Opera's new browser comes with WhatsApp and Messenger built
in
Thanks to add-ons and extensions, modern browsers are
capable of much more than just accessing websites. However, unless you know what you're looking
for, finding useful tools isn't necessarily easy. Instead of relying solely on its extension
marketplace, Opera hopes to claw back market share from Google Chrome by
incorporating additional features into its eponymous software. We've already seen it roll out low-power
mode and a fully-featured
VPN, but now it's making things a lot more social by integrating messaging
apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram into its sidebar.
Perspective. And a
lot of that is cash. What would you buy
with $200 Billion?
Apple Becomes First Company Worth More Than $800 Billion
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