Category Archives: Technology

An evaluation of my new Mazda CX-5. What’s good, what’s not, the decision-making process, and their curious approach to automotive design and technology

Mazda logo

I don’t normally talk about cars in and of themselves on this site, so despite that, or perhaps because of it, this post will cover a lot. Decision making, design, automotive technology, corporate perspective, individualism, aesthetics v. functionality v. pragmatism, collaborative filtering, and others. It’s quite interesting to me the complexities of making such a big decision as buying a new car and what goes into it. This was not an easy decision.

About two months ago, as I was shooting down the 405 south through Irvine, my 2008 Ford Escape hybrid suddenly lurched forward as though I had dumped the clutch, lost all power (which is especially bad in a hybrid), and forced me to fight the loss of steering to get it off to the shoulder. It was then that I noticed it had also displayed a message on the dash: “Stop Safely Now.”

This sounds bad

This sounds bad

The red exclamation point was a nice, added touch. I did stop safely, but it was a little late for that message. That little event could have been fatal, however after shutting off then restarting the car, everything seemed to be fine. I was hoping that would be the end of it, considering a similar event happened years earlier and restarting the car appeared to have eliminated the problem. This time, however, would be different.

It happened again. And again. After some research, I learned the problem, and a much bigger potential problem: A component used to cool other electronic components in the car had gone bad. Not only that, someone had died because of it and there was a class-action lawsuit in progress because of it. As the car already had over 100K miles, and other aspects of it had never worked properly, I determined it was time to start the hunt for a new car.

I considered many, and for many reasons. I’m not the luxury car type, and didn’t want to overspend, but looked at all my options. Ultimately, the decision came down to the Hyundai Tuscon and the Mazda CX-5. I decided on the latter, but not without some hesitation that I still carry. When there are many options, there is rarely a clear-cut winner, and this particular decision shows the nuanced nature of, and requirement for, an individualistic approach.

To set some groundwork, I wanted a crossover SUV, sometimes known as a CUV, or more colloquially – and derogatory, I assume – a cute-ute. (To clarify some terms, an actual SUV uses a unibody truck frame, whereas a crossover utilizes the crossover body on a car frame). At the same time, while I have always driven cars that seem somehow ‘rugged,’ like a Jeep Wrangler, Jeep Cherokee, Dodge Dakota, then the Escape, this time I wanted something that was a little more upscale, something that had elegance to it, while maintaining a slight, subtle edge.

There wasn’t much that met those criteria. It was easy to narrow down the search to the Hyndai Tuscon, which has an aggressive theme line, and comes with a lot of options, however while I was researching it, I kept seeing reviews – stellar reviews – for the Mazda CX-5. I was ready to buy, but for something like a car you want to evaluate all your options, and I felt I should at least look at the Mazda before making a final decision.

I knew nothing about Mazda. I don’t know anyone who drives a Mazda, and I have never known anyone who drives a Mazda. I am, however, beholden to design, and that will become important very quickly.

On first approach, the vehicles didn’t move me, metaphorically speaking. I walked around the car to set a baseline for myself, yet nothing stood out. However, as I returned to the front of the car, I noticed something: A chrome trim running along the bottom frame of the grill. It made a nice accent, especially when the sun hit it, and the floating, prominent Mazda logo, which hides the radar for the radar cruise control, has a nice presence in an understated mesh grill.

View from the front, at dealership

View from the front, at dealership

Following the line of the chrome accent, I now noticed the lines of the car itself, and what do you know; understated yet still with a subtle, aggressive edge. Narrow, down-sloped headlights, slightly wider at the hips, an ever-so-slightly reclined greenhouse and canted grill gives it a look of movement. In my search I had also been looking for some kind of pearlescent black, but Mazda’s new three-coat metallic red really shines, both literally and figuratively. I have never been a fan of red cars, but this one is beautiful; absurdly, almost comically chrome red.

Side view of car

Side view of car

Front. Note floating emblem and pearlescent chrome red

Front. Note floating emblem and pearlescent chrome red

In the previous two images, be sure to note the commonalities in thematic design between the front and rear lights; I do love a consistent design approach. I was already coming around to the design, but it was the interior that really grabbed me. A wide center console with chrome trim and leatherette boot evokes a luxury-car feel, which is exactly what I was looking for. Chrome-lined air vents, leveled door handles and center console, a dead pedal (totally unnecessary with an automatic transmission, unless you, what, always ride the brake?), and a tri-spoke steering wheel that looks more sports car than CUV. Additionally, unlike most other cars in the class which have two gauges and an info screen in between, this has three gauges, chrome-outlined, with the rightmost gauge being the info screen. That puts the speedometer front-and-center which is exactly where I like it. There’s also double-stitched leatherette and soft-touch everywhere in the black-and white interior which contributes further to the experience. Indeed, the CX-5 is often compared to Audi in terms of its interior feel, and having looked at Audi I honestly believe the Mazda outdoes it thanks to the symmetry and width of the center console.

Here’s a shot of the instrument cluster. Remember how I was just talking about consistent, thematic design? The gauge on the right with the MPG rating, trip odometer and gas gauge is all digital, however you wouldn’t know it at first glance. It matches almost perfectly with the other two gauges and leads to a unified, integrated theme, but with the additional functionalities of a digital display (this is also the gauge that is used to set the radar cruise control and contains some other informational screens). It’s beautifully done, even with the physical protrusion used to reset the trip odometer.

Instrument Cluster

Instrument Cluster

The CX-5 is compared to the Audi for two other reasons, one of which almost solely sold me on the car, and one of which will likely take some significant getting used to.

The first is that unlike almost every other car company out there, Audi being a notable exception, there is a physical knob mounted directly in front of the center console that is used to navigate the infotainment system. You can only use the top-of-dash mounted screen as a touchscreen if the car is stopped. Otherwise you have to use the knob, and I love it. I have always preferred physical interaction methods over digital, and it is because of the desire to have that in areas where it is no longer practical, such as smartphones, that we have haptic feedback and vibration and the like. People like the immediate, organic response, the feel of a physical button that responds notably and demonstrably to a press, as opposed to a tacked on vibration, if at all.

The dial, in all its glory

The dial, in all its glory

The dial is both textured and grooved, enhancing usability, and clicks with each turn, just like a well-designed mouse wheel will do, and can be used as a pseudo-joypad for moving up, down, right and left. It can also be pressed in as a selection confirmation. It’s responsive and tactile; you always know that an input has been received. Mounted around it are physical buttons with long-standard iconography that you can use to go home, back, or direct to any one of the main screens (Media, Communication, Navigation). Being able to control all aspects of the screen via physical input that’s easy to reach, where your hand naturally rests, and not having to reach out to a dash-mounted touchscreen, is wonderful.

The other reason the car is often compared to Audi, although Mercedes-Benz does this as well, is that rather than have the screen of the infotainment system in the dash itself, it is mounted on top of the dash, as though someone just smashed its vertical edge right in there. At first I really didn’t like it, it looked clumsy and tacked-on, and I am all about integration in design, but once I overheard someone describe it as ‘looking like a drive-in movie screen,’ I was hooked.

I think I'll add some tiny plastic cars and a little drive-in marquee.

I think I’ll add some tiny plastic cars and a little drive-in marquee.

The thing I didn’t realize at first is that by having the screen mounted in such a way, your eyes don’t have to travel too far to see it. To look at a dash-mounted screen your eyes travel almost twice as far, and are off the road for longer. The way Mazda has mounted the screen is actually safer, and I find it to be much more comfortable as well.

Even with the endless praise I have for the physical input methods the car employs, and the location of the infotainment – a word I really don’t like – screen, the system itself leaves much to be desired.

While almost every other auto manufacturer on earth has adopted Apple’s Car Play and Android Auto systems, Mazda stubbornly continues to resist, and this leads to a number of issues that go beyond the lacking software integration.

The fact is, Mazda’s system is behind the times. WAY behind the times. It’s slow to boot up, and chugs and skips while doing so. While on first glance it looks quite clean, with only 5 options, navigating within those options can be a chore. For example, I connected my phone via Bluetooth, something they had me do at the dealership, and while the process was easy and worked the first time, issues became apparent almost immediately. Text alerts and calls worked fine, with clear sound on both ends and snappy response, however when streaming music the usability, or lack thereof, rears its ugly head. I have about 700 artists in my music collection, and there is no way to jump to a particular one, or even navigate by letters of the alphabet. So if I wish to listen to, say, Thin Lizzy, I have to use the knob to scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll, and scroll…you get the idea. You also can’t wrap the scroll, meaning scroll off the top and have the list appear at the bottom or vice-versa, and the tiny red handle in the below image really illustrates how long the list is. The system menus are byzantine but that’s no different from any automaker, or any software at all for that matter.

Scrollin' Scrollin' Scrollin, keep that songlist scrollin'.

Scrollin’ Scrollin’ Scrollin, keep that songlist scrollin’.

Another odd experience is at one point my phone connected, but the car said it couldn’t access media on the phone. It could make calls and receive alerts, but couldn’t see the music and threw an error. However if I played a song on my phone, the song info came up on the car screen and the song played through the car stereo. Very weird. Eventually, and without rhyme or reason, it connected again and all was working fine.

Design concerns continue to abound in the interface, with the main being there’s no flash to the screen. What I mean is, the display is very pedestrian. While others (like the Tucson) will show full color images of the XM stations’ logos and has a graphic that looks like a radio dial if you’re tuning the radio, Mazda’s screen is very bland. On top of that, when listening to XM it bizarrely cuts off information about song and artist, even though there’s plenty of room left on the screen. The navigation screen is more lively and functional, but still tough to navigate (get it?) although it does work well once information is entered. When one considers the time and effort they put in to the overall design of the rest of the car, something they call Kodo, it is baffling they have slacked so much with this. Their information screen in the instrument cluster is full color and informative, using images and text to convey information from cruise control to fuel economy, so I am at a loss as to why the dash-based system is the way it is. Again going back to the Tucson, their screen on the top models is eight inches, full-color, and beautiful, although to be fair on lower models, the screen is only a four-incher and much more difficult to see. Of course, their screen is also exclusively touch, and navigating up and down on one of those is pure hell.

To top it all off, the actual display area of the Mazda’s screen doesn’t utilize the entire surface of the enclosure as you can see in an earlier image.

But I hold out hope. There has been significant vocalization from owners regarding this, and earlier this year Mazda informed Cars.com that they would be coming out with an Apple CarPlay and Android Auto update in the future. They didn’t give any exact dates, however the rumor is later this year. The thing is, they would have to overhaul the system to do it. They wouldn’t be able to shoehorn that functionality into the current interface in any meaningful, or non-crap way, so I am hoping when (if) the update comes, it will be a complete refresh to the whole system that reinvents it from the ground up. That would enhance the experience of this car in a big way.

Even with all my criticisms, there is so much to like. Along with my praise for the interior and exterior design discussed earlier, it has keyless ignition and entry with a detachable valet key, the car locks automatically and unlocks via a button in the handle if the key fob is in your pocket. The doors open wider than its competitors to make getting in and getting out – or, if you’re an engineer or designer, ingress and egress – easier. The radar cruise control will allow you to set a car-length distance to the car in front of you, and the Mazda will follow that car exactly without you having to do anything. It will speed up and slow down, even stop, then start again as the car in front of you does. It has a pseudo heads-up display that will show when the car shifts, blind spot alerts, the speed limit, any street signs in view (it will actually show graphics that look like red stop signs, yellow yield signs, speed limit signs with the actual speed limit, etc. It’s a neat feature), your current speed, and navigation arrows if using that feature, and amazingly does it without feeling cluttered. This is a significant safety feature as it doesn’t require taking eyes off the road for status information. The drive is by far the best driving experience of its class, with smooth shifts and almost no roll around corners, which is due to the vehicle’s unnoticeable transfer of weight to the front wheels when making turns, which keeps the car responsive and easy to control; the most apparent indicator of this is that the people inside the car don’t feel a compelling urge to lean into turns. I programmed my garage-door opener to a button on the mirror, so now the mirror opens the door and I don’t need to have the thing clipped to my visor. I have two different garage door openers for two different doors, and the mirror has three buttons, so I’m set. It has a sport mode that holds the gears longer for somewhat higher revs and offers up a little more power, and a weird manual shifting ability that I can’t imagine anyone would actually use.

Speaking of the Heads-Up Display, in the picture below, if you look closely you can see it as it appears while parked in the garage. When driving it contains much more information yet is still easy to read and interpret.

Heads-up display

Heads-up display

In the following image taken while driving (don’t do this, kids), you can see the speed limit sign and the current speed, as well as the indicators telling me I’m in the lane which is always good. Control signs such as stop and yield can be shown, in full color and shape, concurrently with the speed limit along with the other status indicators listed above.

HUD while moving

HUD while moving

HUD with Navigation

HUD with Navigation

So what about the Tucson? The one I was all ready to buy? I still like it, and I’ll even confess that it gives you much more for about the same money. It has a nice outer design, ventilated seats (not cooled, as some will say), the far superior infotainment screen and system, a rear hatch that opens if you just stand next to it, a 360-degree camera and backup camera that will show you where your car is and where it will be based on how you turn the wheel (the Mazda has a backup camera that works very well, but without that added future prediction bit). The Tucson also has a panoramic sunroof, which while nice, doesn’t actually open all the way and I have heard it suffers from some mechanical problems. The CX-5 has a moonroof and I rarely used the one in the Escape anyhow, so I suspect I’ll be fine with that.

Even so, driving the Tucson just didn’t grab me. It drove well enough, but wasn’t exciting, and the interior was functional and pragmatic, but not special in any way. It offered more, but the experience of being in it and driving it just didn’t excite me or make me want to drive it, and while I can more than understand why someone would choose it over the Mazda as I almost did, I am beholden to the design, the experience, the feel of something, and in that regard Mazda just blew it away as it does to all its competitors at this price point, and some even higher.

It will take some getting used to. I drove the Escape for 10 years and put a lot of miles on it. The washers never worked, all the power-window risers broke at one point or another with a loud crash as the window collapsed into the door frame, the interior lights became stuck on at one point and I had to pull the fuse, the hatch didn’t always close all the way, the electronic clock didn’t even give the correct date. It told the right time and day, but not date. I think it might even have driven around on its own at night committing crimes. Yet I still felt a pang of sadness seeing it sitting in the dealer lot, dirty and looking dejected; I had to tell it goodbye. When they took away my beloved Dodge Dakota, back in 2008, I shed a tear. Curious how we become attached to, and even empathize / sympathize with inanimate objects, something we talk about in several of my classes.

The old and the new. I feel sad looking at this picture.

The old and the new. I feel sad looking at this picture.

If Mazda follows through with their system / firmware update, something that should be doable through one of the car’s many USB ports, I will update this. I am following any little bit of news I get and am hoping we hear something more concrete in the near future.

The new Samsung Galaxy S8+

Samsung Galaxy S8+

I’ve been using my new Samsung Galaxy 8+ for a few weeks now, and must say I like it. It has a slew of new features such as the occasionally functional face-recognition method of login, which according to Samsung I should not use if I have a twin, and I end up using the login PIN about half the time anyway, since wearing sunglasses, being in bright/low light, having your head at a different angle than what the phone expects, or wearing a Freddy Kreuger mask all seem to interfere with its accuracy. It also eschews the previous models’ physical home button for an on-screen equivalent, which can sometimes get lost in app overlays, and the back button rotates with the orientation of the phone which means it sometimes points up, not back. Plus it no longer comes in glorious gold, but I did get a neat metallic grey-blue.

Samsung Galaxy S8+

Samsung Galaxy S8+

The metallic blue branding on the box let me know I was in for something special. I wasn’t such a big fan of the quick start card telling me to follow the instructions on the phone, which in turn told me to follow the instructions on the card. I was almost stuck in an infinite loop.

Lovely Blue Lettering

Lovely Blue Lettering

Hmm...

Hmm…

Even with those caveats, it’s a great phone. It comes standard with 64GB of internal storage, however I popped in a 256GB MicroSD and have enough storage for everything. While other Galaxy’s supported this, my previous S5 did not and I ran out of space almost immediately, which caused repeated battles with those pesky storage demons for months on end. On the front, the S8+ is adorned with a magnificent 6.2 inch AMOLED screen that wraps around the edges, an ‘Infinity Screen’ as Samsung brands it, and you can slide in panels from the edge that house frequently-used apps. I never do that, but you can.

In the US, the phone runs on an 8-core Qualcomm Snapdragon at 2.35 GHz, which is powerful but on-par with competitors. International markets get Samsung’s own 8-core, ARM-based Exynos processor running at the same speed. Both are plenty fast and more than capable for most mobile applications, especially with 4GB of RAM packed in alongside. I was hoping to use Qualcomm’s own Vellamo benchmarking suite to put it through its paces, however it was nowhere to be found, so I fell back on the stalwart and well-established GeekBench 4, which provided a comparatively average single-score of 1830, but a scorching, second-place multi-core score of 6032, placing it only behind Huawei Honor V9. I should also mention that the scores earned by the phone are much higher than what they are reporting for the S8+ on their site.

GeekBench 4

GeekBench 4

(It needs to be mentioned as a warning that I also intended to use the well-known and oft-utilized AnTuTu mobile benchmark, however on boot it insisted I download an additional ‘phone verification app’ and even loaded the Play store to do so. I don’t know why it would require that, I’ve never heard of such a thing, it sounded very fishy, and the reviews of it were foreboding. Therefore, although I like AnTuTu generally, I must recommend that you not use it for mobile bench marking purposes.)

I was also quite pleased at the 3500 milliamp battery life: Using Google Maps for navigation, after an hour of use my battery power was still in the high 80 percentile, whereas the Galaxy S5 would have been long dead by then. Speaking of which, it also supports Qi wireless charging, however be aware that is a misnomer: While you can rest the phone in a dock and have it charge thanks to two coils in the back, the dock itself still has to be plugged in. It doesn’t just magically charge from the air, although I am still waiting for that feature. The 12-megapixel rear camera takes stunning photos, and you can even elect to have them stored in RAW format. May as well, you’ll have the room. I don’t use the front camera except for the once-in-a-blue-moon mobile Skype call, so I can’t comment in any meaningful way on its quality, however it’s an 8 megapixel component.

In the first image below, taken at a mid-level setting and moving at ~70 miles an hour, the wind farm comes out quite clear with separation among colors from the rich blue at the top to the white of the mills in the center (even considering the haze that muddies the contrast along the horizontal center) and the darker colors of the earth and road at the bottom. Minimal blur with good color even at speed. Below that, a few pictures from my trip to Monsterpalooza in Anaheim, and even in low light conditions there is still sharp contrast and detail, except when an area of the image was in competition from multiple light sources as can be seen in the sign to the right of Frankenstein.

Wind Farm

Wind Farm

Another aspect of the phone I really appreciate this time around is when a known or suspected scam call comes in, the phone displays the contact name either as ‘Potential Fraud’ or ‘Potential Spam.’ I don’t know what the difference is, and like to think I could guess it anyway, but there have been no false positives or missed calls because of it so far. Also note the beautiful 1080P screenshots the phone takes.

Potential Spam

Potential Spam

I’ve been very happy with it so far. I haven’t had the chance to run it though its paces save for some movie streaming from my Plex server, which worked flawlessly, and with everything else it hasn’t hiccuped, stuttered, or frozen up yet. It doesn’t even get as hot. I’m still not thrilled about the lack of a physical home button, and once I transfer over all 13,672 files in my music library and see how it handles that in terms of performance and usability I’ll have a better idea of its overall capabilities. They’re also sending a complementary GearVR version 3, but every two weeks they inform me it will take six to eight weeks so I don’t know when it will get here, but with the S8’s USB type C connector, it won’t work with my old version 1, but I’ll update as soon as I can put it through it’s VR paces too.

IoT skills, deployment lagging behind expectations

Your data is here

Because I am teaching a project class in ubiquitous computing this quarter, I was struck by a post on the BPI (Business Performance Innovation) network discussing the results of a survey they conducted along with Nerdery and the Internet of Things Institute that states while industry does genuinely wish to adopt IoT strategies and deployments, they’re not happening as quickly as their enthusiasm might make it seem.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this. The most striking statistic as one reads through the report is that “…just 1.5 percent of executives at large companies say they have a clear vision with implementation well underway, while another 57 percent are either beginning implementation, have pilots underway or are committed and in the planning stages.” It’s the ‘clear vision’ aspect of this that is truly telling, especially when paired with the rest of the sentence. Immediately the question that presents itself is ‘If only 1.5 percent of executives have a clear IoT vision, how is it that 57 percent can be at various stages of design and/or implementation if they don’t?’

One clarification: In my class, and for the purposes of simplicity, we use Ubiquitous Computing and Internet of Things (IoT) interchangeably, however they’re not quite the same and I do let my students know that. The IoT is a subset of the concept of Ubiquitous Computing, the platform on which it’s enabled, similar to how the Internet is the technical foundation on which the Web operates. With that out of the way, the one issue I run into more than any other in this course is the belief of a small contingent of students that it should be a programming course, that they should be learning how to program sensors and the IoT protocols and whatnot. What I explain to them is that anyone can buy a book on how to program for the IoT; what they can’t buy is a book on how to think about the IoT. Like all technologies, IoT technologies can’t, as I tell them ad nauseum, be developed in a metaphorical vacuum. The technical issues of networking, the pragmatic issues of security and privacy, the enterprise issues of data collection and management, as well as many others, all must be considered as well when developing and deploying IoT strategies. After all, they’re not called strategies for nothing.

The second most common issue that comes up in this course is the question of what exactly the Internet of Things is. What defines it? What separates it from the regular Internet? Is that not an Internet of Things as well? How are they delineated? And where does ‘The Cloud’ fit in to all of this, if at all? Is that part of it? As is the case with all definitions, it can often depend on who you talk to. generally, in my class we define it terms of its low-power devices (sensors being the big ones) and lightweight protocols. However even in that case there can be disagreement and confusion. Do we need to make those delineations? The Internet is the Internet, yes? Do we need to divide it into TWO Internets, one for regular electronic devices and one for low-power sensors? What about our phones? Our TVs? They may be using Bluetooth but they certainly are not low-power, lightweight devices. And while this post isn’t meant to be about the technology per se, there are no fewer than twenty different protocols that can call themselves IoT protocols which has almost immediately led to standards overload. The image below gives and idea of this, although it contains both lightweight IoT as well as heavyweight regular networking protocols and where they fall in the TCP/IP stack.

Some IoT and non-IoT protocols

Some IoT and non-IoT protocols

And here’s this, for good measure, since we’re long past this moment in terms of the IoT. I rail against this all the time, but it never ceases to happen (and you should all read XKCD anyway):

Yep

Yep

True to this idea, The Technology Partnership in the UK states it should be called the Internet of Sensors, not the Internet of Things, since the Internet has always been an Internet of Things. A valid point, in my opinion, but then there’s also this. Let’s make up our minds, people!

And that brings me back to my introductory statistic. The linked article above has the following quote: “In my view, far too much attention is focused on getting the ‘Things” connected and not enough time is spent understanding the data insights that will actually drive the business forward.” That’s exactly right. Everyone is trying to figure out how they’ll get ‘things’ connected and get sensors out there and have an IoT strategy, but to what end? They’re so busy thinking about doing it that that they’re not thinking about why they’re doing it, what it all means, or if they need it, or how it will impact their business, or how it might impact their customers not just in terms of, say, improved customer service but also in terms of privacy and data collection and retention / distribution.

It’s important to take a step back and consider the gestalt of the IoT, and all the concerns and considerations that go along with it. It’s not a programming exercise; that’s just one low-hanging leaf on a vast tree of issues. I would hope that some people would be willing to take a step back for a moment, away from the headlong rush to have an ill-defined IoT strategy or deployment, and simply consider what it all means. We can all rush forward after that.

I am completely OK with this

The emojis will be with you, always

Now this I have no problem with whatsoever, although it hints at a larger issue. Researchers at University College London have discovered a dormant but massive Twitter botnet comprised of an estimated 350,000 fake accounts that does nothing but tweet out random quotes from Star Wars novels.

(Full report here)

They discovered it quite by accident while taking a pure random sample of English-speaking Twitter accounts. It’s important to note the importance of this sampling method, as other methods of sampling might bias the results in favor of those accounts that are more active or have more followers. Their one percent sample resulted in approximately six million accounts.

Once their random sample was complete, they plotted the geographic distribution of these users, and they discovered something curious. Many of the tweets formed an almost perfect rectangle along latitude/longitude lines, including open, uninhabitable places like frozen tundra and bodies of water. They conjecture the shape was deliberate to mimic where English-language tweets are most likely to originate, and hide them within the clutter of legitimate Twitter users Tweet flood.

Upon further investigation, the researchers found another surprise. All these Twitter accounts did was tweet out random passages from Star Wars novels. They also never retweet, they send out very few tweets (around ten total) and list ‘Twitter for Windows Phone’ as the tweet source. As much as I hate to say it, that is also likely a ploy to get them to stay under the radar as much as possible because of that platform’s significantly low user base.

It’s not Twitter, but Darth Vader actually posted this on Instagram. Seriously.

It’s not Twitter, but Darth Vader actually posted this on Instagram. Seriously. He doesn’t even care about that stormtrooper behind him.

Using a machine-learning word association approach (a ‘classifier,’ although classifiers are not limited to word association), it found that actual users had a very wide distribution of word choice, while the bots used words almost entirely related to Star Wars. Additionally, the platform percentages were evenly distributed for the most part among real users while the botnet was one hundred percent Twitter for Windows Phone. When the numbers are examined, the botnet is easy to see.

The authors then discuss the implications. Clearly, a dormant, low-activity Star Wars-themed Twitter botnet is not a big deal. However, if the creator decided to reactivate the botnet in order to create a spam network, send malicious messages, or use it for other nefarious purposes, they could. I personally don’t believe that will happen as it likely would have already, however as the authors also note, the botnet went out of its way to stay under the radar.

One of the things I find most interesting about it all is that the authors hint they found another, even more massive Twitter botnet using the same approach, which they will be reporting on at a later date.

Really interesting stuff, and touches on the impact of social media, machine learning and AI, cybersecurity, and geolocation/geotagging just to start (as well as the curious motivations of this particular botnet’s creator). I very much recommend giving it a read.

Panasonic introduces a transparent TV

Transparent screens are nothing new, at least not in science fiction. The most well know, I would argue, is the interface from Minorty Report, as seen in the header image, but there have been many others. Consider, for example, the PADD (Personal Access Display Device) from Star Trek, which was only made transparent recently. Also, they weren’t very good at naming things.

PADD from Star Trek

PADD from Star Trek

There is also the tablet being used by Liara from the popular video game Mass Effect 3.

Liara using transparent tablet

Liara using transparent tablet

 

And let’s not forget Avatar. Or The Avengers. Or The Empire Strikes Back. Or Futurama. Or even this thing that lets you interact with the screen from the front and the back. There were even rumors floating around that Apple was going to be introducing a transparent iPhone and iPad, with some going so far as to render their interpretation of it.

Transparent iPad

Transparent iPad

Transparent phone that was apparently supposed to be a real thing but then wasn't

Transparent phone that was apparently supposed to be a real thing but then wasn’t

It seems the main point behind these is to make them look more future-y, however while they are certainly technically feasible, their practicality is open to debate. A transparent screen leaves open whatever you’re doing to the eyes of everyone around you, there would be no privacy and a serious lack of security.

But what about a TV? A transparent TV that you use for watching, but when you’re not watching it, it just…disappears? Fades into the decor of the house, perhaps, without actually having to motorize it or hide it somewhere.

Panasonic has done just that, developing a TV using OLED technology, in which pixels give off their own light, in order to create a TV that is legitimately watchable while in use, and almost completely transparent when not. The catch is that the screen is made from a fine mesh which is then overlayed on actual, transparent glass. You don’t see the mesh when it is off, and you don’t notice it when it’s on. Genius.

Panasonic transparent TV (Photo credit: Techspot)

Panasonic transparent TV – can you see it? (Photo credit: Techspot)

It’ll be a few years before we see any type of commercial availability, but in the meantime, enjoy a gif of the process as seen on The Verge, who, I might add, really don’t want you downloading their gifs.

Nike announces self-lacing shoes

Nike HyperAdapt

What a time to be alive! Nike has announced that it’s HyperAdapt self-lacing sneakers will finally, FINALLY, be available on November 28th. You can read the press release at this link.

I’m not sure why, but there seems to be more hyperbole around this than is normal for a product release, even in the press announcement. For example: Nike’s own press release, linked above, is titled “Nike HyperAdapt 1.0 manifests the unimaginable.” Transworld Business titled their article about these shoes (and I am not making this up), “Transcending time, space, and our perception of reality, Nike has brought us the shoe that no one that (sic) possible outside the realms of science fiction: the HyperAdapt 1.0.

Let’s not get carried away. It’s a neat thing, but it’s not a future-breaking invention that will unite the world in harmony. Also, I wonder if “self-lacing” is the right term. You see, they don’t actually lace up like a ghost is tying your shoes. Rather, they tighten; a motor in the base of the shoe pulls what looked like pre-laced laces tighter until sensors deem they’re tight enough, and of course the person wearing them can make adjustments if necessary. The motor that does it is rechargeable, and there are lights in the shoe to indicate the status of the charge.

Here’s a video about it, one that goes beyond mere promotion into the realm of world-saving, but these kinds of things have started to concern me. Is this a sign of encroaching laziness, or a useful feature that we need? I can tie my shoes, and do so to just the right amount of pressure. Do I need a self-lacing shoe? With self-driving cars, self-cooking food, self-playing guitars, and whatever else doesn’t need a human, where does it end? I know it’s just a shoe, but that’s exactly why it’s concerning.

And what happens if the motor malfunctions? Or the battery dies? Oh, the humanity!

Destroy your stuff with just a USB stick

usb killer

Hey, now this sounds fun! Want a simple, effective, and inexpensive way to destroy your expensive stuff and all the data on it? Well do I have good news for you! Now, with just a simple USB stick you can blow up damn near any digital device with a front-facing USB port (meaning publicly accessible, it doesn’t actually matter which direction the thing is actually facing. An important distinction).

The USB Kill will charge itself from the USB’s power supply, then discharge itself back into the port, over and over again until the host device is broken. Of course they say don’t use it for malicious purposes, but come on…why else would we want one of these things? Oh right – ‘testing’ purposes.

To be fair, everyone knows USB ports are a haven for malicious attacks, they’re the mosquito-breeding stagnant pond of digital devices, a very easy way to infiltrate a system or exfiltrate (steal or lose) its data.

It’s a pretty nifty device, in and of itself, and another interesting point they make is that only Apple devices are protected against this type of attack out of the box. Everyone else, well, look out (also, it might not destroy the data, and if it doesn’t, then NSA-approved bulk erasers are for you!).

Learn about PC and OS pioneer Gary Kildall, from the inside

In my classes and on this site, I talk a lot about history. To me, it isn’t possible to be genuinely good at something unless that skill is accompanied by a respectful understanding of what came before. Otherwise, how could true knowledge be claimed?

I hold that true for everything. For example, if one claims to be a guitar player but knows nothing about Les Paul or The Beatles, they’re not really a guitar player. They may play guitar, but guitar player they aren’t. Similarly, if one is a physician, but doesn’t know the groundwork laid by Louis Pasteur or Florence Nightingale or how they treated injuries during the Civil War, then I would question their qualifications and their true interest in the field; after all, if they don’t know the history of medicine, how interested in medicine could they really be? A true passion for something necessarily results in learning *about* that thing, and that includes history.

That’s why I talk about it so much. I’m always excited to learn a new little piece of computing history no matter how small; everything helps piece together the puzzle. It’s also why I’m a member of the Computer History Museum, and they recently released a heretofore unknown piece of history that is quite major. It’s the ‘first portion’ (about 78 pages) of an unpublished autobiography of one of the founders of the modern home-computing movement, Gary Kildall. You can read about it and download it here.

Gary Kildall developed the first true OS for what would become business and home computers, and he called it CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers, and you can download the source code from the CHM here). There are many stories about him and his place in the early days of computing. The most common, the one his kids claim is false but has persevered and taken on a life of his own is that when IBM showed up at his front door to license his OS for use in their new line of PCs, he was out flying his plane and his lawyers advised him to not sign the NDA that was provided. IBM, not being a company to wait around, instead went right down the street to Microsoft and signed up with them instead. ironic, because they had approached Microsoft first who sent them to Kildall in the first place! Needless to say, the rest is history.

If you look at the screen of a PC running CP/M, you’ll notice that, and this isn’t a surprise, MS-DOS looks very much like it.

CP/M

CP/M

The truth to that story has always been questioned, but it is generally accepted as what happened. Microsoft had no OS when IBM first approached, which is why they recommended Kildall. However when IBM returned to Microsoft after the failed meeting, Bill Gates jumped at the opportunity and it was all over for CP/M. Gates became the richest person on earth, and Gary Kildall, sadly, faded into comparative obscurity. The fact is, for all his contributions to computing, there just isn’t very much known about him as a person. Even finding a decent header image was difficult.

That’s why it was very surprising to see the Computer history Museum recently make available a copy of the autobiography. Apparently, he had written it sometime back in the 70s and handed a copy of it out to a few friends and family noting it was intended to be published the following year. Needless to say that never happened, and the fact it existed remained a buried treasure ever since.

Being written by his own hand, and talking about the events behind the urban legend of IBM, Kildall, and Gates, it is a really fascinating read, giving insights into how things worked back at the dawn of the personal computer age. I found it especially interesting that even though he had once created a BASIC compiler, he – in his own words – detested BASIC. I didn’t know it was possible to feel that way about a computer language, but apparently he did. I was also struck that in the introduction to the memoir, Kildall’s children mention their father’s later struggle with alcoholism, and apparently that manifested in the writings and is the reason that those sections of the writings were not included in the release.

I am more than ok with that, though. What has been provided in this first portion is a fascinating narrative and perspective, one not seen before, into the mind of someone who deserves much more credit than he gets.

A couple of side notes: You can see Gary in many episode of The Computer Chronicles, an 80’s – 90’s show about technology that is a really interesting and compelling look into the what consumer technology used to be, and  if you haven’t been to the website of the Computer History Museum, you really should give it a look. There is so much there to see; it’s incredibly informative.

Intel recalls all Basis smartwatches due to burn risk

I like to think I’m pretty up on the tech scene, but the first I’d heard of Intel’s Basis watch (Intel bought Basis for $400 million so they could enter the smartwatch market and diversify from their core chip business) was a slew of articles claiming they are now all being recalled because they can burn you. And not just burn you, burn you to the point of blistering your skin. Lots of technology gets hot, heat is a byproduct of chip architecture, but a watch that gets so hot it will burn your skin? Come on, Intel, of all companies.

In their defense, they say it’s only been an issue with .02% of all watches, and they first issued a warning back in June, but it looks like it’s starting to become more of a problem than they anticipated. So if you have a Basis watch, you can return it and any accessories you might have picked up to go with it to the retailer and get a full refund.

Oh, one other thing, from what I understand they were pretty good watches.

The Ogre-Faced spider of drones

Ogre-faced spider

As many of you know, I considered going to grad school for biology, specifically because I wanted to investigate the cognitive capabilities of spiders. I believed there were certain species of spider that had the genuine ability to think and plan out strategy, and although I decided to pursue another path, I would also like to note that I have since been proven right. I knew it all along. Not all of them have the ability to think, of course, in fact I frequently use the example of a black widow and her behavior to illustrate concepts in artificial intelligence, specifically to define what is and isn’t intelligence.

So if you take a look at the lovely lady in the header image, you’ll see a spider that is unique in many ways, not the least of which is that it has two different and distinct colloquial names – one based on her appearance, and one based on her behavior. That’s unusual in the insect kingdom (which isn’t really a kingdom in the biological sense, but you know what I mean). Her first name is the ogre-faced spider, for reasons I think are pretty obvious. Her other name, however, is the one we’re concerned with and it describes not just her behavior but what I believe is at least a low-level ability to cognate: the net-casting spider.

Net-casting spider in action

Net-casting spider in action

That’s right! This spider makes a net, waits for some unsuspecting bug to mosey underneath, then not only traps the bug in the net, but will expand the net to fit the bug if necessary, or in some cases allow the bug to pass if she feels it will put up too much of a fight. And people say spiders can’t think. Or maybe they don’t say that, but if they do, they shouldn’t.

So why all the talk of spiders that can do the thinky thinky? Well, besides the fact that I use spider cognition – insomuch as it is – to explain artificial intelligence concepts, the netcasting spider is also the first thing I thought of when I saw this post over at Engadget: It turns out students at Michigan Tech are developing a drone that, just like the netcasting spider, can throw out a net to catch other drones in midair! How badass is that? Here’s the gif, borrowed from Engadget’s post:

Dronecatcher

Dronecatcher

The designers call it ‘Robotic Falconry,’ which makes perfect sense if you’ve ever seen a falcon hunt; they often pluck their prey, if it’s a bird, out of midair. The rogue drone, as it were, is similarly plucked right out of the air via net and hauled away, helpless, to someplace for…well, I’ll say tea and cake, but more likely disassembly.

I like this idea. It seems a less-lethal way of dealing with a rogue drone. If you think that perhaps this is addressing an issue that isn’t a real problem, you might want to read this post from Ars Technica. We don’t want to see anyone get hurt, and this guy was ready to do it. There’s a fascinating follow-up to that whole thing as well that could set law and policy about drones and would necessarily be very wide-ranging, covering ownership, privacy, property, and how all these things interact and overlap where drones are concerned. Additionally, as Engadget’s post also points out, Japan is testing a net-casting drone because shooting them down could be harmful if they are loaded with a dangerous substance, a problem they’ve already had to deal with.

This could all be focused into something productive, though. What we REALLY need is some kind of gladiatorial drone-combat sport thing – that would be fun to watch. Just like the BattleBots competitions they have, drone wars could become a real thing. A real, exciting thing. Drones with nets, drones with lasers, drones that shoot flames and crash into each other. I’d watch that.