Collaborate Disseminate
This month, the Los Angeles Department for Transportation will enter the next phase of collecting the real-time location of scooters like Lime and Bird. Continue reading EFF Says LA’s Scooter Location Data Could Unmask Individual Riders
Uber, which is pushing back against the requests for real-time location data of its JUMP scooters, was granted a provisional, month-long permit, while other companies received a full-year license. Continue reading Scooter Companies Split on Giving Real-Time Location Data to Los Angeles
You can add another bullet point to the long list of things that drive people nuts about the electric scooter craze in America: the scooters can be hacked. A researcher with San Francisco-based Zimperium discovered a way to manipulate Xiaomi M365 scooter through a Bluetooth connection. Users can access their scooter via an app that connects to the scooter, as long as users authenticate with a password. However Zimperium researcher Rani Idan determined the password fails to completely protect users. “During our research, we determined the password is not being used properly as part of the authentication process with the scooter and that all commands can be executed without the password,” Idan wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “The password is only validated on the application side, but the scooter itself doesn’t keep track of the authentication state.” From there, Idan wrote an app for his mobile device that allowed him to […]
The post Researchers found a way to hack those ubiquitous electric scooters appeared first on CyberScoop.
Continue reading Researchers found a way to hack those ubiquitous electric scooters
A year ago, ridesharing scooter startups were gearing up for launch. Workers at Bird, Lime, Skip, and Spin were busy improving their app, retrofitting scooters, and most importantly, figuring out the logistics of distributing thousands of electronic scooters along the sidewalks of the Bay Area. These companies were gearing up for a launch in early summer, but one company — nobody can remember exactly who — decided to launch early. First mover advantage, and all. Overnight, these scooter companies burst into overdrive, chucking scooters out of panel vans onto the sidewalk simply to keep up with the competition.
The thing …read more
Continue reading Security Engineering: Inside the Scooter Startups
A few months ago, several companies started deploying electric scooters on the sidewalks of cities around the United States. These scooters were standard, off-the-shelf electric scooters made in China, loaded up with battery packs, motors, and a ‘brain box’ that has a GPS unit, a cellular modem, and a few more electronics that turn this dumb electric scooter into something you can ride via an app. Dropping electronic waste on cities around the country was not looked upon kindly by these municipalities, and right now there are hundreds of Bird and Lime scooters in towing yards, just waiting to be …read more
Continue reading Liberating Birds For A Cheap Electric Scooter
It’s a reasonable certainty that 3D-printing is one day going to be a huge part of medicine. From hip implants to stents that prop open blood vessels to whole organs laid down layer by layer, humans will probably benefit immensely from medical printing. But if they do, the animals will get there first; somebody has to try this stuff out, after all.
An early if an unwilling adopter of 3D-printed medical appliances is [Jary], a 22-year-old Great Pied Hornbill, who recently received a 3D-printed replacement for his casque, the large, mostly hollow protuberance on the front the bird’s skull leading …read more
Continue reading Bird Beats Cancer With The Help Of A 3D-Printed Prosthetic
A scientist’s video shows a thirsty moth drinking tears from the eye of a comatose bird. Continue reading Rare Footage Captures Moth Slurping Tears From a Sleeping Bird’s Eyeball
Today’s ruling is a giant middle-finger to Uber, Lyft, Bird, and others who did not receive permits. Continue reading San Francisco Denies Scooter Permits to Uber, Lyft, Bird, and Others
If you pay attention to airplane news — or you watched the film Sully — you know planes have problems with birds. Sully was about US Airways flight 1549 which struck a flock of geese and ditched in the Hudson river. Engineers at Caltech say that was the inspiration for them to develop a control algorithm that enables a single drone scarecrow to herd flocks of birds away from airports.
Airports have tried a lot of things to discourage birds ranging from trained falcons to manually-piloted drones. Apparently, herding birds is harder than you would think. If you fly the …read more
Continue reading High Tech Drone Scarecrows Can Make Airports Safer
The City of San Francisco just gave scooter companies Bird, Spin, and Lime an ultimatum: Get off the street and apply for a permit, or else. Continue reading Scooter Companies Have Two Weeks to Get Off the Streets of San Francisco