October 10, 2005, 6:07 PM PDT
Phishing for business
Posted by: Dorian Benkoil

More on today's impromptu topic of pernicious practices and laws to combat them. TechRepublic's John McCormick writes that phishing--using e-mail and online tricks to get people to turn over their personal information--affects business, too. He says:

"Some scams are beginning to target business credit information; companies are often a better target because they have more money. Businesses are accustomed to paying an invoice when they get it without doing much research. In fact, this is an old scam: mail out a bunch of invoices using a professional-sounding name, and many companies will just send a check. This means that even seemingly harmless information about billing cycles and sample invoices can pose a threat."

He also complains that California's antiphishing law, passed September 30, is too narrowly defined.

Meanwhile, here's a story about business losses due to phishing and other attacks.

Permalink | Post a comment

• Read also: Work
• Email to a friend | Print this post

October 10, 2005, 4:42 PM PDT
The Dream'eo Enza Portable Media Center
Posted by: James Kim

After a long, long wait, there's finally a new Portable Media Center in town. Meet the Enza from Dream'eo. It looks pretty sharp and has same specs as other PMCs: 400MHz XScale processor, a 3.5-inch, 320x240-pixel screen, and a built-in mono speaker. It also runs the same easy-to-use operating system as the Creative Zen PMC, the Samsung YH-999, and the iRiver PMC120.

We'll get it in and see if it's just another PMC or if it can separate itself from the pack. Though it has a removable battery, so far, I'll pass on the paltry three hours of video and six hours of WMA playback. Kind of reminds me of the first Creative Nomad Jukebox with its five-hour battery life. Ugh.

Permalink | 1 comment

• Read also: MP3 players
• Email to a friend | Print this post

October 10, 2005, 4:34 PM PDT
DARPA Grand Challenge 2005: a race-day diary
Posted by: Molly Wood

5 a.m., Saturday, October 8 Charlie, CNET's intrepid camera guy, and I rolled into the parking lot at Buffalo Bill's Resort and Casino in Primm, Nevada, at 4:58 a.m. this morning, and we're already behind the curve. There are about three parking spots left, and even though it feels like the dead of night, the place is already hopping. We're checking in for a 5 a.m. media briefing, but the teams had to be here at 4:30 a.m. to receive a CD containing the course information for today's race. We find out at the briefing that the race will consist of a rather paltry 131.6 miles (we'd expected between 140 and 170). It'll include various hairpin turns and some speed-testing straightaways right alongside Interstate 15 between Primm and Las Vegas, and it will end in a series of mountain switchbacks called Beer Bottle Pass. This is obviously a military operation--that is, it's impressively organized. There's a giant tent for spectators that will feature multiple plasma screens showing satellite feeds and broadcasting regular position updates. There's also a tent where spectators can line up to view 3D satellite images of the race in progress. And, of course, there are concessions and a T-shirt stand.

Dawn breaks over the desert in Primm, Nevada

6:30 a.m. Daylight is breaking over the desert, and the vehicles are getting into place. DARPA director Tony Tether has reminded us several times by now that we are about to witness history in the making, and as the wind begins to pick up, we're just waiting for that history to start. At this point, H1ghlander, Stanley, and Sandstorm have pulled into position, and we're waiting for a go signal, followed by an audible signal from the vehicle, and then they'll lurch into action.

H1ghlander, Stanley, and Sandstorm wait for the race to start

6:40 a.m. H1ghlander gets the go sign, and he's off! The Carnegie Mellon Humvee jets out of the starting chute, straight and true, and seconds later he's booking across the desert, headed for the first U-turn of the race in a dry lake about a mile and a half away. Trailed by a chase vehicle, H1ghlander kicks up a cloud of dust and wild cheering. Five minutes later, Stanley launches in slightly frightening fashion--the vehicle comes slowly out of the chute, makes an alarming turn right toward the concrete balustrade between the starting corral and the grandstands, then rights itself and heads off into the distance. Five minutes later, Sandstorm launches, and five minutes after than, it's Spirit, the Jeep Grand Cherokee from the Axion team.

7 a.m. Just about 15 minutes into the race, and as the bots are still launching, an announcer comes on to tell us that last year's record has already been surpassed--H1ghlander has crossed the 8-mile mark. Two women come by handing out free cans of Red Bull (Stanley's sponsor), which Charlie and I gratefully accept.

The bots continue to launch in intervals for about two and a half hours, and TerraMax, the big yellow behemoth from Oshkosh, lumbers out in second place at a little after 9 a.m. By that point, two vehicles have already passed Spirit; H1ghlander, Stanley, and Sandstorm are in a tight little knot headed through the course; and the wind has picked up even more. H1ghlander crosses the 28-mile mark, going four times as far as its compatriot did 18 months ago. The DARPA announcer tells us that, by Congressional mandate, 30 percent of all military vehicles must be autonomous by 2015.

11 a.m. Members of the media pile into a bus that takes us about 12 miles along the Interstate to a spot that's 68 miles into the course--almost 10 times as far as the best-performing bot in the first challenge. We have just missed H1ghlander, Stanley, and Sandstorm, but the DARPA security guys--big, serious military types in DARPA Grand Challenge windbreakers and hats--tell us that H1ghlander and Stanley cruised straight through as though a person were behind the wheel. Sandstorm, hampered by, um, a sandstorm, was a little shakier. The wind has really picked up, and mini sand tornadoes are everywhere. We wait for the next vehicles to pass with our shirts pulled over our mouths, and I can feel sand working its way into my hair follicles. The next bot to arrive is Team Ensco's desert racer, Dexter. This dune buggy-style vehicle is really cruising--a couple of bots have dropped out at this point, and Dexter has made a huge surge. In fact, he's looking like the early favorite, since this is a time trial. Around 11:30, Axion's Spirit comes by at a snail's pace, but she's still kicking. As we ride back in the bus, we actually see H1ghlander and Stanley streaking across the desert, followed by the military helicopters that are tracking their every move. Spectators line parts of the freeway, and it's utterly surreal to see these driverless vehicles cruising along with trucks behind them. We joke about all the 911 calls that are probably coming in this afternoon.

On our bus is a representative from TerraMax, who says its monster bot is about 30 miles out. She looks tense as she reports that TerraMax is moving fine, just very slowly.

12:30 p.m. "Hold onto your hats, folks," says the announcer. "Stanley has just passed H1ghlander."

There are notes in the media tent about the vehicles that have dropped out, and it's starting to look like a mini graveyard. The MITRE team made it only one mile, while MonstorMoto managed just seven. Team DAD, whose Toyota Tundra featured a truly innovative spinning laser sensor, saw that sensor fail at 26 miles, and one grim notation says, "Virginia Tech, Rocky--36 miles. No longer moving. *Cliff.*" Sadly, the underdog Axion team's Spirit became mired in sand shortly after we saw her pass the halfway point, and the scrappy Dexter suffered a severely punctured tire at 81 miles.

1:30 p.m. The lead vehicles are approaching Beer Bottle Pass, and Stanley is still the lead. We see him start on the switchbacks in a live feed broadcast in the media tent, and a huge cheer goes up. At this point, Stanley is only five miles from the finish line, and he's moving smoothly through the hairpin turns, with a cliff wall on one side and a sheer drop on the other. The Stanford team files into the grandstand and does the Stanford wave, but Sebastian Thrun tells them the next one can happen only when Stanley crosses the finish line. Suddenly, helicopters appear in the distance and the entire Stanford team pours down to the fence in front of the finish line.

1:45 p.m. Off in the distance at the foot of the hills, Stanley and the chase vehicle come into view, closely flanked by two helicopters. The Stanford team and many spectators erupt into cheering. Stanley makes its way toward the finish, where DARPA Director Tony Tether is waiting. He flags down the vehicles and hits the E-stop, to officially declare Stanley the first vehicle to cross the finish line. As the bot makes its way through the Finish gates, the Stanford team hoists Sebastian Thrun and software lead Michael Montemerlo into the air, after dousing them with giant cans of Red Bull. Asked for comment, Sebastian shouts, "We had a good day."

Stanley crosses the finish line--but does he win?

The three lead vehicles finish within about 30 minutes of each other. It's clear to most everyone that Stanley finished faster than the Carnegie Mellon bots--certainly H1ghlander, which was passed. But DARPA refuses to give out exact finishing times, saying it wants to focus on the technological achievements we've just seen in the race, er, challenge. Besides, at this point, three vehicles--CajunBot, Desert Rat, and TerraMax--are still out on the course. By late afternoon, the utterly overlooked Gray Team's bot, TerraMax, and, I think, CajunBot were still out on the course. DARPA would not declare a winner, saying it was still possible for the others to complete the course with a winning time, and that they would continue operations overnight. GrayBot, a modified Ford Escape Hybrid, did indeed complete the course Saturday, in a competitive 7 hours and 30 minutes. TerraMax had to be paused overnight, and true to its size and slowness, took 12 hours, 51 minutes of total time to reach the finish line. Don't feel bad, though. I think Oshkosh already has its contract in hand.

Finally, on Sunday, Stanley is declared the winner and awarded the $2 million prize. And a new era of car and truck development begins. Are we ready?

Permalink | Post a comment

• Read also: Car Tech
• Email to a friend | Print this post

October 10, 2005, 4:15 PM PDT
Princeton's Prospect 11
Posted by: Wayne Cunningham

Princeton University's entrant into the DARPA Grand Challenge was surprisingly low-budget for such a prestigious institution. But Princeton doesn't have the same tech cache to defend as Carnegie Mellon University or Caltech. Princeton's team was made up of a handful of undergraduate and graduate students. I interviewed them in their garage at the qualifying rounds. Their car, the Prospect 11, is built on a GMC Canyon pickup, a vehicle that had been damaged in transport and was going to be scrapped by GM. The car was donated to the Princeton team instead, who set about building in drive-by-wire components, computers, GPS, and its only sensor, a stereo vision camera. A few weeks before the qualifying rounds, they had also gotten a hold of an inertial measurement unit, which meant they had very little time to integrate its information and test it. And a lot of the programming of these vehicles is done by trial and error; let the car run, and if it's about to hit an object, stop it and look at its sensor data and how the computer decided to respond.

The team members also clued me in to how they named the vehicle. Prospect is a street on the Princeton campus with 11 dinner clubs. A popular challenge is to stop for a beer in each club, making it more and more difficult to find your way the farther along you are. An autonomous vehicle could navigate the Prospect 11 for its happily inebriated passengers.

Permalink | 1 comment

• Read also: Car Tech
• Email to a friend | Print this post

October 10, 2005, 4:12 PM PDT
Sensing their surroundings
Posted by: Wayne Cunningham

Most of the technology used by the cars of the DARPA Grand Challenge to see obstacles and find their routes is off the shelf, although not stocked in your standard computer or hardware store. GPS units have been around for a while, but the kind used in the autonomous cars are industrial units with an accuracy of 10 to 30 centimeters. The majority of competitors used units from Trimble. The GPS units were often coupled with an inertial measurement unit (IMU), which can determine speed and acceleration on all axes. An IMU can provide information about the location of the vehicle if the GPS gets interrupted.

One of the most popular types of sensors used to see the immediate surroundings were lidar units. Lidar is an acronym for light detection and ranging. These units project a laser beam, using its reflection to find solid objects. SICK makes many of the units used by the competitors. Lidar works for short ranges, so many of the vehicles also used radar as a long-range detection device. Although radar isn't as good as lidar for determining the shape of an object, having a long-range sensor gives the onboard computers more time to identify obstacles. A few competitors supplemented their sensors with stereo vision cameras, while the Princeton team relied on them. Where a laser beam can see only a narrow part of the terrain, stereo vision cameras see everything in front of the vehicle. The stereo images let the computer determine how far away an object is, using different pixel colors to indicate range. The only problem with stereo vision cameras is that they don't provide much information about what's not there, like a sudden drop-off.

Permalink | Post a comment

• Read also: Car Tech
• Email to a friend | Print this post

October 10, 2005, 3:53 PM PDT
DARPA Grand Challenge 2005: the day before
Posted by: Molly Wood

It's the day before the DARPA 2005 Grand Challenge, and Sebastian Thrun, team leader of the Stanford team, is having a blast. He's cheerfully conducting a one-man orchestra of media attention, race preparation, and technology evangelizing. As he escorts me into the pit area--a section of the Buffalo Bill Resort and Casino parking lot where all the teams are camped out in tents next to their autonomous vehicles--he tells me that this challenge is most certainly, absolutely not about winning.

Thrun, who is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, firmly believes that "if anyone finishes the race, everyone here has won." He tells me that his goal in building autonomous vehicles has little, if anything, to do with their possible military applications. He believes that self-driven vehicles are the way to create safer roads for everyone, and the way he talks about the development of Stanley, the team's souped-up Volkswagen Touareg, it's clear that this is an exercise in the most joyful form of geekery. Stanford didn't compete in the first DARPA challenge; Thrun says they actually chose to watch the race rather than compete, so they could spend as much time as possible building the perfect robotic entrant.

DARPA Grand Challenge entrant Stanley

The car itself is equipped with four laser range finders, a radar system, two stereo cameras, and a monocular vision system, all of which allow it to build a 3D image of the path through which it travels and help it detect turns and obstacles as it chooses the correct path. A blue box mounted in the back of the VW controls the drive functions and, like all the vehicles in the race, Stanley is equipped with an E-stop required by DARPA, which lets them shut down the bot at any time or pause it to allow another vehicle to pass.

The Stanford vehicle runs on seven Pentium M computers, all running Linux, mounted in the back of the Touareg, although Thrun tells me they discovered they really only need two computers to run the vehicle--Stanley is just that efficient. The vehicle's computers are extremely low power, too, drawing all the power they need from the Touareg's engine, eliminating the need for a generator on the vehicle. Cedric Dupont, a senior research engineer at Volkswagen, tells me Stanley is probably the most environmentally friendly bot on the course--it runs on biodiesel, and its good fuel efficiency means the team doesn't have to put in an additional fuel tank. In fact, aside from the computers in the back, the bank of radar and electronic "eyes" on top, and the red button in the center console that switches from robotic to manual drivetrain, the Touareg is very nearly stock. However, Dupont confides that the Stanford team has actually gone through six of the roughly $40,000 vehicles in the course of the project--something Volkswagen wasn't really expecting when it got involved. Three are in attendance at the race--Stanley, a backup replica called Stanlette, and a jet-black chase vehicle.

As a dramatic side note, Thrun is a former Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, which is camped out in the pit right next door. Carnegie Mellon is the brainpower behind Red Team and Red Team Too, whose red Humvees are the heavy favorites to not only complete the course, but take home the $2 million. In contrast to the Stanford team, which numbers 60 including, Dupont says, "everyone," the two Red Teams comprise 250 people. While Stanford is camped out in a tent, preprogramming Stanley on an IBM ThinkPad, the Red Team is working out of a temperature-controlled trailer in the middle of the parking lot, which is filled with computers. They've invested, according to rumors in the pit, some $5 million in the two Humvees, and their sponsors include such heavyweights as Google and Caterpillar. DARPA regulations require Carnegie Mellon to enter as two teams if it's going to run two vehicles, but grad student Josh Johnston tells me the two Humvees were built in the "same development pipeline."

DARPA Grand Challenge entrant H1ghlander

Carnegie Mellon has been here before. Its 1986 military Humvee, Sandstorm, raced in the first DARPA challenge and was the most successful bot on the course--it completed 7.5 miles of the 142-mile course. This year, Carnegie Mellon is reentering Sandstorm, along with a 1999, consumer-model H1 named, appropriately, H1ghlander. Johnston says the team chose a Humvee for the first DARPA challenge because of the vehicle's ruggedness, but says its military history didn't hurt, in a military-sponsored competition.

H1ghlander also features seven Pentium M computers (also running Linux), and both vehicles house stereo cameras, laser-range scanners, and radar equipment in large, carbon-fiber domes mounted on the roofs. It's clear that while Stanford's Thrun presents a cheery, geeky, utopian vision of autonomous vehicle development, Carnegie Mellon is all business. It's serious about the competition and likes its chances.

While Stanley had four perfect runs in the qualifying events that helped place the bots for the starting line, Sandstorm and H1ghlander turned in faster average times. H1ghlander will be the first bot out of the starting gate, followed by Stanley, and Sandstorm will leave third. By Friday, the day before the race, Stanford has clearly become the emotional favorite for spectators and media alike.

But if Stanley tugs at the heartstrings, Team TerraMax captures the imagination with sheer bad-ass-ness.

DARPA Grand Challenge entrant TerraMax

This bot in question is a 32,000-pound MTVR--a medium tactical vehicle replacement. Team leader Gary Schmiedel tells me that Oshkosh truck already makes this vehicle for the Marines. The truck is big enough that all the electronics are mounted in the cab and on the front of the truck, leaving its bed available for hauling 7.1 tons of cargo offroad or 15 tons onroad. The truck stands 9 feet tall, and its three monster-tire axles boast independent steering, so it stands with its wheels cockeyed to demonstrate its steering potential.

Schmiedel tells me it's as maneuverable as a Humvee, but TerraMax's size has already posed some problems. For one thing, it's slow. Although the truck can book through a straightaway, qualifying rounds featuring narrow entryways or tunnels mean TerraMax has had to creep through at a snail's pace, or even back up and reenter several times. Secondly, although TerraMax technically finished the qualifying rounds in fifth place, DARPA has pushed the bot back in starting position to at least 19 out of 23. The problem? The truck is so big that when it's in front of the other bots, they view it as an obstacle, throwing them off their game entirely. DARPA will start the vehicle later in the race so that the other bots won't become convinced there's a gigantic wall dead ahead. In sum, this truck is awesome.

The pit is filled with interesting stories, dune-buggy-like underdogs, and brilliant hopefuls, and even though they've had 18 months to prepare, most of the teams say they don't expect more than a handful of vehicles to complete the course the next day--whatever that course ends up being. They'll receive a CD--called an RFFD--that contains the course's waypoints and mapping data at 4:30 a.m. the day of the race, and the first bot will launch with first light, hopefully around 6:30 a.m.

Permalink | 1 comment

• Read also: Car Tech
• Email to a friend | Print this post

October 10, 2005, 5:51 AM PDT
A look at new spyware laws
Posted by: Dorian Benkoil

CNET News.com's Washington correspondent Declan McCullagh writes this morning about how five new federal bills have been drafted that could try to regulate spyware, the pernicious programs that we often unwittingly allow into our computers. The programs feed us tons of pop-up ads, monitor our behavior, and in really bad cases, steal info.

McCullagh says all five bills could become law. He calls them "son of Can-Spam" after the law passed two years ago that has done anything but eliminate harassing and unwanted e-mail spam. But the Can-Spam Act has added a lot of cost and anxiety for any business that sends e-mail to a customer list. Meanwhile, businesses still spend a lot of time and money trying to filter out the junk.

Permalink | Post a comment

• Read also: Work
• Email to a friend | Print this post