Westjet Airlines Grants Holiday Wishes

A Canadian Airline, WestJet, has created a number of ads (which are real, by the way) in which they give awesome surprises to their passengers. The airline did this four years ago, and this year the company is doing "the 12 flights of Christmas". Here are some of the things they've done previously.

Humanoid Robot with Creepy Expressions

The UK robotics firm Engineered Arts has offered a sneak peek at its new humanoid robot ahead of a full reveal next year, and the preview is as incredible as it is unsettling. Ameca is presented as "the world's most advanced human-shaped robot," and a brief look at this "future face of robotics" suggests it might just live up to this claim. Engineering Arts is building Ameca to offer a platform for robotics technologies, looking to offer the ideal human-like vehicle for the development of human-like artificial intelligence. Its hardware and software are modular so customers will be able to secure just a head, or an arm, for example, depending on the application.

Part of the package is human-like facial expressions, which the firm hopes will enable Ameca to quickly build rapport with anyone, bridging the gap between humans and the digital world. The robot calls to mind Sophia, the humanoid robot granted citizenship rights to Saudi Arabia in 2017, who proceeded to answer questions from journalists in a press conference and later featured on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The videos offering a first look at Ameca show the robot appearing to wake up, loosen its joints and look in amazement at the world around it. The expressions and gestures are incredibly natural and, at first glance, seem more lifelike than those of Sophia, though its worth nothing a 40-second preview is much different to a wide-ranging press conference or appearance on late night television.





Credits:
https://newatlas.com/robotics/ameca-humanoid-robot-video

Outages Brings Down Amazon Web Services

An Amazon Web Services outage is wreaking havoc on the e-commerce giant’s delivery operation, preventing drivers from getting routes or packages and shutting down communication between Amazon and the thousands of drivers it relies on, according to four people familiar with the situation. Three delivery service partners said an Amazon.com Inc. app used to communicate with delivery drivers is down. Vans that were supposed to be on the road delivering packages are sitting idle with no communication from the company, the person said.Amazon Flex drivers, independent delivery people who carry parcels in their own cars, can’t log into Amazon’s app to get assignments, said another person. The problems come amid Amazon’s critical holiday shopping season when the e-commerce giant can ill afford delays that could potentially create lasting log-jams.

AWS said it had identified the cause of “increased error rates” and is working to fix it. Meanwhile, the company is directing customers to alternative servers in its western region that aren’t experiencing problems. The increased errors are in the eastern North American region. Multiple Amazon cloud-computing services were affected, including Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Elastic Compute. Video streaming service Netflix experiencd a 26% drop in traffic after the AWS problems were reported, showing how quickly outages can ripple outward, said Doug Madory, an analyst at the network monitoring firm Kentik in San Francisco.“It gets more and more complicated with software running these services, so when something goes sideways it can take a long time to figure out what went wrong and fix it,” he said. “Complexity has risks. You introduce unknown errors.”

Click here for the video

Credits:
https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/major-amazon-web-services-outage-affects-81609548

Car Thieves Use Air Tags to Track Vehicles

Apple released the AirTag in April to help people keep track of their keys, luggage, and other easy-to-lose items. Now the device is being used to monitor the location of something else: cars. Or, more specifically, high-end vehicles that car thieves have started tracking with AirTags. "Since September 2021, officers have investigated five incidents where suspects have placed small tracking devices on high-end vehicles so they can later locate and steal them," York Regional Police say. "Brand name ‘air tags’ [sic] are placed in out-of-sight areas of the target vehicles when they are parked in public places like malls or parking lots. Thieves then track the targeted vehicles to the victim’s residence, where they are stolen from the driveway."

The police say that AirTags are being hidden in trailer hitches, bumpers, and other hard-to-spot places on vehicles. Because the AirTag was designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, there are plenty of hiding places for car thieves to place the device on an intended target. Stowing one of the trackers is quicker than actually stealing the car, and after the vehicle leaves the public parking lot, it's probably going to be kept somewhere private enough for the theft to occur. Apple previously updated the AirTag to reduce the length of time one of the trackers would need to be away from its owner before it started to alert people who have been traveling in close proximity to the device as a safeguard against the product being used to stalk someone. (Although that change only helps iPhone owners; Android users are left with third-party solutions while they wait for the company to deliver the app it promised to release on the platform.)



Credits:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/car-thieves-are-using-airtags-to-track-vehicles

Hackers Attack Printer Receipts with Pro-Union Messages

Hackers are attacking business receipt printers to insert pro-labor messages, according to a report from Vice and posts on Reddit. "Are you being underpaid?", reads one message and "How can the McDonald's in Denmark pay their staff $22 an hour and still manage to sell a Big Mac for less than in America?" another states. Numerous similar images have been posted on Reddit, Twitter and elsewhere. The messages vary, but most point readers toward the r/antiwork subreddit that recently became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, as workers starting demanding more rights. Printers and other internet-connected devices can be notoriously insecure. In 2018, a hacker hijacked 50,000 printers with a message telling people to subscribe to PewDiePie, of all the random things. The receipt printer hack, by contrast, has a much more focused set of targets and messages.

Some users suggested that the messages were fake, but a cybersecurity firm that monitors the internet told Vice that they're legit. "Someone is... blast[ing] raw TCP data directly to printer services across the internet," GreyNoise founder Andrew Morris told Vice. "Basically to every single device that has port TCP 9100 open, and print[ing] a pre-written document that references /r/antiwork with some workers rights/counter capitalist messaging." The individual[s] behind the attack are using 25 separate servers, according to Morris, so blocking one IP won't necessarily stop the attacks. "A technical person is broadcasting print requests for a document containing workers rights messaging to all printers that are misconfigured to be exposed to the internet, and we've confirmed that it is printing successfully in some number of places," he said.



Credits:
https://www.engadget.com/someone-is-hacking-receipt-printers-with-pro-worker-messages-115040881.html