Leave your wallet at home, Iowa is implementing digital driver’s licenses

Here in the United States, we’re quickly hurdling towards a future where all you need to carry with you is a smartphone. No cash, no credit cards, and now no driver’s license needed. The state of Iowa will soon be releasing a dedicated app that will effectively serve as a complete replacement for the traditional plastic driver’s license, and other states will likely follow suit. Both police and airport security will accept this new digital license, so feel free to leave your wallet or purse at home.
Starting next year, this digital driver’s license will be an option for all Iowa drivers. It’s currently unclear as to which platforms will be supported, but it’s a safe bet that iOS and Android will be the priority. Will Windows Phone and Blackberry users be left out in the cold? That still remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them get snubbed. Of course, Iowa will continue to issue old-fashioned plastic licenses, so even those of us without smartphones will still be able to properly identify ourselves.

Earlier this year, Apple introduced the Apple Pay system that enables secure payment transactions using only your iPhone and your fingerprint. It uses the built-in Touch ID fingerprint sensor to confirm your identity, and effectively shields your raw credit card data from merchants. Considering how often major security breaches happen these days, it’s clear that additional safeguards are desperately needed. Those same concepts could easily be applied to your digital ID card, but that doesn’t seem to be happening just yet.

 


Iowa’s DOT Director Paul Trombino claims that this “identity vault app” will be secure, but then proceeds to brag about the use of PINs. If we really want to up the ante on security, we need to be thinking much bigger than a JPEG of your driver’s license behind a 4-digit password. Why not partner with Apple and Google to use the biometric data stored on your phone? You could easily verify your identity without ever needing to hand over your fingerprints to the state. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but maybe in the current political climate, that would be perceived as a bit too invasive.
As it stands, this initiative is mostly focused on the convenience factor, but it could be so much more than that. Moving away from simple plastic cards opens up many opportunities to increase security and privacy, but it can also be abused by the powers that be if we’re not careful. These digital driver’s licenses in Iowa are a small step forward, but it leaves me hopeful for the future of digital IDs.
Extreme tech
 

China’s new microwave pain beam burns you from the inside out

Ever since Transmetropolitan’s bowel disruptor terrified a dystopian future and Minority Report made the movie-going world wonder — if only for a fleeting moment — if they’d rather be shot with a bullet than hit with the sick stick, there have been actual weapons developed in the real world that seem straight out of science fiction. While it hasn’t been used to win a war just yet, the beginnings of sonic weaponry already exist, and the US Navy already has laser weaponry that is controlled with a device reminiscent of a video game controller. China’s new weapon, dubbed the Poly WB-1, doesn’t make you uncontrollably poop or incapacitate you through induced vomiting, but it burns you from the inside out from over half a mile (or one kilometer) away.

The Poly WB-1 uses millimeter wave beams to excite the water molecules within a victim until they heat up, causing overwhelming — but non-lethal — pain. Basically, it’s like a household kitchen microwave turned into a long-range, targeted weapon.

 


As you can see from the image to the right, the beam is attached to a very conspicuous truck, complete with military colors and emergency lights — you don’t have to worry about someone sneaking it through a security checkpoint at an airport or concert just yet. Publicly, at least, the the Poly WB-1 isn’t slated for miniaturization just yet, but will instead be attached to ships.
While a pain beam sounds absolutely terrifying, it’s arguably a step in a safer direction for military conflict than the tried-and-true lethal favorites of bullets, bombs, and fire. It’s also a much safer alternative to weapons that use chemical or biological agents.


Though the Poly WB-1 sounds like it’s from the future, it’s not the first non-lethal pain beam that acts like a microwave. The US developed its own microwave pain beam back in 2007, the Raytheon Active Denial System, as a means of crowd control. It was deployed in 2010, but wasn’t ever used — reportedly because of a 16-hour boot time, and massive fuel cost if left in standby mode after boot — and recalled the same year. It was also a satellite-like object placed atop a truck.
Even if China has figured out the boot time and fuel cost, it may be keeping the weapon as insurance or a looming threat, rather than actually using it — the negative publicity of a long-range pain beam that microwaves people might be too much for China to handle if the rest of the world has a problem with it. For now, just be glad you can’t sneak that thing through a metal detector.
Extreme tech


 
 

Raspberry Pi, the original $25 PC, now smaller than a credit card and costs just $20

When the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced way back in 2011 that it would release a complete PC for $25, we were dubious — but hey, here we are in 2014 and Raspberry Pi has been a massive success story, with thousands of units sold at the promised $25 price point. Today, the Foundation is releasing the Raspberry Pi Model A+ — a smaller, cheaper version of the Model A. The A+ costs just $20, and you can buy it today from Farnell in the UK or MCM in the US. Amusingly enough, the A+ is now smaller than credit-card sized.
As you probably know, technology has a habit of getting smaller — we adopt smaller connectors, redesign board layouts, combine multiple chips into single packages, and process nodes step down from 90nm to 45nm to 28nm. Therefore, it stands to reason that the Model A+ is significantly smaller than the original Model A — the A+ is now just 65mm x 56.5mm, down from 85.6mm x 56.5mm for the Model A. With the size reduction and fewer components, the Model A+ is about half the weight (23 grams vs. 45 grams).


Raspberry Pi Model A+, side-on, with a too-shallow depth of field

 
Raspberry Pi Model A+, hooked up to a screen, playing HD video. (Cables, screen, etc. not included.)

While it’s nice to talk about the inexorable march of miniaturization, the main reason the Model A+ is smaller is that the Foundation removed some of the larger components. The composite video RCA jack has been removed (composite video is now available through the 3.5mm headphone jack), and the SD card slot on the back of the board has been replaced with a micro SD slot. Remove a few components, redesign the PCB a bit (the A+ looks a lot like the recently announced B+), and voila: You have a much smaller computer. The smaller parts list obviously helped the Foundation bring the price down from $25 to $20, but I’m sure the main Broadcom BCM2835 SoC costs significantly less than three years ago, too.


Specs-wise, the Model A+ is virtually identical to the A — the same ARM SoC clocked at 700MHz, the same 256MB of RAM, the same HDMI video output. The Model A+ massively increases the number of GPIO pins, though, from 26 pins to 40 — the same number of GPIO pins as the larger Model B+, and they’re in the same physical location along the top edge, which might be useful in some compatibility related circumstances. The other important improvement on the A+ is that it (reportedly) uses 1 watt — down from 1.5W for the Model A, and 3W for the Model B+. In the case of the Model B+, the additional power consumption is mostly due to the Ethernet socket — I’m not sure how the folks at Raspberry Pi axed the Model A’s power consumption by 50%, except for some updated components (maybe the BCM2835 went through a process shrink?)
The Model A+ should be fully cross-compatible with Model A, B, and B+ applications. The B and B+ have twice as much RAM, but as you can see in the videos above, the A+ still runs Minecraft: Pi Edition and HD video just fine. All in all, the Model A+ for $20 is a great deal — but its single USB port definitely makes it more oriented towards DIY hardware hacking, while the Model B+, with its four USB ports and Ethernet socket, is still a better option for a low-power Linux box or home-theater PC.
You can buy the Raspberry Pi Model A+ from Farnell in the UK, and MCM in the US — but more stockists will appear soon, I’m sure.
Extreme tech
  

Food: The rarely-seen robots that package what we eat

From pancakes to jelly beans, a new breed of intelligent robots are preparing our food, discovers Veronique Greenwood, and it can be a dazzling sight.



Last July, while touring a jelly bean factory, I came upon a startling sight. Over a conveyor belt, a large robot spider danced over packets of sweets, plucking each one up with human speed and precision and placing it in a carton. The packets were piled willy-nilly, but the machine and its colleagues – two others were also manning the line – seemed to know where each one was and worked together to collect them all in seconds. It was riveting, and not a little eerie.
It turns out these robots are based on a design by Swiss robotics professor Reymond Clavel of the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, called a delta robot. They are incredibly quick and can do jobs in food packaging that only humans used to be able to do, like sorting or stacking randomly arranged objects, without the repetitive stress injuries such tasks give people.


Automation in the food industry has moved far beyond the simple labelling machines and conveyor belts you may be familiar with. Now intelligent robotic arms perform dazzling movements and expert feats of coordination, getting everything from frozen fish chunks to cookies swiftly into their packaging. It's not a side of processed foods you see that much, but it is everywhere.

To find out more about how they work, I spoke to Klas Bengtsson, a product manager at ABB, a Swiss company which makes food-grabbing delta robots.
Here are the robots at work at a Honeytop Specialty Foods factory, with a soundtrack that sounds a bit “Mission: Impossible”:

Here they are in a salami factory. Wait for the part where they dance to the Enya-techno music.

So what's going on in that pancake video? First, the pancakes go through a tunnel where a camera takes stock of where everything is lying on the conveyer belt. The camera feeds that information into software that records each pancake's location. If the food item in question isn't lying flat, says Bengtsson, there's a spot for the software to record its angle of placement as well.


The software feeds that information to the robot, which deploys its arm to that location, turns on a tiny vacuum on the end of the arm, and sucks up the pancake, gently but surely. It whirls around to the centre conveyer belt, where it puts the pancakes in piles to be packaged, turns off the vacuum to release its payload, and whirls right back out to intercept the next one. If it gets a bunch of pancakes too close together to stack all of them immediately, it deposits extras in a little tray above the conveyer to use in the future when the pancakes are more spread out.




The robot picks up the pancake with suction (ABB)


The Honeytop set-up has four robots spread out along the conveyor belt, so if one robot doesn't have time to grab all the pancakes in its view, another robot will. Overall the robotic team can stack more than 400 pancakes per minute. “There's a lot of deep-down technology to get this accurate,” Bengtsson says. “You have this expression once in a million, but when you are picking pancakes in a line like this, if you had a failure or a problem once in a million, that would be quite often.”
The salami video shows a tougher situation for the robots, says Bengtsson. Four of them are working right in each others' elbow room, thanks to space constraints in the factory, and they are grabbing the salami in small mechanical claws and depositing them on plastic sheeting that will be sealed up around them. The claws – each robot has three – have more moving parts than a vacuum, and timing their opening and closing is trickier than just turning a vacuum on and off.  “I know this was a real challenge,” he says. “There are a lot of tricks in here.”

          Adjacent robot arms coordinate their activity and can handle more than just food (ABB)

You can package food without such agile machines. But the benefit of having robots this fast and flexible is that you don't have to install machinery that will, say, make sure all of the salamis are lying straight and equidistant from each other. So you can use the same assembly line for salamis of one length in the morning and an inch longer in the afternoon, and all you have to swap out is the packaging, not the robots. The pancake stackers, too, can stack pancakes in short or tall stacks, in as many columns as needed, without just a little reprogramming.
This kind of super-adaptable packaging set-up isn't limited to a particular kind of product. Just about any object can be picked up and placed with these machines, and they can do other delicate food tasks, including scoring lines on bread before it is baked.
So while a fleet of delta robots isn't cheap to design or install, they are appearing more and more in industrial food settings. An uncanny intelligence was one of the last things to touch some of the products you can buy in packages – an interesting picture to have in your mind as you reach out to put them in your shopping basket.
 BBC