Tech News Amuse
June 2022

Our tech news overview for the month of June:

 

Amazon introduces autonomous warehouse robots

The internet mail order company introduces Proteus, a mobile robot that transports goods independently through the warehouse without endangering its human colleagues. In tests, the robot reliably bypassed employees or stopped for them, except for a few strange incidents where Proteus accidentally hit people who uttered the words "union", "working hours" or "minimum wage".

 

Work in the Metaverse a terrible experience as study confirms

An international team of researchers had test persons work alternately for several hours in a physical and in a virtual office for one week. The result: two people had to stop the experiment after the first day, the rest suffered from increased stress, lower productivity, headaches and nausea in the virtual office.

Some potential employers, however, emphasised above all the positive effects: no theft of office materials, grumbling employees outside the office can be muted, and during real toilet breaks, work could simply be continued digitally via VR glasses. In addition, the excuse "had to stay late at the office today" loses a lot of credibility with your partner if you don't get home until 10 pm.

 

Thousands of recorded telephone conversations temporarily freely discoverable on the net

An anonymous IT expert accidentally discovered the call centre recordings which contain a lot of personal data as well as partly personal content.

However, misuse of these recordings is not to be feared because, according to experts, no one will bother to torture themselves through hours of music on hold. Nevertheless, many telephone users want to use more secure communication media such as Whatsapp in the future.

 

Cyber attack strikes Palermo

After the attack, the city's digital infrastructure was left in shambles. The organisation "Vice Society" demanded a ransom, otherwise they would publish numerous personal data of the citizens. Since then, public offices can only be reached by fax. Just like in Germany.

 

Mobile phone use does not increase the risk of a brain tumour

This was the result of a long-term study of 800,000 British women. Brain tumours occurred in this sample regardless of the duration and frequency of mobile phone use close to the head. Afterwards, the researchers had to explain to their children why people used to hold their mobile phones to their heads in the first place.

 

Special fabric should make it possible to generate electricity with one's clothes

Researchers from Singapore have developed a fabric that can generate energy through the movement of the wearer and transfer it to electrical devices. Gamers will probably still have to charge their devices via the socket.

 

Microsoft discontinues Internet Explorer on 15 June

This means that the most widely used web browser in the 90s will no longer be supported either functionally or in terms of support. It is currently unclear when the browser itself will react to the shutdown.

More on this here from my colleague Strigalt von Entf.

 

Alexa to imitate voices of deceased relatives

Amazon has announced plans to do so. The assistance software is supposed to be able to imitate a person with less than one minute of speech material.

For the life of us, we can't imagine what could go wrong with such technology. And we have another idea: In addition to deceased relatives, voice imitation could also be used for married couples who have not spoken to each other in years.

 

ETH Zurich develops system to record and relive reality

Using depth cameras, for example, an office room with all the objects and people in it is recorded three-dimensionally. Using VR glasses, all events can be relived later. Who hasn't experienced this: the day at the office is over and there's nothing you want more than to be able to experience it all over again.

 

Innovative voice assistance software to respect privacy

The "Bodyguard" system developed at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts only connects to the internet for data retrieval purposes and processes the call data locally instead of in the cloud. Experts doubt the success of the system: how is it supposed to catch on if no one can earn money with personal data?

 

Watch dealers & manufacturers enter NFT market

Two Swiss watch dealers & manufacturers, Beyer and Tag Heuer, are now offering their customers non-fungible tokens. Who would have thought that pointlessly expensive watches could become even more pointlessly expensive?

Electronic nose should be able to sniff out whisky fakes

With E-Nose, Australian researchers are developing a way to distinguish expensive whisky from cheap hooch and fakes. This can prevent cases of fraud, such as when a tourist was offered a whisky that was supposedly over 100 years old for 10,000 francs. The question that remains unanswered is why you would spend 10,000 francs on an old whisky, if you can't even taste the difference without a robot nose.

Robot dog guards Pompeii

The electronic guard dog, about the size of a retriever, is supposed to keep order and prevent recreational archaeologists from secretly digging in the ruins. A previously deployed humanoid robot with a speech module, on the other hand, was withdrawn because all it did was shout "The ground is lava!"