After two straight ceremonies on Mondays, the 76th Primetime Emmy Awards will air on a Sunday.

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The 2024 Emmy Awards will return to their usual September home, airing Sept. 15 on ABC.

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The 76th Emmy Awards have been given an official airdate: Sunday, Sept. 15 at 8 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. PT on ABC.

Emmys Move Back to Sunday, as ABC Reveals 2024 Ceremony Date

Senior TV Writer/TV Editor, Awards · After a crazy year that saw the Primetime Emmys postponed because of the strikes, the annual fete will return to normal in 2024 with its traditional September berth

When To Expect The 76th Primetime Emmys In 2024

The 2024 Emmys— a different show than last month’s awards, which was delayed by the writer’s strike from 2023— is set for Sunday, September 15 on ABC.

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Sound Call Graph Construction for Java Object: Conclusions, Acknowledgment, & References

Why Cybersecurity Firms Should Stop Bragging

The family safety app Life360 doesn’t have some standard guardrails to prevent a hacker from taking over an account and accessing sensitive information, The Markup has found. The service, used by more than 35 million people in 140 countries, is a location tracking app for families to keep tabs on their loved ones’ whereabouts. The app shares real-time location among group members as well as marked locations such as homes and workplaces. Through a series of tests, we found that Life360 doesn’t provide several basic security measures to thwart potential hackers, including limiting failed log-in attempts and providing two-factor authentication for accounts. The Markup tested the Life360 app against a series of standards published by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), a nonprofit foundation that promotes app security standards. The organization’s (ASVS) is a voluntary industry guideline and also closely follows the , which are federal standards for user authentication. Application Security Verification Standard National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Digital Identity Guidelines We found that Life360’s app failed to pass six of the 19 tests we were able to conduct for important security features such as limiting failed log-in attempts and verifying that passwords are checked against a set of breached credentials. Life360 did pass 11 other of the ASVS tests—for example we verified that users are able to change their password and can use passwords of more than 64 characters. Life360 partially passed two additional tests that check if a user is notified about account changes. We found the app notified users about log-ins from multiple devices and password reset requests but not when the account’s email address, phone number, or password were changed. You can see the full results of our testing . here “We strongly disagree with the implied accusations in your series of questions. We have a highly experienced security team and conduct both internal and external audits of our platform. In addition we host a bug bounty program and run ongoing penetration testing,” said Chris Robertson, head of security and cloud operations for Life360, in an emailed statement to The Markup. For one of the tests, we set up a script that attempted to log in to one of our accounts on Life360’s website using incorrect passwords more than 500 times in just over 16 minutes (after checking an initial checkbox labeled “I am human”). It allowed us to log in when we entered the correct password on the 501st attempt. We also did this test manually through the app with more than 100 failed attempts with the wrong password followed by a successful attempt with the correct password. In both cases, Life360 never blocked future log-in attempts and immediately allowed access once we put in the correct password. The ASVS standard calls for allowing no more than 100 failed log-in attempts per hour on a single account. The platform’s lax password policies, apparent lack of log-in attempt limits, and the absence of two-factor authentication is notable considering the sensitive nature of the precise, real-time location data it uses and the fact that children are among its users. The Markup that Life360’s vast collection of location data made it one of the largest suppliers of raw data for the location data industry. In January, the that it would stop selling precise location data (except to Allstate’s Arity) but would still supply aggregated location data to the company Placer AI. previously reported company announced “An app that’s dealing with child information that’s not at least offering multifactor [authentication], that’s straight-up negligence,” Jim Manico, the ASVS’s project manager said. Life360 users have complained about unauthorized log-ins in on and in for the Life360 app in the Google Play and iOS app stores.  Several users claimed that a hacker had logged in to their accounts and was able to view either their real-time locations, their marked places like their homes, or their loved ones’ real-time location. multiple posts social media reviews Life360 did respond to each of the app store reviews that we found, directing users to their support team. The reviewers did not respond to multiple requests for comment. “Reports of hacked accounts are extremely rare and are usually a result of a family member inviting someone, such as a friend, to their shared family account,” Life360’s Robertson said. Former Life360 employees told The Markup that Life360 executives were well aware of the security issues but chose growth and new user features over dealing with a backlog of security improvements. The former employees spoke to The Markup on a condition of anonymity because they are still employed in the data industry. Life360 has recently started positioning itself as a way to ensure the digital safety of its users, including identity theft protection, credit monitoring, and data breach notifications. In its , Life360 promises users, “We safeguard your data so you can live more and worry less,” noting that up to “1 million kids each year” are victims of hacks and identity theft. marketing language The company also doesn’t follow the security advice it shares in its marketing material. In a posted to Life360’s website, it recommends users set passwords at a minimum of 12 characters. Life360 only requires that passwords contain six characters. video Experts warn that apps that allow people to track each other’s locations, in particular, can be misused. Abusive partners will sometimes use access to shared accounts to follow and harass survivors, and tracking apps are a big part of that concern, Thomas Ristenpart, an associate professor at Cornell Tech and a co-founder of the Clinic to End Tech Abuse, said. While he hasn’t seen examples of Life360 being abused by stalkers, Ristenpart said that any apps that provide real-time location data are causes for concern. In his work, he’s aware of location monitoring tools being used by abusive partners who track and stalk survivors, he said. “We do look for apps like Life360 installed. If we find them, then we do have a discussion with the clients about what they want to do,” Ristenpart said. Improving account security is often the top recommendation that Ristenpart makes to tech companies, he said. More companies are as a security feature to prevent account takeovers. In February, Google after it enabled two-factor authentication by default. Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell company, after . requiring two-factor authentication reported a 50 percent drop in account takeovers enabled mandatory two-factor authentication hackers hijacked cameras to harass owners Experts said preventing users from creating obvious passwords like “123456” and “password”—which Life360 does not do—is also important. The app also failed to flag a famously breached password, “password1,” and email login “khaleesifan3@emmyhost.com,” which comedian Andy Samberg jokingly at the 2015 Emmy awards. shared as his HBO log-in Both credentials have been flagged by as well as the as leaked. Google Chrome’s Password Checkup Have I Been Pwned database “It doesn’t sound like they’ve done even the basics,” Jim Fenton, a consultant for NIST and a co-author of the agency’s authentication guidelines, said. “If you can use the password ‘password,’ that’s not great.” One of the former Life360 employees told The Markup that there had been an internal debate about email validation for accounts. Verifying an email address helps prevent fraud and bots from spamming a service, and it protects users from having somebody sign up in their name. The former Life360 employee said the company decided against this measure to make it easier for people to sign up. We changed our Life360 accounts’ emails multiple times without receiving any validation emails to make sure they were real email addresses. We also never received validation emails when signing up. What We Found Why it Matters A lack of multifactor authentication Multifactor authentication prevents an attacker from being able to log in to your accounts by having just your password alone. It usually requires a second authentication method, which can be a temporary code from a text message or an authentication app, or a physical token like a USB security key. No log-in attempt limits Attempt limits prevent attackers from making an infinite amount of guesses until they correctly guess your password. Hackers will often use bots to do this and can eventually crack most passwords without attempt limits. We were able to try the wrong password 500 times with no warning (after checking an initial checkbox labeled “I am human”). Lack of password change notifications Password change notifications warn users when their credentials are altered without their consent. Life360 logs out all other sessions once a password is changed, but the original owner is never notified when that happens. If the attacker changes the password before the real user does, the real user would effectively be locked out of their own accounts. Weak password strength requirements The longer your password is, the harder it is for a bot to crack or a person to guess. NIST and OWASP both recommend passwords with at least eight characters. The requirement for Life360 was at least six characters. No warning when using common passwords or known breached credentials Many data breaches are the result of exploiting commonly used passwords from past data breaches. We were able to set our passwords to “password” and “123456,” two of the most common passwords found in breaches. No ability to directly log out other sessions or review activity The only way to log out other log-in sessions is through resetting your account password. It is possible to have two devices logged in with the same account simultaneously, which could reveal a person’s exact location and recent location history. An account activity log would let users look for suspicious login activity. Credits: and Alfred Ng Jon Keegan Photo by on Towfiqu barbhuiya Unsplash Also published here

Life360 Potentially Leaves Its Users’ Sensitive Data at Risk

Life360 potencialmente deja en riesgo los datos confidenciales de sus usuarios

Life360 laisse potentiellement les données sensibles de ses utilisateurs en danger

Life360 संभावित रूप से अपने उपयोगकर्ताओं के संवेदनशील डेटा को जोखिम में डालता है

Life360 は、ユーザーの機密データを危険にさらす可能性があります

Life360 potencialmente deixa os dados confidenciais de seus usuários em risco

Life360 có khả năng để lại rủi ro cho dữ liệu nhạy cảm của người dùng

Life360 可能会使其用户的敏感数据面临风险

Amid a growing reliance on technology due to the coronavirus pandemic, have become a growing threat to schools across the United States – leading to school shutdowns and to demands for more funding to address the problem. Public school systems often have limited budgets for cybersecurity safeguards and have become targets of more attacks. cyberattacks Starting last year, when many schools were more dependent on technology in order to conduct virtual learning due to pandemic shutdowns, several high-profile incidents were reported, leading school officials to scramble to recover data or even manually wipe all laptops. “Pretty much any way that you cut it, incidents have both been growing more frequent and more significant,” Doug Levin, director of the K12 Security Information Exchange, a Virginia-based nonprofit that helps schools defend against cybersecurity risk, told The Associated Press. Precise data is hard to come by since most schools are not required to publicly report cyberattacks. But experts have said public school systems — which often have limited budgets for cybersecurity expertise — have become an inviting target for ransomware gangs. School systems that have had instruction disrupted include those in Baltimore County, Maryland and Miami-Dade County, Florida along with districts in New Jersey, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Levin’s group has tracked more than 1,200 cybersecurity incidents since 2016 at public school districts across the country. They included 209 ransomware attacks, when hackers lock data up and charge to unlock it; 53 “denial of service” attacks, where attackers sabotage or slow a network by faking server requests; 156 “Zoombombing” incidents, where an unauthorised person intrudes on a video call; and more than 110 phishing attacks, where a deceptive message tricks a user to let a hacker into their network. According to a by the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Centre, an organisation that tracks cyberattacks on US schools, in 2020 alone, there were more than 400 cyberattacks on schools, a number that experts said is a vast undercount. report The new data comes amid increasing challenges to keeping schools in the US open, amid a recent surge in COVID-19 cases due to the spread of the Omicron variant. President Joe Biden has pledged to keep schools open, citing the importance of in-person learning for children’s education, and has increased school funding for tests, masks and hygiene protocols. In October, Biden signed the K-12 Cybersecurity Act, which calls for the federal cybersecurity agency to make recommendations about how to help school systems better protect themselves. “The global pandemic has impacted an entire generation of students and educators and underscores the importance of safeguarding their sensitive information, as well as for all Americans,” Biden at the time. “This law is an important step forward to meeting the continuing threat posed by criminals, malicious actors, and adversaries in cyberspace.” said In New York City, after an attack this month on third-party software vendor Illuminate Education, teachers across the city could not access grades. Local media reported that the outage added to stress for educators already juggling instruction with enforcing COVID-19 protocols and covering for colleagues who were sick or in quarantine. Last year, the FBI issued a warning about a group called PYSA, or “Protect Your System, Amigo,” saying it was seeing an increase in attacks by the group on schools, colleges and seminaries. Other ransomware gangs include Conti, which last year demanded $40m from Broward County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest. Most are Russian-speaking groups that are based in Eastern Europe and enjoy safe harbour from tolerant governments. Some will post files on the dark web, including highly sensitive information, if they do not get paid. While attacks on larger districts garner more headlines, tended to target smaller school districts in 2021 than in 2020, according to Brett Callow, a threat analyst at the firm Emsisoft. He said that could indicate bigger districts are increasing their spending on cybersecurity while s ransomware gangs Also published on: https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/news/cyberattacks-on-us-schools-increasing-amid-reliance-on-technology/

US Schools Face Increasing Cyberattacks Amidst Push Toward Digitization

Conservative estimates put company’s monthly income at a minimum $500,000. According to a recently released , researchers at Checkpoint blame an Italian “company” for the widespread malware, GuLoader. The company has formerly advertised itself as “DarkEye” and “DarkEye Protector.” report CloudEyE To make matters interesting, the company isn’t a totally illicit dark web entity. It exists in plain sight on the internet as a legitimate business operation, and even has : VAT registration numbers SD SOFTWARE DI DRAGNA SEBASTIANO FABIO – Via Paolo Bentivoglio, 17 – Catania (CT) – Partita IVA: 05276750873 . EasySoft Di IVANO MANCINI – Via Lombardia, 8 – Fonte Nuova (RM) – Partita IVA: 13379111001 GuLoader is a heavily used “network dropper” in 2020, used to distribute malware through cloud services like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. The following infographic shows GuLoader has been used to distribute different strands of malware like , , , , , among many others. Formbook Azorult Remcos NanoCore Lokibot Image credit: Checkpoint The discovery was made by Checkpoint researchers while reverse engineering what was detected as GuLoader malware samples. There were references to “DarkEye protector” in those binaries. Image credit: Checkpoint On taking a closer look, it was clear that GuLoader and DarkEye are very similar samples with payload embedded in the sample itself – therefore no download was necessary. Moreover, when searching the web for “DarkEyE Protector,” different threads on hacker forums made it easy for the researchers to corroborate facts and conclude that DarkEye and CloudEye were purposely created with the intention of evading malware detection, therefore helping attacks. The reads: report “The ads describe DarkEyE as a crypter that can be used with different malware such as stealers, keyloggers, and , and makes them . This left us with no doubt that this software was developed to protect malware from discovery by anti-viruses, as the authors didn’t forget to emphasize that they “don’t take any responsibility for the use” of DarkEyE.” RATs (remote access Trojans) fully undetectable for antiviruses (FUD) The entity behind CloudEye or DarkEye appears to be a legitimate business, as evident from their website www.securitycode.eu. They market themselves with the intention of, “protecting windows applications from cracking, tampering, debugging, disassembling, dumping.” Moreover, given their “plans” start at $100/month and the entity claims to have upwards of 5,000 customers, their monthly income has been estimated at $500,000, speaking conservatively. The so-called CloudEye “protector,” however, actually injects malware into your compiled apps. To test, the researchers used a simple “calc.exe.” When “encrypted” using CloudEye, the resulting binary was detected positive for GuLoader. “The CloudEyE-produced sample that we got has the same structure as GuLoader. Just like GuLoader, it is compiled with Visual Basic and contains shellcode encrypted with a random 4-bytes XOR key. Therefore, we decrypted the shellcode from both samples (CloudEyE and GuLoader),” stated the advisory. Additionally, CloudEye alters the program structure to make it challenging for automated analysis, detection and decryption to take place: “To make it harder for automatic analysis and probably also to prevent automatic decryption, the shellcode starts from a random stub and is prepended with a jump over this stub. In both samples, the same space on the stack is reserved for a structure with global variables.” Checkpoint has been able to trace identities of the people behind the CloudEye operation to specific email addresses, domains and names. Image credit: Checkpoint Encryption bypasses virus detection The report concludes with reasons as to why CloudEye is malicious and why many cloud providers are inconsistent with detecting CloudEye-encrypted binaries: “CloudEyE operations may look legal, but the service provided by CloudEyE has been a common denominator in thousands of attacks over the past year. Tutorials published on the CloudEyE website show how to store payloads on cloud drives such as Google Drive and OneDrive. Cloud drives usually perform anti-virus checking and technically don’t allow the upload of malware. However, payload encryption implemented in CloudEyE helps to bypass this limitation." The report continues, "Code randomization, evasion techniques, and payload encryption used in CloudEyE protect malware from being detected by many of the existing security products on the market. Surprisingly, such a service is provided by a legally registered Italian company that operates a publically available website which has existed for more than four years.” A comprehensive list of Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and are available in the same report. malware hashes © 2020. . All Rights Reserved. Originally published on and syndicated from . Ax Sharma Security Report

CloudEye Turns Out To Be A Front For Hackers spreading GuLoader

Evaluation of ROS 2.0 communications for real-time robotic applications . The content of this article comes from “ ” available at Real-time Linux communications: an evaluation of the Linux communication stack for real-time robotic applications https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.02595.pdf Peer written with Carlos San Vicente Gutiérrez, Lander Usategui San Juan and Irati Zamalloa Ugarte . In this work we present an experimental setup to show the suitability of ROS 2.0 for real-time robotic applications. We disclose an evaluation of ROS 2.0 communications in a robotic inter-component (hardware) communication case on top of Linux. We benchmark and study the worst case latencies and missed deadlines to characterize ROS 2.0 communications for real-time applications. We demonstrate experimentally how computation and network congestion impacts the communication latencies and ultimately, propose a setup that, under certain conditions, mitigates these delays and obtains bounded traffic Introduction In robotic systems, tasks often need to be executed with strict timing requirements. For example, in the case of a mobile robot, if the controller has to be responsive to external events, an excessive delay may result in non-desirable consequences. Moreover, if the robot was moving with a certain speed and needs to avoid an obstacle, it must detect this and stop or correct its trajectory in a certain amount of time. Otherwise, it would likely collide and disrupt the execution of the required task. These kind of situations are rather common in robotics and must be performed within well defined timing constraints that usually require real-time capabilities. Such systems often have timing requirements to execute tasks or exchange data over the internal network of the robot, as it is common in the case of distributed systems. This is, for example, the case of the Robot Operating System (ROS)[1]. Not meeting the timing requirements implies that, either the system’s behavior will degrade, or the system will lead to failure. Real-time systems can be classified depending on how critical to meet the corresponding timing constraints. For hard real-time systems, missing a deadline is considered a system failure. Examples of such real-time systems are anti-lock brakes or aircraft control systems. On the other hand, firm real-time systems are more relaxed. An information or computation delivered after a missing a deadline is considered invalid, but it does not necessarily lead to system failure. In this case, missing deadlines could degrade the performance of the system. In other words, the system can tolerate a certain amount of missed deadlines before failing. Examples of firm real-time systems include most professional and industrial robot control systems such as the control loops of collaborative robot arms, aerial robot autopilots or most mobile robots, including self-driving vehicles.Finally, in the case of soft real-time, missed deadlines -even if delivered late- remain useful. This implies that soft real-time systems do not necessarily fail due to missed deadlines, instead, they produce a degradation in the usefulness of the real-time task in execution. Examples of soft-real time systems are telepresence robots of any kind (audio, video, etc.). As ROS became the standard software infrastructure for the development of robotic applications, there was an increasing demand in the ROS community to include real-time capabilities in the framework. As a response, ROS 2.0 was created to be able to deliver real-time performance, however, as covered in previous work [2] and [3], the ROS 2.0 itself needs to be surrounded with the appropriate elements to deliver a complete distributed and real-time solution for robots. For distributed real-time systems, communications need to provide Quality of Services (QoS) capabilities in order to guarantee deterministic end-to-end communications. ROS 2 communications use Data Distribution Service (DDS) as its communication middleware. DDS contains configurable QoS parameters which can be tuned for real-time applications. Commonly, DDS distributions use the Real Time Publish Subscribe protocol (RTPS) as a transport protocol which encapsulates the well known User Datagram Protocol (UDP). In Linux based systems, DDS implementations typically use the Linux Networking Stack (LNS) for communications over Ethernet. In previous work [2], we analyzed the use of layer 2 Quality of Service (QoS) techniques such as package prioritization and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) scheduling mechanisms to bound end-to-end latencies in Ethernet switched networks. In [3], we analyzed the real-time performance of the LNS in a Linux PREEMPT-RT kernel and observed some of the current limitations for deterministic communications over the LNS in mixed-critical traffic scenarios. The next logical step was to analyze the real-time performance of ROS 2.0 communications in a PREEEMPT-RT kernel over Ethernet. Previous work [4] which investigated the performance of ROS 2.0 communication showed promising results and discussed future improvements. However, the mentioned study does not explore the suitability of ROS 2.0 for real-time applications and the evaluation was not performed on an embedded platform. In this work, we focus on the evaluation of ROS 2.0 communications in a robotic inter-component communication use-case. For this purpose, we are going to present a setup and a set of benchmarks where we will measure the end-to-end latencies of two ROS 2.0 nodes running in different static load conditions. We will focus our attention on worst case latencies and missed deadlines to observe the suitability of ROS 2.0 communications for real-time applications. We will also try to show the impact of different stressing conditions in ROS 2.0 traffic latencies. Ultimately, we attempt to find a suitable configuration to improve determinism of ROS 2.0 and establish the limits for such setup in an embedded platform. A bit of background Overview of ROS 2 stack for machine to machine communications over Ethernet ROS is a framework for the development of robot applications. A toolbox filled with utilities for robots, such as a communication infrastructure including standard message definitions, drivers for a variety of software and hardware components, libraries for diagnostics, navigation, manipulation and many more. Altogether, ROS simplifies the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms. ROS 2.0 is the new version of ROS which extends the initial concept (originally meant for purely research purposes) and aims to provide a distributed and modular solution for situations involving teams of robots, real-time systems or production environments, amidst others. Among the technical novelties introduced in ROS 2.0, Open Robotics explored several options for the ROS 2.0 communication system. They decided to use the DDS middleware due to its characteristics and benefits compared to other solutions. As documented in [5], the benefit of using an end-to-end middleware, such as DDS, is that there is less code to maintain. DDS is used as a communications middleware in ROS 2.0 and it typically runs as userspace code. Even though DDS has specified standards, third parties can review audit, and implement the middleware with varying degrees of interoperability. As pointed out in the technical report [6], to have realtime performance, both a deterministic user code and an real-time operating system are needed. In our case, we will use a PREEMPT-RT patched Linux kernel as the core of our operating system for the experiments. Following the guidelines of the PREEMPT-RT and with a suitable kernel configuration, other authors[7] demonstrated that it is possible to achieve system latency responses between 10 and 100 microseconds. programming Normally, by default, DDS implementations use the Linux Network Stack (LNS) as transport and layer. This makes the LNS a critical part for ROS 2.0 performance. However, the network stack is not optimized for bounded latencies but instead, for throughput at a given moment. In other words, there will be some limitations due to the current status of the networking stack. Nevertheless, LNS provides QoS mechanisms and thread tuning which allows to improve the determinism of critical traffic at the kernel level. network An important part of how the packets are processed in the Linux kernel relates actually to how hardware interrupts are handled. In a normal Linux kernel, hardware interrupts are served in two phases. In the first, an Interrupt Service Routine (ISR) is invoked when an interrupt fires, then, the hardware interrupt gets acknowledged and the work is postponed to be executed later. In a second phase, the soft interrupt, or “bottom half” is executed later to process the data coming from the hardware device. In PREEMPT-RT kernels, most ISRs are forced to run in threads specifically created for the interrupt. These threads are called IRQ threads [8]. By handling IRQs as kernel threads, PREEMPT-RT kernels allow to schedule IRQs as user tasks, setting the priority and CPU affinity to be managed individually. IRQ handlers running in threads can themselves be interrupted so the latency due to interrupts is mitigated. For our particular interests, since our application needs to send critical traffic, it is possible to set the priority of the Ethernet interrupt threads higher than other IRQ threads to improve the network determinism. Another important difference between a normal and a PREEMPT-RT kernel is within the context where the softirq are executed. Starting from kernel version 3.6.1-rt1 on, the soft IRQ handlers are executed in the context of the thread that raised that Soft IRQ [9]. Consequently, the NET_RX soft IRQ, which is the softirq for receiving network packets, will normally be executed in the context of the network device IRQ thread. This allows a fine control of the networking processing context. However, if the network IRQ thread is preempted or it exhausts its NAPI weight time slice, it is executed in the ksoftirqd/n (where n is the logical number of the CPU). Processing packets in ksoftirqd/n context is troublesome for real-time because this thread is used by different processes for deferred work and can add latency. Also, as the ksoftirqd thread runs with SCHED_OTHER policy, it can be easily preempted. In practice, the soft IRQs are normally executed in the context of the Ethernet IRQ threads and in the ksoftirqd/n thread, for high network loads and under heavy stress (CPU, memory, I/O, etc.). The conclusion here is that, in normal conditions, we can expect reasonable deterministic behavior, but if the network and the system are loaded, the latencies can increase greatly. A sneak peak into the results Throughout the experimental tests, the following results were obtained. Details can be obtained in the original publication: Impact of RT settings under different system load. a) System without additional load without RT settings. b) System under load without RT settings. c) System without additional load and RT settings. d) System under load and RT settings. Read the full article at . https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.02595.pdf References [1] M. Quigley, K. Conley, B. Gerkey, J. Faust, T. Foote, J. Leibs, R. Wheeler, and A. Y. Ng, “Ros: an open-source robot operating system,” in ICRA workshop on open source software, vol. 3, no. 3.2. Kobe, Japan, 2009, p. 5. [2] C. S. V. Gutiérrez, L. U. S. Juan, I. Z. Ugarte, and V. M. Vilches, “Time-sensitive networking for robotics,” CoRR, vol. abs/1804.07643, 2018. [Online]. Available: http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07643 [3] C. S. V. Gutiérrez, L. Usategui San Juan, I. Zamalloa Ugarte, and V. Mayoral Vilches, “Real-time Linux communications: an evaluation of the Linux communication stack for real-time robotic applications,” ArXiv e-prints, Aug. 2018. [4] Y. Maruyama, S. Kato, and T. Azumi, “Exploring the performance of ros2,” in 2016 International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT), Oct 2016, pp. 1–10. [5] “Ros 2.0 design,” accessed: 2018–07–27. http://design.ros2.org/, [6] “Introduction to Real-time Systems,” realtime_background.html, accessed: 2018–04–12. http://design.ros2.org/articles/ [7] F. Cerqueira and B. B. Brandenburg, “A comparison of scheduling latency in linux, preempt rt, and litmus rt.” [8] J. Edge, “Moving interrupts to threads,” October 2008, [Accessed: 2018–04–12]. [Online]. Available: https://lwn.net/Articles/302043/ [9] J. Corbet, “Software interrupts and realtime,” October 2012, [Accessed: 2018–04–12]. [Online]. Available: 520076/ https://lwn.net/Articles/

Towards a distributed and real-time framework for robots

The future will be automated An irregular round-up of creative coding inspirations and disruptions in advertising, social, urban play and human computer interaction. The age of the bot has begun. We just have barely begun to notice. It’s only been 10 years, and smartphones have fundamentally changed our world, the bot revolution will come quicker, and have an even greater impact. The bots cometh in all shapes and sizes, and , automations, AI and robot friend and foe. But most likely our most common interaction with them in the very near future will be in the form of messenger/personal assistant and customer service bots. hardware software History of Bots Primer: ELIZA: The history of bots can really be traced backs to the 60s to MIT, when wrote ELIZA, a textbot, based on very simple pattern recognition, that would respond in way a therapist would, by throwing questions back at you and with answers such as “How does that make you feel?” ELIZA, became immensely popular and had a huge influence on a number of early computer games. But Weizenbaum was troubled by people’s reaction. He intended ELIZA to be a mere parody of human conversation, yet suddenly users were confiding their deepest thoughts to it, and soon became a detractor.Chat with ElIZA here: Eliza chats with Siri: Joseph Weizenbaum http://nlp-addiction.com/eliza/ https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/1miydk/i_was_able_to_get_siri_to_communicate_with_eliza/ ALICE: A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), inspired by ELIZA, became the de facto bot, and bot software in the mid-90s, as the internet boomed and spawned 100s of versions, like , or due to its relative ease of programming. And this is the most important trend to watch for as the chatbot indystry gears up. As they become easier to build, bots will become the domain of hobbyists and fans bringing along the really interesting unintended and creative uses. Alice talks to Fake Captain Kirk: Fake Captain Kirk Jack Sparrow Santa Bot http://www.pandorabots.com/pandora/talk?botid=f5d922d97e345aa1 SmarterChild: SmarterChild was a chatterbot with a personality, available on AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger and was a massive massive hit in the early 2000s. Much like what messenger bots are trying to do today, beyond just holding a conversation, SmarterChild wanted to be useful, tapping into web services to provide sports scores, weather forecasts, stocks, and other info. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-history-of-smarterchild GooglyMinotaur: One of the more interesting uses of the SmarterChild technology was by Radiohead, with a bot named — music’s first ever chatbot. Googly (as is googly eyes, not Google) gave fans access to real time information about Radiohead, obscure Radiohead trivia, played music upon request and even challenged you to a game of hangman. It was a huge success with over a million people engaging in conversations with the bot (and averaging over 60 interactions per person). Average time spent per user was over 34 minutes.Here’s a great writeup from one of its makers: GooglyMinotaur https://chatbotsmagazine.com/radiohead-s-googlyminotaur-ee91cd600a4a#.66gq0762q Sylvie: The last most important bot I need to mention is Sylvie. launched in 2000, by Virtual Personalities, and with whom I had the good fortune working with back in the day. Sylvie was a Verbot (Virtual Robot) developed by futurists (who invented, um, banner advertising) and (founder of one of the original search engines ), and was the first practical commercial 3D avatar interface. Here’s a TED talk about Sylvie: Peter Plantec Dr. Michael Mauldin Lycos Artbots: Faxbot: constantly monitors Yelp for reviews of prisons and whenever the script finds a new review it automatically sends a fax to that prison with the Yelp star rating and content of the new review. Faxbot http://lav.io/2014/11/yelp-prison-review-faxbot/ Um, er, um parliament: “Parliament Live”, is a great project by net artist is a bot that creates art by downloading videos from the UK parliament at random, then transcribing and analysing which words were spoken most frequently. Using that analysis, the bot generates a new cut of the video containing only the top keywords. Sam Levine https://twitter.com/parliament_live Crowdsourcing a president: Laprimaire is using bot technology to help crowd-source the next president of France http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/23/laprimaire-has-built-a-telegram-chatbot-to-help-crowdsource-the-next-president-of-france/ https://laprimaire.org/ Inferno, Robot Dystopia: Robots and prosthetics have always had a close relationship. But artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn take it to another level with their dystopian robotic artwork, Inferno. Mech suit-like exoskeletons are worn by the performer, who are forced by the robots to act/react in a certain way. http://billvorn.concordia.ca/menuall.html More dystopia with machines hacking machines — the world’s first all-machine hacking tournament is happening next month organised by (those guys who, you know, ) with a $2 million prize up for grabs. DARPA brought us the internet https://www.cybergrandchallenge.com/ http://www.wired.com/2016/07/__trashed-19/ How do we stop intelligent machines from taking over the world and enslaving us all? Give them emotions: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36387734 Two thirds of robots find their work boring: http://www.creativeapplications.net/arduino-2/make-longer-cables-short-film-by-students-at-hfg-schwabisch-gmund/ Shiv Integer: explorers mutant gadgets, with a bot expropriating 3D models from open-source hardware design website, , mashing designs together and then re-uploading its sometimes humorous, sometimes scary creations. Like any good art, the bot has created a mix of outrage and fandom amongst the Thingiverse community. Shiv Integer Thingiverse _Shiv Integer is a bot whose entire purpose in life is to create bizarre objects for 3D printers. It has been living for…_arstechnica.com That time a bot invaded Thingiverse and created weird new 3D objects The Next Rembrandt: A great use of technology, JWT’s The Next Rembrandt used Artificial Intelligence to analyse the master’s paintings to create a new work of art. The project has involved data scientists, developers, engineers and art historians. The final 3D printed painting consists of more than 148 million pixels and is based on 168,263 Rembrandt painting fragments. award winning https://www.nextrembrandt.com/ Seeing AI: One of the most impressive use-cases for AI around at the moment is Microsoft’s cognitive services bringing sight to the sightless: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/microsofts-new-ai-tools-help-developers-build-smart-apps-and-bots/ Swarm Robotics: Swarm robotics is one of the most exciting robotic research fields. imagines a world where a swarm of display blocks autonomously reconfigure themselves: Curious Displays http://boingboing.net/2010/02/22/concept-for-swarming.html And this reality is closer than you think. Disney Research , and put some of the ideas into practice: has released a paper http://www.wired.com/2014/05/disney-invents-swarming-robots-that-create-animations/ MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory developed prototypes for the Flyfire pixel display in the sky: http://senseable.mit.edu/flyfire/ Drone 100: Recently Intel partnered with for from their beautiful world record breaking 3D drone display: Ars Electronica Drone 100 http://iq.intel.com/100-dancing-drones-set-world-record/ Music for Robots: Do androids dream of electric sheep? Not sure. But apparently they’re into funky jazz. teamed up with to create ‘Music For Robots’ by robots. Squarepusher Rhizomatiks http://www.creativeapplications.net/maxmsp/squarepusher-x-z-machines-the-making-of-stupendous-music-machines/ Racing bots: And finally let’s end with some super exciting news that robots will begin racing against each other at high speeds. , the world’s first driverless Robotic car race, is currently in it’s testing phase, and will begin racing proper next year, held on the same tracks as the Formula E championship season. German concept designer and automotive futurist Daniel Simon, best known for his vehicle designs in movies like Tron: Legacy, Captain America and Oblivion, has designed the cars, which are predicted to go at speeds of around 300km/h and navigate much more exciting courses. Watch the action unfold in the Inside Roborace documentary series: RoboRace _The first global autonomous car racing championship will start in 2016, the creators of Formula E have announced. Known…_www.wired.co.uk Formula E announces 300kph ‘RoboRace’ championship http://roborace.com/ Yamaha has also built a robotic motorcycle — MotoBot: Robots in the home: Robots are coming to our homes too, but they won’t do the dishes just yet. , one in ten Americans will have a robot in home by 2020, and the race is already gearing up. Just about everyone’s a /speaker . According to Juniper Research has home assistant or is building one Jibo, the world’s first social robot for the home, looks to be the cutest: https://www.jibo.com/ Then there’s Zenbo from Asus: http://zenbo.asus.com/ And Softbank’s Pepper, which has been sold out from the get go: https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/home-robot-pepper/ Though just a prototype, ’ newest robot, the kind of cute, kind of scary, Spot Mini, won’t do the dishes for you but will at least pack the dishwasher: Boston Dynamics Though, says Engadget, our robot butler dreams are still a long way away: https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/03/asus-zenbo-proves-our-robot-butler-dreams-remain-just-that/ Chat/Messenger Bots: Messaging apps have already surpassed social networks for monthly active users and messaging will become the primary path for customer interaction within the next five years. So understandably . Two months after it’s launch, . there’s a lot of fanfare around messenger bots Facebook Messenger now already had over 11,000 chatbots But is it all hype? Well yes and no. Chat bots and artificial Intelligence are still pretty . But this is really pretty much still day zero, and it’s the , rather than the reality that has started a gold rush. sucky promise The end game is to turn mobile messaging into an that consumers can essentially live in — to and , and , add context to a conversation, and of course to . Already the hype was, well just that, hype. But the promise is exciting, and as always we’ll see some kind of middle ground and some breakaway sticky stuff. all-encompassing platform make payments bookings access content services get customer service shop So are there really any good messenger bots out there? Well there’s some kind promise… Jessie: Of all those I’ve tried , is one of the better chatbots I’ve encountered. She’s is a quirky, energetic 20-something experiencing crisis after crisis, all the while looking for a job, a boyfriend, and a new apartment. You assume the role of Jessie’s friend and provide advice. Jessie https://pullstring.com/product/humani/ http://www.fastcompany.com/3059112/most-creative-people/i-spent-a-week-talking-to-a-millennial-chatbot-character-on-facebook Jessie was developed by one of the more promising platforms out there, with the founders were behind (developers of talking toys like Hello Barbie and Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends Talk to You) and have worked on Pixar movies such as Wall-E and Toy Story. Pullstring Toytalk Probably the most successful modern messenger bot to date, Pullstring were also responsible for the where fans could chat with the ​characters, get clues to a code to unlock the reveal trailer and be awarded a special digital badge for use in the current version of the game. More than six million messages were exchanged between fans and the chatbot on the first day alone (with 30K simultaneous conversations happening per second), and resulted in eight times more social media engagements than any other Call of Duty​ launch to date. C​all of Duty: Infinite Warfare Messenger campaign http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/03/call-of-duty-infinite-warfares-first-victory-6m-bot-messages-on-facebook/ Hugging Face: Hugging Face is a fun digital AI friend — in essence you can text back and forth and trade selfies. I haven’t tried it yet, sounds suprisingly engaging: _Meet Hugging Face, a new chatbot app for bored teenagers. The New York-based startup is creating a fun and emotional…_techcrunch.com Hugging Face wants to become your artificial BFF _Hugging Face, a company named after the hugging face emoji, is bringing its AI bot from private to public beta today…_venturebeat.com Hugging Face launches app to be your 'AI friend' Xiaoice — the world’s most talked to bot: Microsoft’s Xiaoice, , is a chatbot on Weibo, and other social networks in China with over 20 million registered users, where the average user interacts with the service around 60 times a month. Introduced in 2014 by Microsoft Research and Bing in Beijing, it can answer simple questions, and engage in real-life human chatter. Cortana’s little sister http://www.businessinsider.sg/microsoft-xiaoice-turing-test-in-china-2016-2/ Chatting to Miss Piggy: Another company to watch is , who’ve already worked with Disney and Universal on some pretty large projects. My favourite being , where you can only chat to her directly before and after her show. Imperson Miss Piggy And a whole bunch of other reading: Pizza Hut allows you to order on Twitter and Facebook: Sephora lets you to send a selfie to try on lipstick: http://fortune.com/2016/07/13/pizza-hut-chatbot-twitter-facebook/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelarthur/2016/06/21/augmented-reality-bot-brings-virtual-lipstick-try-on-to-facebook-messenger/#6590fce12067 Everything you wanted to know about bots but were too afraid to ask, in one nice concise Medium post: https://medium.com/art-marketing/the-hidden-homescreen-70c794ff9ada#.dchq9klvs In many ways Slack is leading the bot wars: http://www.wired.com/2015/08/slack-overrun-bots-friendly-wonderful-bots/ Ray Kurzweil, best known for his views on , and is building a chatbot for Google: the Singularity http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11801108/ray-kurzweil-building-chatbot-for-google 25 chatbot startups you should know: http://blog.ventureradar.com/2016/06/14/25-chatbot-startups-you-should-know/ Why Microsoft is betting its future on AI: Meanwhile things went horribly wrong for Microsoft’s AI Twitter bot Tay: http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/7/12111028/microsoft-bot-framework-artificial-intelligence-satya-nadella-interview http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-chatbot-racist Wired argues, if you want your bot to be more human-like, teach it to chit chat: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/clive-thompson-12/ But beware the uncanny valley: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/beware-emotional-robots-giving-feelings-artificial-beings-could-backfire-study-suggests BBC asks would it be possible (or moral) to love a robot? http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zqq6sg8 in Hong Kong is one of the leaders in human-like robotics: Hason Robotics http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/16/could-you-fall-in-love-with-this-robot.html Watch two semi-Ai bots creapliy chat and flirt with each other: http://digg.com/video/chatbot-nightmare-conversation FastCompany suggests the next phase of UX will be designing personalities: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3054934/the-next-phase-of-ux-designing-chatbot-personalities Services like donotpay will enable us to navigate our rights, through the legal quagmire, and bring the balance of the law get information quicker: http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/27/donotpay-traffic-lawyer-bot/ Skynet is a pretty cool old-school bot that functions as a web portal: http://www.skynet-ai.com/bots/AI/SkynetV6/ Beware Skype scam bots and fake webcam girls: https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2014/06/skype-chatbot-scam-fails-miserably/ http://blog.emsisoft.com/2013/04/25/new-skype-scam-uses-chat-bots-fake-webcam-girls-want-your-credit-card-information/ Ok, well that’s all folks. Hope you enjoyed this very looooong edition. This is such a wide and important topic, but hopefully it got you a teensy bit excited about our robots near future. Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radarboy3000/ Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/radarboy_japan Like my Facebook Page to get tutorial and workshop updates here: https://www.facebook.com/radarboy3000

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