Today’s Tech Sightings:
A Laptop-Sized Solar Panel Is Lighting Rural Africa
M-Kopa, a Nairobi-based provider of solar-lighting systems, is making affordable solar panels to power homes that have no access to Kenya’s electrical grid. The panel is the size of a laptop, with a battery that generates about 8 watts of energy.
Hawking, Musk, Wozniak Call for Ban on Offensive AI Weapons
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is slowly crawling into our collective consciousness; and luminaries like Tesla Motor’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and astrophysicist Steven Hawking are already sounding alarm bells. Hundreds of robotics and AI researchers signed an open letter from the Future Life Institute in which they warned about the inevitability of a global arms race and called for a “ban on offensive autonomous weapons”
IoT Devices Will Triple to Over 38 Billion Units By 2020
New research from Juniper Research expects that there will be up to 38.5 billion Internet of Things (IoT) always-connected devices in 2020. That’s an increase from 13.4 billion in 2015 – or a 285 percent spike. The study also found that the number of connected devices already exceeds that of humans on the planet by at least two times.
Microsoft Downloading Windows 10 to Some PCs Ahead of Launch
Microsoft has begun rolling out Windows 10 on machines that previously received an invite. You’ll know the download has started when a new folder called “$windows.~BT” appears on your PC’s system partition. And if a download wreaks havoc with your system, Microsoft is providing a tool to deal with that here.
Critical Vulnerability in Apple App Store, iTunes Revealed
Vulnerability Lab’s security researcher Benjamin Kunz Mejri this week uncovered a critical flaw in Apple’s App Store and the iTunes invoice system that allows remote hackers hijack a session and inject malicious script codes into the vulnerable modules.
Microsoft Sinks in Antivirus Tests
You might want to reconsider if you’ve been running Microsoft’s antivirus utility on your Windows PC. Germany-based testing lab AV-Test just ranked Windows Defender as the worst performer out of the 22 common anti-malware apps tested. McAfee, Norton and Trend Micro products also underperformed.
China Busts ‘Fake’ Apple Factory That Made 41,000 iPhones
Chinese authorities have shut down a Beijing factory that manufactured about 41,000 counterfeit Apple iPhones. The factory belonged to a company that was set up earlier in the year and had workers repackaging second hand parts billed as new, genuine iPhones. The fake iPhones were worth up to $19 million.
