Being able to see where you’re going while driving at night is important of course. Thus anything that a carmaker can do to help you see at night is going to be welcome. Mazda has you covered on that front with their High Beam Control with Adaptive Front-Lighting System.
Let’s start with High Beam Control. The system automatically switches between the headlamps’ high and low beams in a way that maximizes the frequency of use of the high beams, which illuminate the road far ahead and enable the driver to quickly spot pedestrians, animals, and other potential obstructions on the road at night. It helps the driver avoid hazards by promoting nighttime visibility. When it detects the headlamps of an oncoming vehicle, the tail lamps of a preceding vehicle, or some other light source, it automatically switches to the low beams to prevent the headlamps from blinding the other driver. It also selects the low beams when the high beams are not necessary, e.g., when the car’s speed is 30km/h or lower and/or the car is on a brightly lit urban road.
The second system is the Adaptive Front-Lighting System. It enables the driver to see further around curves at night. It predicts the shape of the road from the driver’s steering inputs and the car’s speed and directs lamps in the direction of travel.
What’s unique about these systems is the fact that you can find them on the vehicles such as the Mazda CX-5 among other Mazda vehicles. Thus you don’t have spend luxury car money to get these systems in your next vehicle. That’s a good thing as more people will not only experience the benefits of the High Beam Control System with Adaptive Front-Lighting System, but they’ll be safer drivers because of it. Not to mention that the rest of us will be safer as well.
Chinese Hackers “Pwn” Safari And Flash At Pwn2Own Contest
Posted in Commentary with tags Adobe, Apple, Hacked on March 14, 2014 by itnerdEvery year, the hacking community has gathered at the Pwn2Own event In Vancouver to show off their hacking skills in exchange for cash. This year a pair of Chinese hackers are making news for hacking Safari and Flash. Here’s the details as posted by Threat Post:
Fang Jiahong and Liang Chen represented the Keen Team at Pwn2Own on Thursday, starting off the second day of the annual exploit festival with a quick takedown of Apple’s Safari browser. They then wrapped up the contest with a successful zero-day exploit of Adobe Flash, the second time the Adobe product was toppled.
What should get your attention is the fact that the hackers were able to vulnerabilities in OS X Mavericks and Webkit (which is part of Safari) to bypass the security that is built into Safari. What should also get your attention is this:
“I think the Webkit fix will be relatively easy,” Chen said. “The system-level vulnerability is related to how they designed the application; it may be more difficult for them.”
Apple was present for this contest and they have been made aware of the details of how this happened. Thus it’s likely that the next update to Mavericks which is already under testing will contain a fix for this. If you’re wondering about details of the Flash hack, I can’t find any.
Oh, if you’re wondering what they got for doing this, the Safari hack scored them $40,000 and the Flash hack scored them $75,000. They said they will donate a portion of their winnings to charities representing the families of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Nice.
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