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An uncontested vote by the Beverly Hills City Council could guarantee a chauffeur for all residents in the near future. However, instead of a driver, the newly adopted program foresees municipally-owned driverless cars ready to order via a smartphone app. Also known as autonomous vehicles, or AV, driverless cars would appear to be the next big thing not only for people, but local governments as well – if the Beverly Hills City Council can get its AV development program past a few more hurdles, that is. The technology itself has some challenges ahead as well.

In the meantime, the conceptual shuttle service, which was unanimously approved at an April 5 city council meeting, is being celebrated.

Naming Google and Tesla in its press release, Beverly Hills must first develop a partnership with a manufacturer that can build it a fleet of unmanned cars. There will also be a need to bring in policy experts. All of these outside parties will have a chance to explore the program’s potential together at an upcoming community event.The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts will host a summit this fall that will include expert lectures, discussions, and test drives. Er, test rides.Already in the works for Beverly Hills is a fiber optics cable network that will, in addition to providing high-speed internet access to all residents and businesses, one day be an integral part of a public transit system that runs on its users’ spontaneous desires.Obviously, Beverly Hills has some money on hand for the project, and it is also an ideal testing space as the city takes up an area of less than six square miles. Another positive factor is the quality of the city’s roads, which exceeds that of most in the greater Los Angeles area, not to mention California and the whole United States.“It can’t find the lane markings!” Volvo’s North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, complained to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti last month, according to Reuters. “You need to paint the bloody roads here!”Whether lanes are marked or signs are clear has made a big difference in how successfully the new technology works.Unfortunately, the US Department of Transportation considers 65 percent of US roads to be in poor condition, so AV cars may not be in the works for many Americans living outside of Beverly Hills quite as soon.

Disaster stories involving the Internet of Things are all the rage. They feature cars (both driven and driverless), the power grid, dams, and tunnel ventilation systems. A particularly vivid and realistic one, near-future fiction published last month in New York Magazine, described a cyberattack on New York that involved hacking of cars, the water system, hospitals, elevators, and the power grid. In these stories, thousands of people die. Chaos ensues. While some of these scenarios overhype the mass destruction, the individual risks are all real. And traditional computer and network security isn’t prepared to deal with them.Classic information security is a triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. You’ll see it called “CIA,” which admittedly is confusing in the context of national security. But basically, the three things I can do with your data are steal it (confidentiality), modify it (integrity), or prevent you from getting it (availability).

So far, internet threats have largely been about confidentiality. These can be expensive; one survey estimated that data breaches cost an average of $3.8 million each. They can be embarrassing, as in the theft of celebrity photos from Apple’s iCloud in 2014 or the Ashley Madison breach in 2015. They can be damaging, as when the government of North Korea stole tens of thousands of internal documents from Sony or when hackers stole data about 83 million customer accounts from JPMorgan Chase, both in 2014. They can even affect national security, as in the case of the Office of Personnel Management data breach by—presumptively—China in 2015. On the Internet of Things, integrity and availability threats are much worse than confidentiality threats. It’s one thing if your smart door lock can be eavesdropped upon to know who is home. It’s another thing entirely if it can be hacked to allow a burglar to open the door—or prevent you from opening your door. A hacker who can deny you control of your car, or take over control, is much more dangerous than one who can eavesdrop on your conversations or track your car’s location. With the advent of the Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems in general, we've given the internet hands and feet: the ability to directly affect the physical world. What used to be attacks against data and information have become attacks against flesh, steel, and concrete. Today’s threats include hackers crashing airplanes by hacking into computer networks, and remotely disabling cars, either when they’re turned off and parked or while they’re speeding down the highway. We’re worried about manipulated counts from electronic voting machines, frozen water pipes through hacked thermostats, and remote murder through hacked medical devices. The possibilities are pretty literally endless. The Internet of Things will allow for attacks we can’t even imagine.

Huawei Technologies, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment supplier, is set to launch its HongMeng operating system (OS) as a potential alternative to Google's Android OS, on August 9 at Huawei's Developer Conference, industry insiders told the Global Times Wednesday. According to media reports, the user experience (UX) design features a brand new ringtone and notification panel, a cleaner interface for the camera, more animation and faster speed. Users can also add widgets and personalize the locked screen. Citing industry experts (most likely of Chinese origin), the Global Times reported that "it is possible for Huawei to build a sustainable smartphone ecosystem on the HongMeng OS and reshape the current market dominated by Android and Apple's iOS", although the new system is primarily designed for industrial automation and applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). "Given the design features of the HongMeng OS, it can be a game changer in IoT-related areas, such as driverless cars and smart homes," Fu Liang, a Beijing-based independent industry analyst, told the Global Times. According to Huawei's website, the HongMeng OS is built with a processing latency of less than 5 milliseconds, which is especially required in circumstances involving IoT applications that often need to transfer large amount of data simultaneously.