Items tagged with traffic lights
Have you ever honked at someone because they did not realize the red traffic light had turned green? If they are an Audi driver, this situation should no longer be a problem. Audi recently announced the “traffic light information system” -- a service which informs drivers when a traffic light is about to turn green. Scott Keogh, President of Audi of America, noted, “Continuous innovation in connected car services and advanced driver assistance systems that enrich and improve the customer experience is at the core of the Audi brand and our collective future.” Traffic light information is an Audi PRIME feature and will allow vehicles to communicate with the infrastructure in select metropolitan...
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A city in Germany has embedded LED traffic lights into sidewalks so that pedestrians who are too busy looking at their smartphone won't accidentally walk out into oncoming traffic. Sadly, this isn't a belated April Fool's story, and it begs the question, has it really come to this? And at the risk of sounding crass, isn't there a cutoff point where we stop interfering with natural selection? The city of Augsburg came up the idea after noticing that walkers were so engrossed with their smartphones that they weren't paying attention to traffic signals. By installing LED traffic lights right into the pavement, pedestrians can continue looking down at their handsets while being made aware of when...
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Word to the wise -- be careful crossing through intersections, even when you have a green light. We don't want to overstate the threat, but apparently you really can hack into a traffic signal and change the light, just as you've seen in countless Hollywood films featuring the token computer hacker. This was proven by a team of researchers at the University of Michigan. The small team of five consisting of students from the school's electrical engineering and computer science departments published a paper title "Green Lights Forever (PDF)," and in it, they outlined the discovery of a "number of security flaws that exist due to systemic failures by the designers." Moreover, they explained in the...
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