California pilot program turns GM’s EVs into roving battery packs

While not nearly as much of a mess as Texas’ energy infrastructure, California’s power grid has seen its fair share of brownouts, rolling blackouts, and power outages caused by wildfires caused by PG&E. To help mitigate the economic impact of those disruptions, this summer General Motors and Northern California’s energy provider will team up to test out using the automaker’s electric vehicles as roving, backup battery packs for the state’s power grid. 

The pilot program announced by GM CEO Mary Barra on CNBC Tuesday morning is premised on birectional charging technology, wherein power can both flow from the grid to a vehicle (G2V charging) and from a vehicle back to the grid (V2G), allowing the vehicle to act as an on-demand power source. GM plans to offer this capability as part of its Ultium battery platform on more than a million of its EVs by 2025. Currently the Nissan Leaf and the Nissan e-NV200 offer V2G charging, though Volkswagen announced in 2021 that its ID line will offer it later this year and the the Ford F-150 Lightning will as well. 

This summer’s pilot will initially investigate, “the use of bidirectional hardware coupled with software-defined communications protocols that will enable power to flow from a charged EV into a customer’s home, automatically coordinating between the EV, home and PG&E’s electric supply,” according to a statement from the companies. Should the initial tests prove fruitful, the program will expand first to a small group of PG&E customers before scaling up to “larger customer trials” by the end of 2022.

“Imagine a future in which there’s an EV in every garage that functions as a backup power source whenever it’s needed,” GM spokesperson Rick Spina said during a press call on Monday.

“We see this expansion as being the catalyst for what could be the most transformative time for for two industries, both utilities and the auto automotive industry” PG&E spokesperson Aaron August added. “This is a huge shift in the way we’re thinking about electric vehicles, and personal vehicles overall. Really, it’s not just about getting from point A to point B anymore. It’s about getting from point A to point B with the ability to provide power.”

Technically, like from a hardware standpoint, GM vehicles can provide bidirectional charging as they are currently being sold, Spina noted during the call. The current challenge, and what this pilot program is designed to address, is developing the software and UX infrastructure needed to ensure that PG&E customers can easily use the system day-to-day. “The good news there is, it’s nothing different from what’s already industry standard for connectors, software protocols,” August said. “The industry is moving towards ISO 15118-20.”

The length of time that an EV will be able to run the household it’s tethered to will depend on a number of factors — from the size of the vehicle’s battery to the home’s power consumption to the prevailing weather — but August estimates that for an average California home using 20 kWh daily, a fully-charged Chevy Bolt would have enough juice to power the house for around 3 days. This pilot program comes as automakers and utilities alike work out how to most effectively respond to the state’s recent directive banning the sale of internal combustion vehicles starting in 2035.

The Morning After: Android 12L will arrive on tablets and foldables this year

When it announced the Android 12L beta in October, Google promised the software for larger screens would be ready early this year. It’s not here just yet, but the company still expects it to land in 2022. And while we don’t have device specifics, we could see existing devices like the Galaxy Z Fold, Z Flip and Surface Duo pick up the new interface, adding features like home and lock screens optimized for larger displays. 

TMA
Engadget

Android has long faced criticism for still being an unintuitive system for tablets, leading to a dearth in real competition for Apple’s iPads — Samsung’s efforts aside. But hey, at least with Android 12L, Google is trying to make it better. Are you an unloved Android tablet user who’s intrigued? We tested the Android 12L beta here.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

Samsung confirms hackers compromised its systems and stole Galaxy source code

South American hacking group Lapsus$ previously claimed responsibility.

Samsung confirmed yesterday some of its data was stolen during a cyberattack over the weekend. In a statement to Bloomberg, the company admitted “some source code relating to the operation of Galaxy devices” was taken, but customer and employee credentials were not impacted. Although Samsung has not revealed the actors behind the compromise, South American hacking group Lapsus$ has claimed responsibility. The organization shared a 190GB torrent file that reportedly includes bootloader source code for all of Samsung’s recent devices, as well as code related to biometric authentication and on-device encryption for Galaxy devices.

Continue reading.

Kia’s 2022 Sorento plug-in is no Telluride

But it’s still a posh SUV.

TMA
KIA

Kia’s 2022 Sorento plug-in hybrid (PHEV) is a capable mid-size SUV with some hybrid pep, three rows of seats and a slightly ho-hum aesthetic. It suffers a little from comparisons to the Telluride, Kia’s larger and far more fashionable family SUV. The Sorento is decidedly more basic, but with plenty of charm. Devindra Hardawar test drove it for a bit.

Continue reading.

Cities turn to tech to keep sewers free of fatbergs

These pipe-blocking globs can outweigh an elephant.

It’s a little early to go into too much detail on fatbergs, but once you’ve had your coffee and are fully awake, this is an intriguing insight into how cities are fighting the issue, exacerbated by the boom in wet wipes over the years. Weapons to tackle them include high-pressure water cannons, remote-operated cameras and even sonar tech.

Continue reading.

‘God of War’ might also get a TV series adaptation

‘The Last of Us’ is already on its way.

TMA
SIE

Amazon Studios and Sony’s PlayStation Productions unit are in talks to produce a live-action TV series adaptation of God of War, according to Deadline. The outlet reports that Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, best known for their work on The Expanse and Children of Men, are involved in the project.

In case you’re not keeping count, Sony’s recently established PlayStation Productions unit is already working with HBO to produce a TV series based on Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. It’s also working on a Ghost of Tsushima movie and a Twisted Metal series that will stream on Peacock. There was also that Uncharted movie. Ahem.

Continue reading. 

Google is buying cybersecurity company Mandiant for $5.4 billion

Google has todayannounced that it has signed an agreement to buy Mandiant, a notable cybersecurity company, for $5.4 billion. The unit, once acquired, will be folded into Google’s Cloud team to ensure that it can offer an “end-to-end security operations suite” for its business customers. Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia says that the deal will enable “organizations [to] effectively, efficiently and continuously manage and configure their complex mix of security products.” Google’s cloud platform is used by a number of major companies, and an outage towards the end of 2021 briefly knocked out Spotify, Snapchat, Etsy and Discord, amongst others.

Mandiant isn’t likely to be a name on everyone’s lips, but it’s one of those companies who gets called in whenever bad things go down. It discovered the SolarWinds hack, and it was hired by Equifax to look into its security practices after its massive security snafu in 2017, and T-Mobile entered into partnership with the company after its 2021 breach. It also works with major banks and governments to work on high-profile attacks involving state actors. Mandiant was previously a part of FireEye after being acquired in 2013, but the company was spun back out last year.

The news comes just a month after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft might be interested in acquiring the company. It said that any deal would enable its new buyer to offer “unparalleled cybersecurity knowledge,” although Microsoft — obviously — subsequently pulled out of negotiations. But Google clearly feels that the deal is worth it, and is the second most expensive purchase the company has ever made, after its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola.

Google’s Jigsaw open sources its anti-harassment tool to help protect journalists

Anyone can be harassed online, but it’s an inevitability for activists and journalists covering contentious topics and challenging their country’s authorities — especially if they’re women. Google’s Jigsaw unit has released the open source code for a web app called Harassment Manager that can help them review, sort and export the toxic comments they get on social media. Developers can build on the code to create their own version of the tool, but Jigsaw does have implementation partners, including Thomson Reuters Foundation that’s rolling out a functional web app for its journalists in June.

In its current form, Harassment Manager works on Twitter, which teamed up with Jigsaw for the project. It uses the unit’s Perspective API to detect comments that are most likely to be harmful and allows users to easily document and hide those responses, as well as to mute or block the accounts harassing them. Jigsaw has been training Perspective to detect online harassment since at least 2017 by feeding it comments identified as toxic by human reviewers. 

As The Verge reports, Perspective gives Harassment Manager the power to check the messages a user gets and to sort them into high, possible and unknown levels of harmfulness. The user can then process them in batches instead of dealing with them one by one, and they can blur toxic messages if they don’t want to read them.

According to Jigsaw’s research, 70 percent of female journalists receive threats online, and more than 40 percent of them stopped reporting their story as a result. The unit is hoping that the code can give developers what they need to be able to create a tool to protect people who “deal with disproportionately high toxicity online,” especially “female journalists, activists, politicians and other public figures.” Jigsaw says open sourcing the tool is just a step towards helping people who constantly deal with online harassment. It will continue working with NGOs in the journalism and human rights space to figure out how Harassment Manager’s technology can help keep their communities safe.

金属に刻印＆ボードの切断も簡単。高精度・コスパ抜群のレーザー彫刻機「Runmecy D4」

「Runmecy D4」（ランメシー）主な特徴： 5Wの高出力で刻印速度が大幅アップ！ ※従来製品比 スマホ・パソコンと連動、Android/iOS/Mac/Windowsに対応！文字や画像をアップロードするだけで手軽に刻印可能！ 0.01mmの高精度で文字や画像を精細に描き出すことが可能。 コンパクトなのに150×150mmまでの彫刻範囲に対応！ 様々な素材に刻印・切断可能。ステンレス鋼、革、木材、ガラス、プラスチック、陶器、紙、石、食物など 支援額98,015,794円を突破したコンパクト金属レ…