Tag Archives: america

Something Wild Happens When You Try to Take a Video of a Car’s Sensors

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A video shows how the lidar sensors equipped on self-driving cars can wreak havoc on your smartphone camera.

Public service announcement: don't point your phone camera directly at a lidar sensor.

A video recently shared on Reddit demonstrates why. As the camera zooms in on the sensor affixed to the top of a Volvo EX90, a whole galaxy of colorful dots is burned into the image, forming over the exact spot that the flashing light inside the lidar device can be seen.

What you're witnessing isn't lens flare or a digital glitch — it's real, physical damage to the camera. And it's permanent.

"Lidar lasers burn your camera," the Reddit user warned. 

Never film the new Ex90 because you will break your cell camera.Lidar lasers burn your camera.
byu/Jeguetelli inVolvo

Lidar is short for light detection and ranging, and it's become the go-to way for automakers to enable their self-driving cars to "see" their surroundings (unless you're Tesla, that is). The sensors work, essentially, by shooting a constant stream of infrared laser beams to measure the distance to nearby objects, which a computer uses to form a 3D reconstruction of everything in the vicinity of the vehicle.

We can't see the laser beams since they're in a wavelength outside the range of human vision. But cameras, on the other hand, are all too sensitive to the powerful beams. Their delicate little sensors can be damaged if they're brought too close to a lidar source, or if a long lens is used to look at one. As The Drive notes in its coverage, this is why backup cameras are usually unaffected, since they use an ultra-wide angle lens. In the video, you'll also notice that the burn-in damage disappears when the camera zooms out: that's the camera transitioning from a long lens to its undamaged short one.

To its credit, Volvo explicitly warns about lidar damage on its support page and its owners manual, but that hasn't stopped a few surprised owners from learning about it the hard way. 

And honestly, we can't really blame them. The phenomenon has even caught a self-driving car engineer off-guard, who discovered that their $2,000 Sony camera's sensor was permanently fried after attending a CES show where lidar-equipped cars were being exhibited.

This is a risk with potentially any car's lidar tech and not just Volvo's, to be clear. After The Drive reached out, the Swedish automaker doubled down on its warning.

"It's generally advised to avoid pointing a camera directly at a lidar sensor," a Volvo representative told The Drive. "The laser light emitted by the lidar can potentially damage the camera's sensor or affect its performance."

"Using filters or protective covers on the camera lens can help reduce the impact of lidar exposure," the Volvo rep added. "Some cameras are designed with built-in protections against high-intensity light sources."

If reading all this has you worried about your eyeballs, fret not: according to experts, the lidar beams used in cars are harmless. Volvo's lidar system, for example, uses 1550-nanometer lasers, and at that wavelength, the light can't even reach the retina.

We still wouldn't recommend staring at them, though.

More on phones:Trump Believes Entire iPhones Can Be Manufactured in America

The post Something Wild Happens When You Try to Take a Video of a Car's Sensors appeared first on Futurism.

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Something Wild Happens When You Try to Take a Video of a Car's Sensors

RFK Jr. Realizes He’s Made a Huge Mistake

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Last week, Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. announced sweeping layoffs. He's having regrets.

Last week, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and noted anti-vaccine crackpot Robert Kennedy Jr. announced sweeping layoffs as part of a major restructuring effort.

Roughly 20,000 of the department's 82,000 full-time employees ended up on the chopping block. Around 10,000 have been laid off, with the rest being taking either early retirements or buyouts, according to the announcement.

But it's looking like Kennedy moved too hastily, firing important workers who even he admits were actually needed.

"Personnel that should not have been cut were cut," he told reporters this week, as quoted by CBS News. "We're reinstating them."

Bafflingly, he defended the unprofessional screwup.

"And that was always the plan," Kennedy added. "Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we're going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we'll make mistakes."

It's a confounding admission, highlighting the second Trump administration's "move fast and break things" approach, and how little thought is being put into sweeping cuts affecting the HHS and a vast number of other government agencies.

DOGE has already had to reinstate key government employees on several occasions, including staff who were working to contain bird flu and USAID efforts to prevent Ebola outbreaks.

Kennedy, a noted figure in the anti-vaccine movement, has proven a highly controversial pick for the job, and is already pouring resources into investigating long-debunked claims linking vaccines and autism.

It's a precarious situation, especially given the ongoing measles outbreak. As the New York Times reported late last month, ill-informed measles patients were experiencing complications after following Kennedy's advice to take large amounts of Vitamin A.

As part of the HHS restructuring efforts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's complete Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch was laid off, according to CBS — which, Kennedy argued, was a mistake.

Despite backtracking on DOGE's ill-devised plans, it remains unclear how or when the HHS will reinstate these key figures. CDC officials told CBS that they hadn't been informed of any upcoming plans to do so.

And the effects of the mass layoffs are already being felt. The CDC, for instance, won't be able to continue its investigation into lead in water "due to the loss of subject matter experts," officials said, as quoted by CBS.

Despite admitting that 20 percent of the cuts were a mistake, Kennedy has said that restructuring the HHS could save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year "without impacting critical services."

Now that the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration have been hit hard, we'll all find out whether that'll turn out to be true.

More on Kennedy: Man Who Believes Poppers Cause AIDS Is Planning to Gut America's HIV Prevention Office

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Trump, Who Called for Death Penalty for Drug Dealers, Pardons Most Influential Drug Dealer in Human History

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Trump appears to have reversed on his position that drug dealers should get the death penalty by pardoning Ross Ulbricht this week.

During his announcement in late 2022 that he would be once again running for president of the United States, now-reelected president Donald Trump issued an outrageous threat: that he'd seek to punish drug dealers with the death penalty.

"We're going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts," Trump told an audience during his speech at his Mar-a-Lago estate at the time. "Because it's the only way."

Just over two years later, Trump appears to have completely reversed that position by unconditionally pardoning Ross "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht this week. Ulbricht ran Silk Road, the now infamous site that made history as the first dark web marketplace, offering a cornucopia of banned drugs in exchange for the then-nascent cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Ulbricht was sentenced to life in federal person in 2015 after he was busted by the FBI — and after Silk Road had facilitated the sale of over $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods.

"Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people," Preet Bharara, then US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement at the time.

During his 2015 sentencing, district judge Katherine Forrest described Ulbricht as "no better a person than any other drug dealer."

Forrest had a point. Ulbricht didn't just sell drugs; he disrupted the entire industry. He wasn't your neighborhood dealer; he was the Uber of plugs, singlehandedly creating an entire new model that directly connected drug buyers with drug sellers — and taking a handsome cut in the process. In terms of long term impact, Ubricht probably had more of an impact on the global drug trade than Pablo Escobar.

It's not that drug crimes actually deserve draconian punishments, but Trump's pardon serves as a painstakingly obvious attempt to curry favor with the crypto industry — which he also once reviled, before gaining its financial support — as well as contradicting his earlier promise to literally punish drug dealers with death.

The pardon highlights Trump's fragile moral compass and well-documented willingness to abandon his stance on a given matter when presented with an opportunity to cash in.

Ulbricht's life sentence has long been the subject of libertarian outrage, as Al Jazeera reports, with the crypto community arguing he was unfairly prosecuted as an example to others.

"I was doing life without parole, and I was locked up for more than 11 years but he let me out," he said in a video message posted on X-formerly-Twitter. "I’m a free man now. So let it be known that Donald Trump is a man of his word."

Trump's decision to pardon him, however, had plenty of critics.

"Pardoning drug trafficking kingpins is a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to his crimes," Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto wrote in a tweet. "Donald Trump should have to explain to them how any of this makes America safer. It's an outrage."

Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order earlier this week, looking to reinstate the death penalty. Whether the Supreme Court will green-light the decision remains to be seen.

During a campaign speech in September, Trump reiterated his desire to expand the death penalty to those who were convicted of drug trafficking.

"These are terrible, terrible, horrible people who are responsible for death, carnage and crime all over the country,"  he said at the time. "We’re going to be asking everyone who sells drugs, gets caught, to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts."

Yet somehow Ulbricht, who created an entire marketplace and new business model for the sale of drugs, has been set free.

More on Silk Road: Silk Road Mastermind Ross Ulbricht Seen Leaving Prison Holding a Small Plant

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Trump, Who Called for Death Penalty for Drug Dealers, Pardons Most Influential Drug Dealer in Human History