According to a report by Technology Review, the scientists in the group proved they could take control of cars using "GM's OnStar and Ford's Sync, as well as through the Bluetooth connections intended for making hands-free phone calls."

Previously, the scientists showed they could take over a car, providing they had "physical access to the vehicle's onboard diagnostics port--a federally mandated access point located under the dashboard in almost all modern cars." This is qualitatively different however. Now scientists, and by association all manner of goodies and baddies, can in theory (and at least in this study in practice) take over a car they had not previous connection to.

What are the implications of this? On the positive side, a driver who passes out or has a heart attack could, if it were caught in time, be saved by piloting the car to a safe stop. A criminal, say a car-jacker, could be driven straight to a police station. On the other hand, high-tech thieves might, in mastering these elements of our new, more high-tech cars, find it a great deal easier to steal them.

Model-T photo by Dave Seven | amphibious car photo by Susan Williams

The first Pi Day celebrations were held at the San Francisco Exploratorium when the now retired Larry Shaw decided the day was worth commemorating. Since then, the annual geek celebration has grown and is now held across the United States at universities, museums and even some folks' homes.

It's a mathematical constant representing the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. It's also an irrational number, with an infinite number of decimal places and can't be written as a ratio of two whole numbers. According to Physics Central, supercomputers have been able to compute Pi out to over 1.3 trillion decimal places without seeing a pattern emerge.

Image Credit: Qwantz

For the hardcore, the Joy of Pi has listed the first ten thousand digits for you to peruse, or if you're particularly keen, why not try to take the crown from Japan's Akari Haraguchi, the current record holder for being able to recite the first 100,000 digits of Pi from memory.

An interesting coincidence; today also happens to be Albert Einstein's birthday.

Update: oops - 22nd, not 21st

Today popular online storage company Mozy announced that it has been merged by the company that acquired it with another acquisition called Pi (Personal Information) - into a new forthcoming service called Decho (your digital echo). Pi was founded by Paul Maritz, who is now the CEO of virtualization powerhouse VMWare. What do you get when you bring these kinds of stars together into one service? Only a few clues are available so far, but we're excited to see what Decho becomes.

Pi Looks Cool

The storage side of this arrangement, Mozy, is interesting because the company has almost one million customers and has been innovating in its marketing and services for some time. Much more interesting, though, is Maritz's stealthy former company Pi. Now a part of the new company Decho, Pi's web site contains little more than a tasty description of an unlaunched data-centered personal information service. The site says Pi intends to build on the metaphors of search, subscription, aggregation and publishing for both manual and automatic consumption.

See this paragraph, for example:

"One of the failings of today's tools is that it is hard to get back the complete context of a task. Think of being in a meeting and all the items of information that are relevant: presentations, a list of attendees, private notes by you, notes you wish to share, notes by others, action items. Today it is surprisingly cumbersome to capture all this information in a way that is easy to get back to, and if needs be share with others.

At Pi we intend to solve this problem."

API Level Innovation

Not much is known about what services Decho will create when Mozy and Pi are brought together, but the following slide from the PR deck sure looks interesting.

Though vague, that looks pretty hot to us. It looks like a turnkey point of entry for a whole world of innovation built on top of our aggregated personal data. Presumably the security emphasis found on the Pi site and in online storage service Mozy will carry though here, so Decho will allow for data owners to have complete control over access.

We don't know for sure what to expect, but we'll be watching Decho and the surrounding ecosystem of services closely in coming months.