Wired

Iotera is trying to crowdsource a new nationwide wireless network for devices that operate outside the home. Iotera believes we need something more than ordinary Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and cellular networks if we’re going to bring things like keychains and backpacks online, but the company aims to make this happen in a unique way.

Iota is also includes a wireless base station that connects those devices to the Internet.

Each station has a range of 3 to 4 miles, and it can communicate with any Iota device within range, including those owned by other people. Since every base station can be used by any Iota device, each user is essentially providing coverage for every other user within range. As more users come online, the wider the coverage will be. Eventually, the company may be able to achieve nationwide coverage.

Believe it or not, there are people in Congress listening to the Internet. We just have to get their attention -- and, more importantly, we have to keep their attention long enough to effect real change.

[Commentary] By today’s standards, America Online’s tightly controlled experience seems quaint -- and pretty silly. But that early-’90s scenario could very well repeat itself today, with the so-called Internet of Things.

Yes, this vast array of smart devices will all be connected to the public Internet, but they may already be evolving in a way where they can’t all talk to each other, where one set of devices is cut off from another, just as AOL was cut off from Prodigy or CompuServe in a pre-web version of proprietary wishful thinking.

The Internet of Things only really makes sense as a concept if lots of devices can talk to lots of very different devices -- your car to your thermostat, your fitness band to your coffee maker. Few hardware makers would openly disagree with that premise. But at the same time, corporate tech giants are racing to create competing standards through which devices will connect, and these are, in effect, the AOLs and CompuServes of today.

Beneath its slick interface and crystal clear GPS-enabled vision of the world, Google Maps roils with local rivalries, score-settling, and deception. Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website.

In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site (which siphons off the commissions).

Small businesses are the usual targets. Attacks happen because Google Maps is, at its heart, a massive crowdsourcing project, a shared conception of the world that skilled practitioners can bend and reshape in small ways using tools like Google’s Mapmaker or Google Places for Business.

[Commentary] When the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Riley v. California, it definitively told the government to keep its warrantless fingers off your cell phone. But as the full impact of that opinion has rippled through the privacy community, some SCOTUS-watchers say it could also signal a shift in how the Court sees the privacy of data in general -- not just when it’s stored on your physical handset, but also when it’s kept somewhere far more vulnerable: in the servers of faraway Internet and phone companies.

In the Riley decision, which dealt with the post-arrest searches of an accused drug dealer in Boston and an alleged gang member in California, the court unanimously ruled that police need a warrant to search a suspect’s phone. The 28-page opinion penned by Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly avoids addressing a larger question about what’s known as the “third-party doctrine,” the notion that any data kept by a third party such as Verizon, AT&T, Google or Microsoft is fair game for a warrantless search.

But even so, legal analysts reading between the opinion’s lines say they see evidence that the court is shifting its view on that long-stewing issue for online privacy. The results, if they’re right, could be future rulings from America’s highest court that seriously restrict both law enforcement’s and even the NSA’s abilities to siphons Americans’ data from the cloud.

Newly uncovered components of a digital surveillance tool used by more than 60 governments worldwide provide a rare glimpse at the extensive ways law enforcement and intelligence agencies use the tool to surreptitiously record and steal data from mobile phones.

The modules, made by the Italian company Hacking Team, were uncovered by researchers working independently of each other at Kaspersky Lab in Russia and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs in Canada, who say the findings provide great insight into the trade craft behind Hacking Team’s tools.

The new components target Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry users and are part of Hacking Team’s larger suite of tools used for targeting desktop computers and laptops. But the iOS and Android modules provide cops and spooks with a robust menu of features to give them complete dominion over targeted phones.

This is the first time that the modules used to spy on mobile phone users have been uncovered in the wild and reverse-engineered. Kaspersky has tracked more than 350 command-and-control servers created for this purpose in more than 40 countries. While Kaspersky found only one or two servers in most of these countries, the researchers found 64 in the United States -- by far the most. Kazakhstan followed with 49, Ecuador with 35 and the United Kingdom with 32.

As Kaspersky notes, it makes little sense for governments to maintain their command servers in foreign countries where they run the risk of losing control over the servers.

[Commentary] Privileged companies -- including Google, Facebook, and Netflix -- already benefit from what are essentially Internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years.

Such web giants -- and others -- now have direct connections to big Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.

The concepts driving today’s net neutrality debate caught on because the Internet used to operate differently -- and because they were easy for consumers to understand. In many respects, these concepts were vitally important to the evolution of the Internet over the past decades. But in today’s world, they don’t address the real issue with the country’s ISPs, and if we spend too much time worried about fast lanes, we could hurt the net’s progress rather than help it.

When Google announced Project Loon on June 15, 2013, a lot of people were skeptical. But Google reports that since then, it has been able to extend balloon flight times and add mobile connectivity to the service.

As a result, Google’s expectations are flying even higher than the 60,000-foot strata where its balloons live. “This is the poster child for Google X,” says Astro Teller, who heads the division. “The balloons are delivering 10x more bandwidth, 10x steer-ability, and are staying up 10x as long. That’s the kind of progress that can only happen a few more times until we’re in a problematically good place.”

Since the first public test flights in New Zealand, Google’s balloons have clocked over a million and half kilometers.

Google made a different kind of advance with Loon when it added the capability to send data using the LTE spectrum -- making it possible for people to connect directly to the Internet with their mobile phones. (Loon’s original Wi-Fi connection required a base station and a special antenna.) Using LTE also helped Google boost the capacity of its connections. Recent Loon payloads are providing as much as 22 MB/sec to a ground antenna and 5 MB/sec to a handset.

An algorithm has been developed to automatically recognise human gestures or activities in videos in order to describe what is taking place.

MIT postdoc Hamed Pirsiavash and his former thesis advisor Deva Remanan from the University of California at Irvine have used natural language processing techniques in order to improve computers' ability to search for particular actions within videos -- whether it's making tea, playing tennis or weightlifting.

The activity-recognising algorithm is faster than previous versions and is able to make good guesses at partially completed actions, meaning it can handle streaming video. Natural language processing has been applied to computer vision in order to break down the different components involved in any action in the same way that sentences are divided down into different elements.

The researchers essentially came up with a type of grammar for human movement, dividing up one main action into a series of subactions. As a video plays, the algorithm constructs a set of hypotheses about which subactions are being depicted and where, and ranks them according to probability. As the video progresses, it can eliminate hypotheses that don't conform to the grammatical rules, which then dramatically reduces the number of possibilities.

Pirsiavesh believes that the system may have medical applications, including checking that physiotherapy exercises are being carried out correctly or the extent to which motor function in patients with neurological damage has returned.

[Commentary] Well, the last meeting of the Federal Communications Commission was certainly a lot of sound and fury signifying next to nothing.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, despite weeks of backlash, still wants to allow Internet Service Providers like Comcast and Verizon to “offer” different levels of service to Internet companies, although he refused to call them a “fast lane” and a “slow lane” and refused to recognize how those arrangements up the food chain affect consumers and a neutral Internet.

His concession to those of us who value a neutral Internet is to allow it on a case-by-case basis, guaranteeing that nothing will ever get settled, and Internet companies will be allowed to bleed money. Sure, the FCC will ask whether the telecommunications services that carry Internet content should be regulated like utilities (Title II of the Communications Act), and there will be people who make an argument for it.

But here’s the rub. The damage is already done. It was done months ago. And the FCC did nothing to stop it. Regardless of what rule the FCC finally approves, and defends through the years of court challenges, it already established the bad precedent that big ISPs can cause traffic congestion, demand tribute to fix it, and get away with it.