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The US National Security Agency wants a quantum computer – and has dedicated $79.7 million to the technology, according to the latest top secret government documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post.
It is no surprise that the NSA is pursuing such a potentially powerful technology, nor does the revelation pose an immediate privacy threat – the documents suggest that the agency is no closer to perfecting the technology than university researchers around the world. But if the agency does eventually realise its goal, what do citizens need to watch out for? And is there technology that would allow people to stay safe from quantum spooks?
Quantum computers promise to vastly outperform even the best ordinary computers at specific tasks by exploiting the weird properties of quantum mechanics. While a regular PC computes with bits that are either 0s or 1s, quantum machines use quantum bits, or qubits, which can be both simultaneously, and offer a computational speed-up.
One area quantum computers should excel in is factoring numbers into their prime building blocks. That could make them capable of breaking the internet's most commonly used encryption methods, which depend on the fact that ordinary computers can't find prime factors quickly. So in principle, the NSA could use a quantum computer to read secret data – without the need to collude with tech firms, which they have done in the past.
The NSA programme, called "Penetrating Hard Targets", apparently aims to build a quantum computer big enough to outperform the conventional variety. However, the Snowden documents, which are dated 2011, only mention aspirations for a machine consisting of two working qubits – far too small to factorise the large numbers that ordinary computers struggle with. It is also smaller than some of the quantum computers that university researchers are working with.
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Azdine El Mountassir Billah, general director of telecoms watchdog Agence Nationale de Reglementation de Telecom (ANRT), has announced that Amendment Bill 121-12, revising and supplementing the Post and Telecommunications Act (Law No. 24-96), will be presented to the Government Council for approval, local news agency L’Economiste reports.
According to the article, the executive has revealed that the new regulation gives more power to the telecoms watchdog, and if passed, the ANRT will be allowed to impose penalties on operators of up to 2% of their turnover before tax, in cases of infringement.
The bill also addresses consumer protection, infrastructure sharing and the integration of optical fibre infrastructure in buildings, among other topics.Further, the Amendment Bill ultimately aims to create a national roaming system, which will allow subscribers to use the network of any operator available in the area in which they are located.
When it comes to Chinese internet giants, Baidu and Alibaba are familiar names to many in the U.S. But, Tencent may not ring a bell outside of China. I’m betting that will change as the Shenzhen-based social networking and mobile apps giant keeps growing its user base both inside and outside of its home country.
Fun fact: Tencent was one of only three tech companies to make the cut in four top tech innovator lists (from Forbes, Boston Consulting Group, MIT Technology Review and Fast Company), as Scott Anthony pointed out in a Harvard Business Review post on Thursday. The other two winners were Google and Amazon. That’s pretty heady company.
Tencent’s core products –apps like QQ instant messaging and WeChat SMS (also known as Weixin) — may not be all that innovative in and of themselves But, Tencent has been able to build a profitable business model around them — using those base services to sell a ton of other paid stuff like club memberships, avatars, community memberships, and dating services. In that, Tencent’s model differs quite a bit from that of Google, Facebook, or Baidu.
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Both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP are based on the premise that by boosting trade and investment, general prosperity will increase too. And yet, despite the huge scale of the plans, and their major potential knock-on effects on the lives of billions of people, precious little evidence has been offered to justify that basic assumption.
To its credit, the European Commission has at least produced a report (pdf) on the possible gains. But as I've analyzed elsewhere, the most optimistic outcome is only tangentially about increased trade, and requires a harmonization of two fundamentally incompatible regulatory systems through massive deregulation on both sides of the Atlantic. In any case, the much-quoted figures are simply the output of econometric models, which may or may not be valid, and require extrapolation to the rather distant 2027, by which time the world could be a very different place.
Given the difficulty of saying anything definite about the future, it makes sense to look back at how past trade agreements have actually worked out for those involved. One of the most important, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has been operational for 20 years, and so offers us a wealth of hard facts. Public Citizen has just released an excellent analysis of what happened (pdf). As it points out:
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Levels of the potent neurotoxin found near the massive industrial operation have been found to be up to 16 times higher than “background” levels for the region, says Environment Canada researcher Jane Kirk, who recently reported the findings at an international toxicology conference.
Mercury can bioaccumulate in living creatures and chronic exposure can cause brain damage. It is such a concern that Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq signed an international treaty in October pledging Canada to further reduce releases to the environment.
The federal scientists stress the mercury loadings around the oilsands are low compared to the contamination seen in many parts of North America including southern Ontario and southern Quebec.
But they say the mercury is “the number one concern” when it comes to the metal toxins generated by oilsands operations. It is also a major worry for aboriginal and environmental groups concerned about the oilsands’ impact on fishing, hunting and important wildlife staging areas downstream of the oilsands.
Environment Canada scientists are sampling everything from snow to lichens to bird eggs as part of the federal-provincial joint oilsands monitoring program.
Kirk, who will publish the findings in a scientific study in 2014, told the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry conference in Nashville in November that about 19,000 square kilometres are “currently impacted by airborne Hg (mercury) emissions originating from oilsands developments.”
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It was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.
Not the absence of sound, exactly.
The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.
And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.
What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.
The birds were missing because the fish were missing.
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.
"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.
"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.
"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."
But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.
North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.
"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.
And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.
"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."
But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.
"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.
"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.
"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.
"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."
Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.
No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.
If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.
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Fernando Mazariengas of Guatemala invented a clay-pot water filtration system that can be inexpensively produced in factories using locally sourced material. The filter has since been improved and widely distributed by MIT’s Susan Murcott and others. Factories built at 52 locations in 31 countries are helping to curb disease, while also bringing jobs.
About nine years ago, Murcott’s team started disseminating the ceramic filter in northern Ghana -- where over a million people lack access to a reliable supply of clean drinking water. It’s now starting to make a difference.
Murcott cofounded a nonprofit company in 2005 called Pure Home Water to sell filters produced in Accra, Ghana’s capital. But the rough 12-hour truck ride to deliver them to where they’re needed most caused a lot of breakage.
So in 2011, a factory was built in the impoverished, rural northern region. They reached full production by 2012 -- providing sustainable, safe drinking water to more than 100,000 people.
MIT News explains:
Australian and French scientists believe they have cracked one of the great puzzles of climate change and arrived at a more accurate prediction of future temperatures.
The news is not good, according to Steven Sherwood of Australia’s Centre for Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. If carbon emissions are not reduced, then by 2100 the world will have warmed by 4°C.
This figure does not, at first, sound high: researchers have been warning for 20 years on the basis of computer models that under the notorious business-as-usual scenario in which everybody goes on burning coal and oil, then as carbon dioxide levels double, global temperatures could rise by between 1.5°C and 4.5°C.
Pessimists could cite one extreme, optimists the other: the range of uncertainty was a recognition that there were still some big unknowns in the machinery of climate, and one of those unknowns was the behaviour of the clouds in a warmer world.
More warmth means more evaporation, more vapour could mean more clouds. Low-level clouds reflect sunlight back into space, and help cool the climate a bit. This is what engineers call negative feedback.
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Italy's communications watchdog has approved new copyright regulations which opponents say puts online freedom of expression at risk.
The new rules, which gives regulator AgCom the power to block users' access to certain websites in the country, received the green light after a five-month long battle. The package of regulations will come into effect on 31 March next year and has received a warm welcome from the entertainment industry while drawing intense criticism from a coalition of lawyers and activists threatening to challenge it in Italy's highest administrative court.
But why are the regulations so controversial? They allow the rights-holders for "digital works" such as videos, songs, photos and games to turn to AgCom when they think a violation of those rights has occurred — until now, besides notice and takedown agreements with major sites, they could only resort to a judicial court.
With the new provisions, if AgCom agrees an Italian-hosted site is infringing rights-holders' copyright, the watchdog can order its hosting provider to remove the digital works in question. Alternatively, it can also ask ISPs to block their customers' access to the site, whether the site is hosted in Italy or not. Providers have three working days to comply with AgCom's decision. In total, from the filing of the complaint to AgCom's verdict, the whole process should last no more than 35 days.
However, in cases where AgCom deemed there is a "serious violation of the economic exploitation of the rights of a digital work" — that is, the rights-holder could lose a substantial amount of money — the procedure can be speeded up to 12 days. In such instances, if the rights-holder's claim is upheld, hosting providers and ISPs are only given two working days to comply.
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How broadband could improve economics and create a win-win situation for governments was the fulcrum of a presented by the Chief Executive of Nigerian Communications Satellite Limited (NIGCOMSAT), Engr. Timasaniyu Ahmed-Rufai at the recent e-Nigeria conference on local content hosted by Nigerian IT Development Agency (NITDA) in Abuja.
Ahmed-Rufai asked in his paper “Satellite based broadband in Nigeria, prospects and challenges” Why Broadband?” and listed the seemingly misgivings and scepticism of policy makers that broadband can actually deliver services and improve the wellbeing of citizens.
He addressed:
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Don't feel bad if you don't really know anything about 5G wireless networking – because, by most standards, it doesn't actually exist yet. The cross-pollination of codified specifications, new products, and technological innovation required hasn't yet brought 5G to fruition.
What there has been, however, is a lot of hype. Samsung grabbed attention in May with its announcement of a 1Gbps wireless connection it referred to as “5G,” saying it would bring the capability to its production smartphones by 2020.
The European Commission’s Horizon 2020 plan, announced this month, includes roughly $172 million for 5G research and development, and South Korea’s Yonhap News announced that country’s government would spend $475 million on developing a national 5G network, to be completed by 2020. Both proposals cite the transformative effects and massive economic benefits of 5G technology.
The problem, however, is that no one seems to agree on precisely what the term 5G even means. Sathya Atreyam, a research manager at IDC, says that it’s become a buzzword at this point.
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Born of the energy crisis of the 1970s, gas driller Lenape Resources flourished in western New York for more than three decades — until the revolutionary technology that sparked the nation’s shale gas boom brought the industry to a screeching halt in New York under a moratorium now in its sixth year.
Today, Lenape has just five employees, down from 100 in years past. ‘‘Those five — we’re trying to give them work in Pennsylvania,’’ said John Holko, the company’s president. ‘‘We’re not going to be here much longer.’’
As another year closes with a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in New York and no timetable for Governor Andrew Cuomo to decide whether to lift it, drilling interests have all but given up on the state, and environmental groups are pressing for a permanent ban.
Advancements in horizontal drilling and fracking — which releases gas from rock by injecting a well with a mix of water, sand, and chemicals at high pressure — have yielded so much gas from the Marcellus Shale underlying much of the mid-Atlantic region that gas prices have plummeted.
As a result, the less productive vertical wells still allowed in New York are no longer in demand, Holko said.
While other states have allowed shale development even as they scramble to draft regulations, New York has had deep shale drilling on hold since it started developing new rules in 2008. Amid intense pressure from antifracking groups, Cuomo has said he wants his health and environmental commissioners to take all the time they need to decide whether fracking can be done safely.
Critics of fracking cite potential air and water contamination and disruptive industrial activity near population centers, while supporters say state regulations mitigate the risks.
At the same time, dozens of towns have enacted their own bans or moratoriums in case the state does approve fracking — although most are outside the region along the Pennsylvania border considered most profitable for gas exploration.
Some drilling proponents, including industry and landowners hoping to profit from leases, are putting up a fight in state courts over town bans and the state’s stalled regulations. The state’s highest court will decide this spring whether two town bans, in Dryden and Middlefield, are legal.
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Amidst the continuing debates about the merits of Malcolm Turnbull’s national broadband network relative to Stephen Conroy’s, it doesn’t appear to have been appreciated that there may yet be significant changes to the nature of the rollout and the context within which NBN Co will operate in future.
When Turnbull’s strategic review of the NBN was released on December 12 it might have appeared that the NBN’s course had been set: it would be a $41 billion network, using a mix of technologies including copper and HFC cable, which would deliver download speeds of at least 50 Mbps to 90 per cent of Australians by 2019. By contrast, the review concluded that the Conroy fibre-to-the-premises network would have cost $73 billion and taken until 2024 to complete.
While the review made a compelling case for the Turnbull NBN – Conroy’s, already two years behind schedule three years into the rollout, would deliver its 100 Mbps to only 57 per cent of premises by 2019 and require an increase in average broadband bills of up to 80 per cent to generate its promised returns – the review’s findings aren’t the last word on the NBN.
On the day of the review’s release Turnbull also announced a panel of experts which will conduct an economic and social cost-benefit analysis of broadband, including an assessment of the different properties of the available technologies. Conroy and Kevin Rudd have been criticised for not undertaking such a review before they committed to the original version of the NBN.
There are, of course, those who criticise Turnbull for not being forward-looking enough and for not ‘future-proofing’ the NBN by building the ubiquitous fibre-to-the-premises network envisaged by Conroy.
The panel, however, has been tasked with considering the benefits of bringing forward improvements in broadband speed and the respective benefits of alternative or potential technologies.
It will also consider the extent to which market-pricing mechanisms might capture the value of benefits from the network, and whether there should be infrastructure-based competition to the NBN, among other things.
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Creatures which live deep beneath the ocean surface are likely to be badly hit by climate change over the next century, a new study says.
The study, by an international research team from the UK, Canada, Australia and France, is the first to quantify future losses in deep-sea marine life, using advanced climate models.
The researchers say their results show that even the most remote deep-sea ecosystems are not safe from the impacts of a warming world. They say the weight of the marine creatures that will be lost is greater than the combined weight of every person on Earth.
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Spanish conglomerate corporation Abertis Infraestructuras is said to have closed the acquisition of 1,741 mobile towers from Telefonica Espana (Movistar) and Yoigo for a total of EUR171 million (USD234.5 million), Expansion reports. The development represents the first phase of an August 2013 agreement under which Abertis said it would buy at least 4,227 mobile-phone towers from the two mobile operators for EUR385 million, in a transaction it said would contribute around EUR60 million a year to EBITDA.
On the back of the completion of the first stage of the deal, Movistar and Yoigo will now jointly use the infrastructure acquired by Abertis, while it will also be made available to other operators on a wholesale basis.
In a statement to the Comision Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), Abertis was cited as saying that acquisition of the first batch of towers would contribute to the ‘consolidation of the group as a key player in the rational use of fixed telecommunications infrastructure and mobiles in Spain,’ while it would also ‘enable the development of new business opportunities for sharing in the necessary deployment of fourth generation mobile phone infrastructure.’
Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Texas anymore.
More than 800 rural Texans filled the high school auditorium in Azle last night. They came to a town hall held by the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) hoping to get answers about the recent earthquakes in North Texas. The audience booed when David Porter, Texas Railroad Commissioner announced that they were there to hear from the people but would not be answering any questions.
For some background on the recent North Texas earthquakes, read Fracking Earthquakes and Industry’s Deadbeat Dad Problem
The audience was filled with people in denim and flannel shirts, including State Rep. Lon Burnam who, each legislative session, files bills that, if passed, would help people faced with oil and gas development. During the 83rd Legislative Session, among the bills Burnam wrote were: HB 379, a bill to assess a fee for wastewater disposal to encourage water conservation in fracking; HB 3599, a bill to place restrictions on the siting, drilling, completion, and operation of oil and gas wells in certain locations and HB 3600, a bill relating to the rights of an owner of the surface estate in land in connection with oil and gas exploration and production operations.
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It's not entirely clear what form this will take, but the French telco Orange is claiming that it is planning to file a lawsuit over the news that the NSA has been tapping its undersea fiber optic cables.
France-based telecom firm Orange has revealed plans to take legal action against the US National Security Agency (NSA) for using its submarine cable for surveillance.....
An Orange spokeswoman was quoted by Reuters as saying: "We will take legal action in the next few days because we want to know more about the eventuality that Orange data may have been intercepted."
Again, I'm not sure under what jurisdiction or exactly what kind of lawsuit Orange is intending to bring, but it's yet another bit of blowback against the NSA's overreach in its efforts to spy on absolutely everyone.
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The term, "information superhighway" has always been insufficient to describe the Internet. In reality, the Web is a global communication space containing the private information of a large part of the population of every developed country. If someone were able to train an all-seeing eye onto the Internet, the blackmail potential would be almost limitless.
It is precisely this all-seeing eye that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) have developed under the name Tempora. An appropriate real-world metaphor for the program might be something like this: In every room of every house and every apartment, cameras and microphones are installed, every letter is opened and copied, every telephone tapped. Everything that happens is recorded and can be accessed as needed.
It sounds preposterous, but it is frighteningly close to the reality that was unveiled by the Guardian on Friday. Together, the GCHQ and NSA monitor Internet traffic by tapping directly into the data stream sent through fiber-optic cables. They are able to copy and cache this data, to be sifted through later as needed.
Those behind this disgraceful program have not even bothered to deny what they are up to. The British spy agency has said it will not be commenting on the program -- but said that whatever they do is in the service of the fight against terrorism and subject to strict legal controls.
The NSA has been making this same argument since the Prism program was unveiled earlier this month. What we're doing, they say, is for a good cause. It's all regulated, and we're only looking at the information collected when we deem it necessary.
But that's all just pretence.
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You won’t find it at a dealership anytime soon, but one of Ford’s featured demonstrations at the 2014 International CES next week will be a C-MAX hybrid vehicle that has had its roof tricked out with SunPower SPWR +8.35% solar panels.
The idea is to enable the vehicle’s electric battery to replenish itself even if there’s not an electric vehicle charger handy. But it’s a slow process: it takes about an hour to store enough charge to drive the car one mile on electric power.
So, Ford researchers have developed a special charging canopy outfitted with a concentrating Fresnel lens that moves with the sun to accelerate the charging process – it’s the same sort of magnifying glass used in lighthouses.
With the aid of this concentrator, the panels can generate enough electricity (about 8 kilowatt-hours) over the course of one day to propel the car up to 21 miles on its electric motor, said Mike Tinskey, global director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure for Ford.
The system works by concentrating the sun’s rays onto the panels, and then slowly adjusting the vehicle’s position under the canopy over the course of the day as the sun moves from east to west – using the electric engine to move it gradually. “We looked at tracking systems, but they were too complex and expensive, so we asked ourselves, ‘Why can’t the vehicle move instead,’ Tinskey said.
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As American energy production booms, thousands face pipelines in their backyards.
Lorrie Reed lives alone in a trailer on a rural road outside Frankfort, Kentucky, on two acres of land that her late husband bought more than twenty years ago. He left the property to her and their daughters when he died in a motorcycle accident. “He told me before he passed that the place was going to be mine, and the only way I’d lose it was if I let somebody mess me out of it,” Reed says.
Ever since this past summer, when land agents approached her—twice—to ask permission to survey a proposed pipeline route across her property, Reed repeats these words to herself. She walks with a limp, an injury from a collision with a dump truck during the years that she worked on road maintenance crews. She owns a pistol because she is afraid of the feral dogs that she says are common in the area. She held the gun in her palm when the pipeline consultants pulled into her gravel driveway. “You’re trespassing,” she told them.
Still, she decided to sign the paperwork allowing them to survey. A day later, a letter arrived at her house from the Bluegrass Pipeline Blockade, a loose-knit network of Kentuckians organized mainly through Facebook. Reed learned that the pink survey ribbons in the field across the street from her land marked the potential route of a two-foot-diameter transcontinental pipe. It would haul a mix of butane, propane, pentane and other chemicals—called “natural gas liquids,” or NGLs—from fracking wells in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
Nine years ago, a four-inch NGL pipeline about a tenth as big destroyed five homes in eastern Kentucky and left a state trooper with severe burns after he rescued a 3-year-old child. In August of this year, a ten-inch NGL pipeline ruptured in western Illinois, shooting flames 300 feet into the air.
The information frightened Reed, and she wrote to the Williams Companies, one of the two corporations leading the pipeline project, to say that she had changed her mind: no one from the Bluegrass Pipeline project should set foot on her land.
By the end of the summer, distressed property owners and other Kentucky residents had united in an uprising against the pipeline. The project hasn’t aroused much public outcry in the other seven states it would cross. But in Kentucky, the proposed route traverses hallowed terrain: the eponymous Bluegrass Region, where the Kentucky Derby’s prizewinning horses graze; rolling hills pocked by springs, rivers, and aquifers that flow through the limestone soils and give Kentucky bourbon its characteristic taste.
Opponents say a pipeline spill could destroy Kentucky’s traditional economies. Signs saying No Proposed Bluegrass Pipeline now line many of the rural roads; one sits at the edge of Reed’s yard. Officials in several counties and one city have passed resolutions protesting the pipeline or pleading with the state or federal government to consider the potential impact on property rights and the environment. Since at least October, land agents hired by the pipeline developers have been privately making deals with property owners—but some, like Reed, say they won’t budge.
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China’s rapid economic growth has wreaked havoc on the country’s environment. The recent ‘airpocalypse’ speaks to the scale of the unprecedented pollution. However, the cause of China’s environmental problems could also be the solution. In fact, the way to “completely” address the issue is to let the economy grow even bigger, said Junjie Zhang, an environmental economist at UC San Diego.
According to Zhang, the number of polluting industries will be reduced as the economy grows. China has pledged to tackle overcapacity in the steel, cement, glass and shipbuilding sectors, which are responsible for discharging a good deal of the country’s pollutants.
Zhang said the country will eventually get rid of the majority of those industries and shift to a growth model fueled by more innovative and high-technology products. He said at that stage, the environment will get better with economic development.
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North Augusta residents will soon see a brand new City vehicle roaming through the streets of Martintown Road, Georgia Avenue and more.
In the next of a line of City improvements, North Augusta, SC has acquired a hydrogen fuel cell-powered bus. The clean technology bus' only emission is water vapor, according to City Administrator Todd Glover.
“The Aiken-Edgefield Economic Development Partnership has been for many years touting and exhibiting the virtues of hydrogen fuel cell technology,” Glover said. “The hydrogen fueling station at the Sage Mill Industrial Park led to several of the tenants in the park to convert their fork lift fleets to hydrogen fuel cells. Also, EDP, in conjunction with Aiken County constructed the Center for Hydrogen Research, now the Applied Research Center, to explore alternative fuel research and testing. With these initiatives, Aiken County is considered a world leader in the field of Hydrogen fuel cell technology.”
The reason for the county being a world leader is thanks to the EDP according to Glover. He said Fred Humes, with the EDP, contacted the City about partnering to obtain the bus and showcase the technology after they came off a grand made available to local governments. The bus carries a $50,000 price tag, though the value of the bus is more than $650,000, and is split between the two agencies. Glover said North Augusta's application was approved in a “competitive process over many local governments throughout the country.”
Though North Augusta does not have a specific green initiative, the City has been working on ways to be more environmentally friendly.
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Last April I wrote that we should care about Bitcoin because it represented a new conception of currency, one untethered by traditional restrictions like state monetary policy. Nine months later, I must confess I’m scratching my head as to the point of it all.
I’m not saying that Bitcoin is necessarily a bad thing, though the last couple of weeks have produced a flurry of articles to that effect, generally from people a lot better-versed in economics than I am (do read Alex Payne, Charlie Stross, Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman).
What I am saying is that I’ve realized I can’t actually see the point of Bitcoin, as in “why should anyone use it?” Last April, I wasn’t dealing with the “why” aspect enough. The arguments in favor of Bitcoin’s use – in real life, not speculative cashing in and out — are way too easy to shoot down. So let’s go hunting:
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Sharks in Western Australia are now tweeting out where they are — in a way.
Government researchers have that monitor where the animals are. When a tagged shark is about half a mile away from a beach, it triggers a computer alert, which tweets out a message on the . The tweet notes the shark's size, breed and approximate location.
Since 2011, Australia has had ; there have been six over the past two years — the most recent .
The tagging system alerts beachgoers far quicker than traditional warnings, says Chris Peck, operations manager of Surf Life Saving Western Australia. "Now it's instant information," he , "and really people don't have an excuse to say we're not getting the information. It's about whether you are searching for it and finding it."
The tags will also be monitored by . Researchers have tagged great whites, whaler sharks and tiger sharks.
"This kind of innovative thinking is exactly what we need more of when it comes to finding solutions to human-wildlife conflict," says Alison Kock, research manager of the in South Africa. Kock tells NPR that the project is a good idea — but that people should know that not all sharks are tagged.
Her program does the same work, but humans do the spotting and tweeting.
Kock and , a marine biologist who leads shark research at the University of Hawaii, agree that the tweets won't be enough to protect swimmers.
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The internet is weak, yet we keep ignoring this fact. So we see the same thing over and over again, whether it’s because of natural disasters like hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, wars like Syria and Bosnia, deliberate attempts by the government to shut down the internet (most recently in Egypt and Iran), or NSA surveillance.
After Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines last month, several towns were cut off from humanitarian relief because delivering that aid depends on having a reliable communication network. In a country where over 90 percent of the population has access to mobile phones, the implementation of an emergency “mesh” network could have saved lives.
Compared to the “normal” internet — which is based on a few centralized access points or internet service providers (ISPs) — mesh networks have many benefits, from architectural to political. Yet they haven’t really taken off, even though they have been around for some time. I believe it’s time to reconsider their potential, and make mesh networking a reality. Not just because of its obvious benefits, but also because it provides an internet-native model for building community and governance.
But first, the basics: An ad hoc network infrastructure that can be set up by anyone, mesh networks wirelessly connect computers and devices directly to each other without passing through any central authority or centralized organization (like a phone company or an ISP). They can automatically reconfigure themselves according to the availability and proximity of bandwidth, storage, and so on; this is what makes them resistant to disaster and other interference. Dynamic connections between nodes enable packets to use multiple routes to travel through the network, which makes these networks more robust.
Compared to more centralized network architectures, the only way to shut down a mesh network is to shut down every single node in the network.
That’s the vital feature, and what makes it stronger in some ways than the regular internet.
But mesh networks aren’t just for political upheavals or natural disasters. Many have been installed as part of humanitarian programs, aimed at helping poor neighborhoods and underserved areas. For people who can’t afford to pay for an internet connection, or don’t have access to a proper communications infrastructure, mesh networks provide the basic infrastructure for connectivity.
Not only do mesh networks represent a cheap and efficient means for people to connect and communicate to a broader community, but they provide us with a choice for what kind of internet we want to have.
For these concerned about the erosion of online privacy and anonymity, mesh networking represents a way to preserve the confidentiality of online communications. Given the lack of a central regulating authority, it’s extremely difficult for anyone to assess the real identity of users connected to these networks. And because mesh networks are generally invisible to the internet, the only way to monitor mesh traffic is to be locally and directly connected to them.
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