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Fliers are one giant step closer to using their smartphones, tablets and e-readers for the duration of a flight after the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, announced plans Thursday to expand the use of so-called portable electronic devices during all phases of air travel.
“We believe today’s decision honors both our commitment to safety and consumer’s increasing desire to use their electronic devices during all phases of their flights,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx stated. “These guidelines reflect input from passengers, pilots, manufacturers and flight attendants, and I look forward to seeing airlines implement these much anticipated guidelines in the near future.”
FAA based its decision on the results of an exhaustive yearlong review by the 28-member PED Aviation Rulemaking Committee, composed of pilots, flight attendants, airline executives, mechanics, engineers and electronics makers. “I commend the dedication and excellent work of all the experts who spent the past year working together to give us a solid report so we can now move forward with a safety-based decision on when passengers can use PEDs on airplanes,” FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said.
Fliers have long chafed under rules that require lightweight portable electronics to be turned off for takeoff and landing, largely because the FAA has failed to convince passengers that they pose a threat. Now, it will be up to each airline to prove to the FAA that its fleet can tolerate the radio interference. The sooner they can prove that tablets, e-readers, smartphones and the like are no threat to safety, the sooner you can use your gadgets.
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This week, Cisco hosted the inaugural Internet of Things World Forum in Barcelona, Spain. The event had a little under 800 attendees, which I thought was a great turnout for a first year event. There was a very diverse set of vendors at the event, ranging from traditional IT companies like Cisco, Oracle and SAP to a number of companies that IT people have likely never heard of, such as Grundfos, QnetiQ and AGT International. As diverse as the companies were, though, they all had one thing in common – the belief that when you live in a world where everything is connected, it significantly changes the way we live, learn and play.
I seriously doubt there is any kind of universal “killer application” for the IoT, rather a set of “deadly” applications with killer-ish qualities in certain verticals. The key verticals that I see adopting IoT are city governments, retail, oil and gas, finance, healthcare, gaming and transportation. All of these verticals have processes with significant amounts of human latency, which could be streamlined or even automated. Additionally, there are a number of new ways to do business through the connection of “things” and the analysis of data.
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The images, taken by Nasa’s Suomi-NPP satellite, show large swathes of the country engulfed in a choking smog that reduced visibility to less than 10 metres.
Measurements taken on October 20, 2013, scored the air quality index (AQI) in the city at 500, the highest possible reading. Levels above 300 are considered hazardous to human health.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite acquired a natural-colour image of northeastern China on October 21, 2013.
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Humankind could be about to exchange one kind of energy crisis for another. The switch from the finite store of fossil fuels to renewable sources could involve a huge additional demand for the world’s equally finite store of metals and minerals.
Three French CRNS scientists – Olivier Vidal and Nicholas Arndt of the University of Grenoble and Bruno Goffé of Aix-Marseille University – issue the warning in Nature Geoscience.
They say that to match the power generated by fossil fuels or nuclear power stations, the construction of solar energy farms and wind turbines will gobble up 15 times more concrete, 90 times more aluminium and 50 times more iron, copper and glass. Right now wind and solar energy meet only about 1% of global demand; hydroelectricity meets about 7%.
The trio argue that if the contribution from wind turbines and solar energy to global energy production is to rise from the current 400 terawatt hours to 12,000 Twh in 2035, and 25,000 Twh in 2050, that will require 3,200 million tonnes of steel, 310 million tonnes of aluminium and 40 million tonnes of copper to construct state-of-the-art generating systems.
This in turn would mean an annual increase in global production of these metals of from 5% to 18% for the next 40 years, and that would be in addition to the already accelerating demand for metals of all kinds in both the developed and the developing world.
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For the first time, the European and Asian sides of Istanbul are connected by rail.
The $4.5 billion Marmaray project plunges about 200 feet under the Bosphorus Strait and stretches about 42 miles. But it wasn’t easy. The project took nine years to complete and ran five years over schedule (discovering the ancient Byzantine port of Theodosius was just one of the setbacks).
But officials believe the project was well worth the wait because it provides an important economic link between the two continents. Not only will the project provide a maximum daily capacity of 1.5 million for the estimated 2 million people who make the trip between the two sides of Istanbul daily — reducing the notoriously bad traffic between the two sides by 20 percent — but it will also reconnect important trade routes between the continents. The “Iron Silk Road,” will provide a non-stop trade route connecting China to Western Europe by rail.
But not everyone is optimistic about the new transit system. Critics fear that the project was rushed along too quickly to coincide with the 90th anniversary of the Turkish Republic. The problem? The underwater tunnel sits just 11 miles from a major fault line, as The Atlantic Cities reports. Officials urge skeptics that the system is safe, calling it the “project of the century.” But problems on the train’s first day of service didn’t do anything to ease those fears.
Britain is considering introducing criminal sanctions against energy firms that manipulate the market at the expense of consumers, energy minister Ed Davey said on Thursday.
The announcement follows decisions by four of the six largest suppliers unveiling steep price rises.
Energy policy has shot up the political agenda after the opposition Labour party promised in September to freeze energy prices if it won power in elections in 2015, stirring a debate about squeezed living standards.
Pledging to take a tough line against Britain's big six energy companies, who together control 99 percent of the retail market, Davey said the government was considering ways to punish any firm that abused its dominant market position.
"I intend to consult on the introduction of criminal sanctions for anyone found manipulating energy markets and harming the consumer interest," Davey told parliament.
Such market abuse is currently a civil offence. But if the government made it a criminal one energy executives could be jailed if their company was found guilty of market manipulation.
That would bring it into line with rules governing financial markets, where manipulation is already considered a criminal offence.
Lawmakers have accused the "big six" energy firms of colluding to produce above-inflation price rises which they unveiled just as Britain entered its coldest months.
Bosses from RWE nPower, EDF Energy, Centrica, SSE, E.ON. and Scottish Power, a unit of Spain's Iberdrola, dismissed those claims earlier this week.
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It must get boring and lonely spending your days in a lab, mixing up slightly different plastics, epoxies and composites. Perhaps that's why BASF is making a push to get out in front of the world and show what these materials can really do. Prior to the Concept 1865 plastic bike, the German company updated a 1958 BMW Isetta "bubble car" with some of its materials and coatings. The car, which makes the Smart ForTwo look rather roomy, also gets a unique home entertainment system.
BASF selected the BMW Isetta because the front-hatched microcar from the 50s and 60s is still a head-turner today. It makes the perfect canvas for making auto materials and coatings seem way more interesting than they really are. Nicknamed the MySetta, the 1958 Isetta 250's chassis, body and interior have been refurbished.
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Having revised the auction rules for its long-running sale of 800MHz frequencies in September 2013 with a view to speeding up the process, Finland’s Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) has now announced the winners.
With the auction having concluded yesterday, following nine months of bidding, the MoTC has confirmed that in total the sale will generate EUR108.1 million (USD146 million) for state coffers, with DNA Finland, Elisa and TeliaSonera Finland named as the three companies to walk away with spectrum. With all three operators laying claim to 2×10MHz in the 800MHz band, TeliaSonera will pay the most for its new frequencies, having agreed to shell out EUR22.20 million for ‘Frequency Pair 3’ and EUR18.90 million for ‘Frequency Pair 4’. DNA meanwhile will pay a total of EUR33.57 million for Frequency Pairs ‘1’ and ‘2’ (EUR16.9 million and EUR16.7 million, respectively), and rounding out the winners, Elisa bid EUR16.7 million apiece for ‘Frequency Pair 5’ and ‘Frequency Pair 6’.
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Edward Snowden's leaks show that the NSA and GCHQ have been systematically subverting key technologies that underlie the Internet. That betrayal of trust has prompted some soul-searching by the Net engineering community, which realizes that it needs to come up with more surveillance-resistant approaches. This story from Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) provides information about the kind of thing they are working on in one key group, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It reports on a speech given by the IETF's chair, Jari Arkko, at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Bali, Indonesia.
Firstly, the IETF wants to eventually apply encryption to all web traffic.
"Today, security only gets switched on for certain services like banking," Arkko explained, referring to IETF-developed standards like SSL -- the little lock that appears in the upper left corner of your browser to secure online purchases. "If we work hard, we can make [the entire internet] secure by default." To this end, the IETF might make encryption mandatory for HTTP 2.0, a new version of the basic web protocol.
Secondly, the IETF plans to remove weak algorithms and strengthen existing algorithms behind encryption. This means that the US National Security Agency and other surveillors will find it harder to crack current forms of encryption.
Putting that in context, Axl Pavlik, the managing director of Europe's Internet Registry (RIPE NCC), notes that you can never stop surveillance completely, but you can make it more expensive:
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Former chairman, CEO and founder of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy was recently hosted by the HK General Chamber of Commerce and the HK Jockey Club.
He shared his views with local venture capitalist Andy Lau, on how to fuel technology innovation and the government's next edition of the Digital 21 Strategy -- the technology blueprint for Hong Kong currently undergoing public consultation.
Scott, would you mind to sharing with us about what's been keeping you busy since you sold Sun Microsystems to Larry Ellison and Oracle?
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Over the past few weeks, the new flavor of outrage has been the issue of whether or not the NSA (or the U.S. government in general) is spying on America's allies.
Reports have cropped up about American electronic eavesdropping on current German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Mexican President Filipe Calderon.
Additionally, HuffPo reports that "French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault pronounced himself 'shocked'" when he learned that the U.S. allegedly infiltrated French computers in embassies.
The French outrage goes beyond shock. According to HuffPo, Ayrault stated, "It is unbelievable that an ally country such as the United States is capable to go as far as to spy on private conversations that have no strategic rationale and no impact on the national defense."
Yeah, well.
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AT&T's attempts to move into Europe by acquiring local telecoms could be stymied by the recent leaks of NSA surveillance data, European officials tell The Wall Street Journal. Along with Sprint and Verizon, AT&T is implicated in the Obama administration's widespread data collection: the FISA Amendments Act allows the NSA to request all phone metadata records from the companies. A potential expansion, officials fear, could turn local carriers into data siphons for American intelligence agencies. That means they're likely to heavily scrutinize or outright block any potential deals. "We'd need to have a concrete discussion to make sure that European data wouldn't be leaving Europe," one official tells the Journal.
The stream of leaked documents have revealed tight collaboration between the NSA and other intelligence agencies, as well as routine wiretapping of government leader's phones. Since it was revealed that the US had collected phone data from German chancellor Angela Merkel starting in 2002, tensions between the two countries have been particularly high, with both German parliament members and the generally pro-surveillance Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) calling for an investigation.
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17,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from an eight-inch pipeline owned by Koch Pipeline Company on Tuesday, the Railroad Commission of Texas reportedWednesday.
The spill impacted a rural area and two livestock ponds near Smithville and was discovered on a routine aerial inspection, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Details are scarce regarding the cause of the spill and cleanup measures underway but, as UPI reported, “Koch Pipeline Co. said it notified the appropriate federal and state regulators but had no estimated time for repairs. Neither Koch nor the Texas Railroad Commission had a public statement about the incident.”
According to its website, Koch Pipeline Company, L.P. is an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, Inc., the company controlled by billionaire petrochemical giants Charles and David Koch. Koch Industries has also come under fire recently for dumping petroleum coke, a byproduct of tar sands refining, along riverfronts in both Detroit and Chicago.
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Techdirt has been reporting for a while on India's growing success in providing its population with access to low-cost generic drugs, making use of the permissions to do so granted by TRIPS. That has naturally earned it the ire of Western pharma companies, which now seem to be striking back, as this post on Infojustice.org explains:
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry and its Big Brother Chamber of Commerce have launched an all-out disinformation campaign against the India Patent Act and decisions rendered thereunder. They have enlisted allies in the U.S. government, including Members of Congress, the United States International Trade Commission, Secretary of State Kerry, and even President Obama, to carry their claims to the highest levels of the Indian government. They have threatened to insist that the U.S. file a WTO trade complaints against India in 2014 and that India no longer be permitted to export duty-free products to the U.S. under the Generalized System of Preferences.
As evidence for their campaign, the representatives of Big Pharma have claimed that India is violating US-based global norms for protecting patent rights, that it is adopting new patenting criteria not authorized by international law and allowing generic competition when it is not permissible, and that it is discriminating against U.S. pharmaceutical companies in favor protectionist policies that shield Indian generic companies and steal U.S. jobs.
The rest of the post -- written by Professor Brook K. Baker, whose work has been discussed here on Techdirt several times -- then goes on to explain in detail why those claims are false, and is well-worth reading to understand the legal issues here.
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A leading telecommunications analyst has warned it will be some time before a clear picture emerges of which areas will get fibre under the National Broadband Network (NBN) and which will not. The Government has promised to deliver on existing NBN contracts, but yesterday the NBN Co updated its rollout maps, removing hundreds of thousands of premises that were scheduled to be connected to fibre optic cable.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull says the old maps were misleading because they listed areas as being "under construction" even though they were only at the planning stage.
But Paul Budde from telecommunications research site BuddeComm says the Government has made a political decision to redefine contracts.
"This Government says we only talk about work as commencing if somebody has put a spade in the ground, or is climbing on a pole," he said.
"OK, fine, but that's a political decision that you make.
"People are therefore concerned that by changing the definition that they are becoming victims of that political language, of what's included and what's not included."
The Government says it cannot say which areas will get fibre-to-the-home and which will receive the NBN via other kinds of technology until after the NBN Co completes its 60-day review of the network, due in early December.
But Mr Budde says it will be much longer before the structure of the entire network is laid out.
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4G is no longer a fantasy. More and more mobile devices are capable of tapping ridiculously quick LTE Internet, for downloads, streaming and anything else requiring the need for speed.
But what about desktops, laptops and other non-mobile devices that traditionally depend on a fixed Internet connection? Well, the 4G revolution can help too.
We’ve already looked at ways you can ditch your landline at home but still keep your Internet connection, and one of these ways is to sign-up to a mobile broadband plan. But can a Huawei MiFi dongle ever really replace that generic, white Netgear router that sits underneath your living room table?
We take a look.
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Tesla founder Elon Musk, days after announcing the company would open a store in London, predicted that a version of the electric car would be ready for the roads of England and Ireland by late March.
Speaking with the Irish Prime Minister at a technology gathering in Dublin, Musk added that the key to the early success of the Model S has been overcoming perception that electric cars are go-karts.
“If you say electric car, people don’t have good associations. In order to be successful, we had to have sex appeal, great handling and long range.”
Despite early acclaim for the Model S from Consumer Reports, Musk acknowledged that the number of electric cars on the roads remains tiny and that, even if every new car sold is electric, it would still take 20 years to totally transform the fleet.
Invited to compare the Tesla 5 to Apple’s iPhone, Musk stressed the importance of design.
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Billionaire Larry Ellison -- CEO of Oracle Corporation -- is building a microgrid to power the Hawaiian island he bought last year. EBay has one to run one of its data centers. "Microgrids are emerging as a credible threat to the dominance of America’s 100-year-old-plus utility monopoly," trumpets Bloomberg in a recent article. "Microgrids have the potential to radically change the U.S. electricity paradigm as they proliferate and begin to eat into the utility revenue stream."
From our reports store: "Smart Grid Business 2012 to 2017," published by Memoori, analyzes the smart grid market's size, technologies, finance and needed investments, demand forecasts and more.
Today, only about 30 commercial-scale systems like the one used by EBay exist. That number may climb to 300 in just two years, said Steve Pullins, chief strategic officer for Green Energy Corp., a microgrid builder. And microgrids are expected to turn into a $40 billion-a-year global business by 2020, according to Navigant Research. Bloomberg went so far as to produce an infographic documenting the challenges to the utility business model.
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Using solar power to promote healthcare and education is the concept behind Samsung’s Digital Villages, a project recently launched in South Africa as the kick-off a larger plan that includes units in Ethiopia and Gabon by the end of 2013. The Digital Village is also designed to help local traders develop their business with a sustainable and low-cost alternative to fossil fuels.
One of Digital Villages' components is called Tele-Medical Center to provide healthcare to inhabitants of remote villages who lack access to this type of service. The center covers basic operations such as diagnosis and prescription. As it is connected to a database and a server, patient data can be shared and managed online.
Another section, Health Center, provides more technical health care with eye, ear and dental treatment, blood analysis and diagnosis. Education is also part of the project with the Internet School. Teachers have touchscreens at their disposal, which are powered by the solar panels installed on the roof. Students have access to solar-powered netbooks for their multimedia classes.
Samsung is not working alone on this initiative, having forged several partnerships to carry out the project. It has drafted in support from government, civil organizations, local health authorities, universities, relief NGO World Vision (healthcare) and UNESCO (education).
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A corridor of Tesla Supercharger DC fast-charging stations along Interstate 5 and U.S. Highway 101 is complete, allowing owners of the company’s luxury all-electric sedan to drive from San Diego, Calif. to Vancouver, Canada for free.
More than 99 percent of Californians and 87 percent of Oregon and Washington owners now live within 200 miles of a supercharger.
Tesla’s 120 kilowatt superchargers, which only work with the Tesla Model S, provide half a charge in about 20 minutes. The chargers work by delivering direct current power to the battery using special cables that bypass onboard charging equipment. And using them is free for all Tesla Model S owners.
To commemorate the completed West Coast Supercharger Corridor, two Model S sedans left San Diego for a 1,750-mile #DriveFree road trip to Vancouver.
There are 31 stations in North America with plans to expand to most metropolitan areas this fall. By winter 2013, enough Tesla superchargers will be installed to enable coast-to-coast U.S. travel. Tesla plans to to have superchargers within reach of 80 percent of the U.S. population and parts of Canada by 2014 (see graphic below).
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According to new data from TeleGeography’s Global Bandwidth Forecast Service, Africa is expected to lead the world in international bandwidth demand growth in the coming years. Africa’s international bandwidth demand is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 51% between 2012 and 2019. At this rate, African demand would outpace that of both Latin America and the Middle East, which are each projected to rise 37% annually.
Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, especially, will contribute to the continent’s appetite for international bandwidth. Among those with the fastest growing demand are Angola, which is projected to grow 71% annually over the next seven years, Tanzania, which is projected to grow 68%, and Gabon, which is expected to rise 67%.
While Africa’s demand for international bandwidth is growing rapidly, it remains very small by comparison with other world regions. African demand is projected to reach 17.2Tbps in 2019, which equates to only one-fourth the projected demand of Latin America, and less than that of Canada alone.
Nevertheless, international capacity connected to Africa will increase tremendously via upgrades to existing submarine cable systems and new cable builds, and bandwidth prices on these routes will fall accordingly.
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The widespread surveillance of Spanish citizens by the US National Security Agency, which caused outrage when it was reported this week, was the product of a collaboration with Spain's intelligence services, according to one Spanish newspaper.
In the latest revelations to emerge from the documents leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Spanish agents not only knew about the work of the NSA but also facilitated it, El Mundo reports.
An NSA document entitled "Sharing computer network operations cryptologic information with foreign partners" reportedly shows how the US relies on the collaboration of many countries to give it access to intelligence information, including electronic metadata.
According to the document seen by El Mundo, the US classifies cooperation with various countries on four different levels. In the first group – "Comprehensive Cooperation" – are the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The second group – "Focused Cooperation" – of which Spain is a member, includes 19 countries, all of them European, apart from Japan and South Korea. The third group – "Limited cooperation" – consists of countries such as France, Israel, India and Pakistan; while the fourth – "Exceptional Cooperation" – is made up of countries that the US considers to be hostile to its interests.
The reports come a day after the director of the NSA, General Keith B Alexander, testified before the US house intelligence committee that suggestions the agency monitored millions of calls in Spain, France and Italy were "completely false" and that this data had been at least partially collected by the intelligence services of those countries and then passed on to the NSA.
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In early September 2013, the UK’s top cable company, Virgin Media, announced that it had signed a distribution agreement with Netflix, the globe’s leading subscription VoD (video on demand) service.
The deal aimed at TiVo owners marks a turning point, both for Virgin Media which is opening the doors to a pay-TV competitor, and for Netflix which is entering into a guaranteed bitrate rather than over-the-top distribution . Up until then, only Google Fiber in the US had penned a similar deal. Sweden’s Com Hem too recently announced a similar partnership with Netflix to coincide with the its own TiVo rollout.
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Last week we wrote about the rising threat of corporate sovereignty, known more obscurely as "investor-state dispute settlement", that allows companies to sue countries for alleged loss of future profits. Just how grave that threat is for developing nations can be gauged by the following, reported by Tico Times:
Canadian gold-mining company Infinito Gold Ltd. announced its intentions to go forward with a $1 billion lawsuit against Costa Rica over the retracted Las Crucitas open-pit gold mining concession in northern Costa Rica, in a statement released on Friday.
The contract was withdrawn for largely environmental reasons:
"Costa Rica and the Canadian mining company have been ensnarled in a protracted legal battle over the canceled Las Crucitas project in Cutris de San Carlos, Alajuela, since environmentalists and locals decried the loss of virgin forest and health concerns over leeching chemicals contaminating drinking water."
Initially, the company fought the decision using local courts, but when it lost there, it made use of corporate sovereignty to take its complaint to a supra-national tribunal, the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID):
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Al Gore has been everywhere lately. Just last week he presided over his "24 Hours of Reality" project which was seen by millions globally! And without even taking a nap the very next day he gave a talk at Making Progress, where he was fired up, more so than many had ever seen him.
He touched on many subjects:
"He spoke about how income inequality threatened the American Dream, subprime mortgage systems helped start the Great Recession, and how the world is still dealing with the credit crisis as a fallout."
But unsurprisingly, he reserved his passion for his signature issue; the environment:
“Now we have, on the books of the large, public multinational energy companies, $7 trillion of subprime carbon assets,” he said. “Their valuation is based on an assumption that is even more ridiculous and absurd than the assumption that these people that couldn’t make a downpayment or monthly payments were good risks for home mortgages. The assumption is that those $7 trillion can be sold and burned.”
“They will not be sold and burned. They cannot be sold and burned.”
Gore went on to describe how humans are putting 90 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day, “as if it is an open sewer.” That pollution traps the same amount of heat as the energy from “400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs going off every 24 hours.”
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