 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Azerbaijan, a former Soviet Republic in the Caucuses, is getting fiber to the home service and a nationwide speed guarantee of 10-100Mbps for all 9.3 million Azeris, no matter where they live in the country.
Most large cities will be scheduled for fiber to the home service, as part of successive annual budgets planned for telecommunications upgrades. The government has spent $182 million on telecom services so far this year, according to the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technologies.
From January to September, 673.3 kilometers of fiber optic cables were laid, primarily by Aztelekom, the country’s largest telecom provider. Much of the initial spending is for upgrades to the Azerbaijani telephone system, a combination or wired and wireless services.
The ministry plans to provide all areas of Azerbaijan with fiber speed Internet access by 2017. At present, 70 percent of Azerbaijan’s population uses the Internet and 50 percent have the service at home.
Officials claim the goal of the fiber project is to deliver blanket broadband coverage to the entire country, with speeds at least 100Mbps by 2017.
Click headline to read more--
Joining forces with engineering firm Deka R&D, Coca-Cola has launched a project which will see the transformation of approximately 2,000 shipping containers into water purifying stations. Dubbed Ekocenter, the shipping container module has been designed to provide isolated and developing communities with facilities to produce safe drinking water, as well as access to wireless internet technology and solar powered charging.
The first Ekocenter prototype is currently being tested in Heidelberg, South Africa. It consists of a bright red 20 ft (6 m) long shipping container covered with solar panels. The facility comes equipped with a Slingshot water purification device which uses vapor compression distillation to produce clean drinking water.
The Slingshot, which was invented by Deka R&D President Dean Kamen (the same guy who came up with the Segway), was originally designed to be powered by cow dung and can turn almost any source of dirty water (including river water and sea water) into clean drinking water.
"Each machine delivers approximately 850 liters (225 gallons) of safe drinking water per day using less electricity than a hair dryer (1 kWh)," says Coca-Cola.
Click headline to read more--
Italian architects LEAPfactory recently constructed a new energy-efficient hotel on the southern glacier of Mount Elbrus, in Russia's Caucasus mountain range. Generally considered the highest peak in Europe, Mount Elbrus has a summit of 5,642 m (18,510 ft). The hotel in question is located 3,912 m (12,834 ft) above sea level, hence its name: LEAPrus 3912.
The hotel has a total area of 139 sq m (1,500 sq ft), and comprises four prefabricated modules, which were constructed in Italy before being shipped over to Russia and deposited on the mountainside by helicopter. The modules were then assembled and made operational over a few days in July. They boast 46 beds, a living area, restaurant area with kitchen, toilets, reception, and staff accommodation. The hotel has an expected lifespan of 50 years.
Given the remote location, and the expense and technical difficulty of receiving supplies, it makes good sense to ensure that LEAPrus 3912 is as energy-efficient as possible, and LEAPfactory did indeed install a range of technology to bring this about.
Click headline to read more and view pix--
Every five years, the United States National Intelligence Council, which advises the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, publishes a report forecasting the long-term implications of global trends. Earlier this year it released its latest report, “Alternative Worlds,” which included scenarios for how the world would look a generation from now.
One scenario, “Nonstate World,” imagined a planet in which urbanization, technology and capital accumulation had brought about a landscape where governments had given up on real reforms and had subcontracted many responsibilities to outside parties, which then set up enclaves operating under their own laws.
The imagined date for the report’s scenarios is 2030, but at least for “Nonstate World,” it might as well be 2010: though most of us might not realize it, “nonstate world” describes much of how global society already operates. This isn’t to say that states have disappeared, or will. But they are becoming just one form of governance among many.
A quick scan across the world reveals that where growth and innovation have been most successful, a hybrid public-private, domestic-foreign nexus lies beneath the miracle. These aren’t states; they’re “para-states” — or, in one common parlance, “special economic zones.”
Across Africa, the Middle East and Asia, hundreds of such zones have sprung up in recent decades. In 1980, Shenzhen became China’s first; now they blanket China, which has become the world’s second largest economy.
The Arab world has more than 300 of them, though more than half are concentrated in one city: Dubai. Beginning with Jebel Ali Free Zone, which is today one of the world’s largest and most efficient ports, and now encompasses finance, media, education, health care and logistics, Dubai is as much a dense set of internationally regulated commercial hubs as it is the most populous emirate of a sovereign Arab federation.
This complex layering of territorial, legal and commercial authority goes hand in hand with the second great political trend of the age: devolution.
In the face of rapid urbanization, every city, state or province wants to call its own shots. And they can, as nations depend on their largest cities more than the reverse.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City is fond of saying, “I don’t listen to Washington much.” But it’s clear that Washington listens to him. The same is true for mayors elsewhere in the world, which is why at least eight former mayors are now heads of state.
Click headline to read more--
Former monopoly fixed line operator Eircom has launched a new fibre-based television service in direct competition to Sky and UPC Ireland. Based on a quad-play offer of broadband access, TV and mobile and voice telephony, the telco’s new ‘eVision’ offer has gone live to some 450,000 households within its current operational footprint.
Available in two basic flavours – a 34 channel and 54 channel bouquet – eVision users can take advantage of incremental bolt-on channels of premium content from the likes of Sky (e.g. Sky Sports and Sky Movies).
Eircom is offering existing ‘eFibre’ broadband subscribers the chance to take eVision for an additional EUR10 (USD13.5) per month on their current bill, which includes a free set-top box capable of pausing live TV and recording up to 240 hours of programmes.
New users will need to sign up to an Eircom landline to start taking the service, with the firm saying it hopes to expand its FTTx coverage to 1.2 million homes across the country by 2015.
EE, the UK’s largest cellco by subscribers and the first of the four major mobile network operators to introduce commercial 4G services, has warned it may limit investment in its LTE infrastructure if the government sees through plans to increase the cost of spectrum, according to the Financial Times.
As previously reported by CommsUpdate, last week telecoms regulator Ofcom published a consultation regarding a proposed revision to the annual licence fees for the 900MHz and 1800MHz spectrum bands. As per the proposals EE faces having its annual spectrum fee more than quadruple from GBP24.9 million (USD39.8 million) to GBP107.1 million.
Click headline to read more--
Liberty Global has made an offer to acquire the remaining interest in Dutch cable operator Ziggo it doesn’t already own, its latest attempt to consolidate the European cable business.
Ziggo, which has about 3.1million customers in the Netherlands said it had received an unsolicited bid from Liberty Global, but found the offer to be “inadequate.” The company added it did not know if another offer would be forthcoming from the cable giant.
Liberty Global is the largest cable operator in Europe with about 20 million subscribers in 13 countries. It agreed to a $16 billion acquisition of U.K. cable operator Virgin Media in February, but since then has fallen short in other attempts to consolidate the business. Liberty Global had bid on German cable giant Kabel Deutschland earlier this year, but was bested by a higher bid from wireless giant Vodafone.
Click headline to read more--
John Malone’s Liberty Global made a big push into the U.K. TV market last week with its $16 billion deal to purchase Virgin Media, a move that could once again pit the media mogul against his former rival, Rupert Murdoch.
Liberty Global agreed to acquire Virgin Media, the largest cable operator in the U.K. with about 4.9 million customers, in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $16 billion. As part of the agreement
Virgin Media shareholders will receive $17.50 in cash, 0.26 shares of Liberty Global Series A and 0.2 shares of its Series C stock for every share of Virgin they own. The deal values Virgin at about $47.87 per share, a 24% premium to their closing price on Feb. 4. Including debt, the total cost of the deal is about $23 billion.
Virgin shares rose 18% ($6.92 each) to $45.61 on Feb. 5. The stock continued to climb in subsequent trading, closing at $46.04 on Feb. 7. Liberty Global shares fell 2% ($1.58) to $67.88 on Feb. 5, but gained ground in later trading, closing at $68.07 on Feb. 7.
The deal will give Liberty Global, the largest cable operator in Europe with 19.6 million customers in 13 countries, a foothold in the U.K., a market it has avoided in the past. The transaction also could renew an old rivalry between Malone and News Corp. chairman Murdoch, who owns a 39% interest in the dominant pay TV provider in the U.K., satellite firm British Sky Broadcasting.
Malone and Murdoch have clashed in the past, most recently in 2004, when Malone’s Liberty Media began buying News Corp. voting stock, eventually amassing a 19% voting stake in the media giant, second only to the Murdoch family. The two called a truce in 2006, with Liberty agreeing to exchange its News Corp. interests for control of DirecTV. DirecTV, the No. 1 U.S. satellite-TV provider, was spun off to Liberty shareholders in 2009.
Click headline to read more--
Despite government efforts to reduce carbon emissions, coal is set to overtake oil as the world's main source of energy by 2020, with potentially devastating effects in the environment, energy consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie said Monday.
According to William Durbin, president of global markets at Wood Mackenzie, China and India are turning to coal since it is cheaper and more reliable than oil or renewable energy sources. In the US, Europe and the rest of Asia coal demand is expected to hold steady.
China's dependence on coal is well known. Annual consumption exceeded 1 billion short tons per year in 1988 and has exploded since then, to an estimated 4 billion tons this year. This means the Asian giant gets about 70% of its energy from the fossil fuel, a number the government hopes to reduce to 65% by 2017.
However, the consultancy doesn’t seem to agree. Speaking at the World Energy Congress, Durbin said China alone would drive two-thirds of the forecast growth in coal demand. Half of the power plants expected to built between now and the end of the decade will be coal-fired.
According to the latest report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal will be the main winner in Southeast Asia’s energy mix. This, says the IEA, will contribute to a doubling of the region’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions to 2.3 gigatonnes by 2035.
Click headline to read more--
Following the path taken by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers in 2011, CableLabs has deployed a hydrogen fuel cell platform from CommScope that will provide the cable R&D cable organization with up to 16 hours of backup power.
CableLabs is using the system to provide backup power for its headend and cable modem termination system installed at its headquarters in Louisville, Colo. The SCTE deployed its fuel cell (pictured) above at its Exton, Pa., headquarters.
Billed as a platform that’s more environmentally-friendly than diesel generators, CommScope’s system, which is being pitched to cable operators and other service providers, uses hydrogen-powered fuel cells that are tailored to pump backup power to network sites and hubs.
"By incorporating fuel cell technology into our infrastructure, CommScope is helping CableLabs take a leadership role in demonstrating how cable operators can continue to provide business and enterprise class services in an environmentally friendly manner," Chris Lammers, executive vice president and chief operating officer at CableLabs, said in a statement.
Click headline to read more--
3D printing is fast moving into the big leagues as it becomes less of a way to print plastic key fobs and more of a tool for the likes of aerospace giants. Earlier this month the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company showcased it next-generation, digitally integrated design and manufacturing process with a tour of its Louisiana facility for community leaders from Jefferson County.
During the tour on October 4, Lockheed Martin's Vice President of Production, Dennis Little, introduced the company’s next-generation digital manufacturing technologies called Digital Tapestry. This is a Model Based Engineering (MBE) tool that Integrates design and manufacturing into a single process. It goes beyond CAD design by providing a digital virtual environment called the Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory (CHIL), where designers can manipulate parts or even entire machines to see how they go together and operate. As they do so, the system produces a constant stream of automatically updated specifications.
When the design moves onto the factory floor, it’s a seamless transition because Lockheed is moving away from tasks, such as manually cutting fabric for satellite blankets or bending and inspecting fuel lines, in favor of automated fabrication and testing that works off of the digital model. To support this approach, the company is also employing standard satellite bus designs and standardizing parts, so they can be ordered in bulk from vendors.
Click headline to read more, view pix and watch video--
The reported participation of technology companies in the U.S. National Security Agency's surveillance programs has prompted digital rights watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation to resign from the Global Network Initiative, a multistakeholder group whose members include Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook and whose stated mission is to advance privacy and freedom of expression online.
The GNI was founded in 2008 specifically to develop an approach for dealing with increased government pressure on information and communication technology companies to comply with domestic laws in ways that may conflict with international standards on freedom of expression and privacy. Its members include human rights and press freedom groups, academics, investors, online services providers and other technology vendors.
"While much has been accomplished in these five years, EFF can no longer sign its name on joint statements knowing now that GNI's corporate members have been blocked from sharing crucial information about how the US government has meddled with these companies' security practices through programs such as PRISM and BULLRUN," the EFF said Thursday in a blog post.
According to media reports based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the U.S. government uses these programs to collect user electronic communications from online services providers including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook and collaborates with or forces companies to decrypt secure communications.
The government's requests for information or cooperation are most of the time accompanied by gag orders that prevent companies from even acknowledging those requests.
In September, the GNI asked 21 governments that are part of the Freedom Online Coalition, including the U.S. and U.K. governments, to report on the electronic communications surveillance requests their law enforcement and national security agencies make and to legally allow companies to inform the public about these requests.
Click headline to read more--
Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed, disclosed in a recent letter to investors that its traffic tripled over the past year, hitting 85 million visitors in August. Soon—thanks to our collective inability to resist such sugary listicles as "36 Things You Never Realized Everyone Else Does Too"—Mr. Peretti says, BuzzFeed will be one of the largest sites on the Web.
Until recently, though, BuzzFeed's towering traffic ambitions were held in check by a simple fact of global demographics. Everything BuzzFeed publishes is in English—and at the rate it's growing, BuzzFeed may be running out of new English speakers to colonize.
Mr. Peretti has long believed that BuzzFeed's appeal is universal, that people in Paris and Mexico City would be just as engrossed by "32 Cats Who Were Way Too Curious For Their Own Good" as are folks in New York and San Francisco. But going international presented logistical challenges. How do you translate dozens of BuzzFeed posts, many of them lousy with English idioms, into several languages every day, within a few hours of each story's publication?
Now BuzzFeed has found a method to do so—a system that's simultaneously brilliant, brazen, and more than a little nutty.
The site this month will launch versions in French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. These international sites will be populated with BuzzFeed posts that originally appeared in English, but BuzzFeed won't be using professional translators to create them. Instead, BuzzFeed's posts will be translated by crowds of foreign-language speakers who are learning English using an app called Duolingo. In theory, as part of their coursework, these hordes will translate a BuzzFeed post in a matter of hours—at a quality that rivals that of professional translators, but at the speed, scale and price that you'd get from a machine.
If it works—and BuzzFeed's tests say it does—the effort could prove the utility of something known as human computation, a theory that argues that instead of rivaling one another, machines and humans can get more done by banding together.
Click headline to read more--
|
Smart energy company Energy Aware, based in Vancouver, Canada, has developed a new product called Neurio that is designed to help people better control their domestic energy usage by monitoring home appliances. The product also allows users to be reminded of domestic tasks involving appliances. In cases of smart appliances, Neurio can detect behavior patterns and program appliances to meet specific requirements.
To be at the hub of all electricity consumption in the house, the Wi-Fi-enabled Neurio sensor is installed in the breaker panel and sends data to a cloud service that analyzes it with smart pattern detection algorithms. The package includes an app called Wattson (iOS and Android), which reports power usage in real-time and can notify users when they forget to turn something off and tell them how much energy their appliances are using. Since Neurio uses Wi-Fi to send all the data to a cloud server, it can be accessed anywhere.
Although its remote electricity consumption monitoring capabilities are similar to other products such as MeterPlug, Neurio does not require the installation of sensors on every individual device around the home.
Neurio can detect the biggest energy guzzlers in a home and estimate how much of the total consumed they account for. Energy Aware claims that beta users have cut up to 44 percent off their energy bills by using the device to identify what appliances they should turn off or unplug.
Click headline to read more--
What weighs 5 tons and has less computing power than your watch? A pioneering piece of computing history call "Flossie," the last operating ICT 1301 mainframe. The National Museum of Computing recently took delivery of the dismantled computer, which needed three moving vans to bring it to the museum’s storage facility in Milton Keynes, UK.
We’re so used to thinking of computers as being so small that a perfectly practical one can fit in your trouser pocket that its easy to believe that preserving historic computers is largely a matter of finding enough shoe boxes and cupboards to put them in. However, many of the early pioneer machines weigh tons and some are so large that they’re less devices than works of architecture.
This is the problem with the ICT 1301. It has a footprint of 700 sq ft (65 sq m), weighs 5.5 tons (5 tonnes), and has a solid steel chassis strong enough to stand on without hurting it – and, believe it or not, one of its big selling points when first made was that it was small.
Click headline to read more and view pix--
Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff’s recent indictment of the United States’ cyberspying practices has profound global repercussions for the U.S vision of a borderless, open Internet. What makes this backlash especially potent and lamentable is that it is being fueled not by democracies that oppose American ideals, but rather by allies that resent Washington’s betrayal of its own overarchingly positive vision.
Rouseff’s offensive to change Internet governance follows reports that the National Security Agency’s watchful eye could see as far as her Palácio do Planalto in Brasília. According to leaked documents, the United States has been surveilling Rousseff’s email, intercepting internal government communications, and spying on the country’s national oil company. After canceling an official visit to meet with President Obama in Washington, Rousseff took to the podium at the U.N.’s General Assembly to call on other countries to disconnect from U.S. Internet hegemony and develop their own sovereign Internet and governance structures.
Rousseff’s move could lead to a powerful chorus—one that would transform the Internet of the future from a global commons to a fractured patchwork severely limited by the political boundaries on a map. Brazil is one of a handful of countries—including Indonesia, Turkey, and India—that have wavered in the debate over whether to develop an international framework to govern the Internet, one that would replace the role that the United States has played as chief Internet steward.
Traditionally, that debate has featured America in the role as champion of a free and open Internet, one that guarantees the right of all people to freely express themselves. Arguing against that ideal: repressive regimes that have sought to limit connectivity and access to information.
The NSA’s actions have shifted that debate, alienating key Internet-freedom allies and emboldening some of the most repressive regimes on the planet. Think of it as an emerging coalition between countries that object to how the United States is going about upholding its avowed principles for a free Internet, and countries that have objected to those avowed principles all along.
Click headline to read more--
All around Europe rightsholders have been working hard to have Internet providers block torrent and other file-sharing platforms. Courts in the UK, Netherlands, Ireland and Denmark have ordered blockades, but Italy raises its head more regularly than most with additional censorship orders.
In a fresh batch of court orders dated today, Italian ISPs have been ordered to block several of the world’s leading torrent sites. The orders were granted by the prosecutor from Bergamo who ordered the original blocking of The Pirate Bay back in 2008. Music industry group FIMI say that they were responsible for the complaints.
“I can confirm that FIMI referred these sites to the criminal prosecutor. We are very happy about the outcome,” FIMI chief Enzo Mazzo told TorrentFreak.
The first blocking order is against ExtraTorrent, an indexing site ranked 5th in the world during the early part of 2013.
The site suffered a setback earlier this week when police in the UK asked its registrar to suspend its .com domain. However, it now appears that ExtraTorrent managed to transfer the domain away from PDR Ltd to a new company and has since regained control.
The Italian block against the site specifically mentions ExtraTorrent.com (the site has since moved to .CC) but also details the site’s IP address.
Click headline to read more--
Bouygues Telecom, France’s third-largest cellular operator by subscribers, has announced that it plans to conduct a Long Term Evolution (LTE) trial in 800MHz band in several municipalities in mountain areas in early 2014, in close collaboration with the Mission France Very High Speed programme.
The pilot network will be launched during the first quarter of 2014 for a period of several months and will be free of charge for all participants.
Asia has more international internet capacity connected to the US and Canada than to any other region. However, new data from TeleGeography’s Global Internet Geography research reveal that this proportion is falling steadily as carriers in the region become less dependent on the U.S. for connectivity.
In 2013, nearly 40% of Asia’s 19.9Tbps of international Internet bandwidth was connected to the US and Canada, down from 48% in 2009. Similarly, while trans-Pacific capacity increased 32% in 2013, this was surpassed by both intra-Asian capacity growth of 44%, and capacity growth on routes between Asia and Europe of 42%.
‘One key reason for the declining share of Asian capacity accounted for by the trans-Pacific route is the sourcing of content closer to Asia,’ said TeleGeography analyst Cody Williams. ‘As many carriers in the region seek to reduce reliance on US-hosted content, Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo have been established as regional hubs for exchanging traffic and hosting content, as opposed to a waypoint that carriers must pass to get content from the US.’
The decline in the share of Asian international Internet bandwidth connected to the US and Canada has been largely picked up by Europe. As transport prices on the Europe-Asia route have declined due to the introduction of multiple new submarine cables, the share of Asian internet bandwidth connected to Europe has increased from 21% in 2009, to 28% in 2013.
Click headline to read more--
The reorganization of Alcatel-Lucent, dubbed “The Shift Plan,” includes a heavier emphasis on cable, and the Paris-based vendor on Wednesday revealed a key piece of its product strategy alongside word of a win with a major U.S. cable operator.
As expected, Alcatel-Lucent launched a line of EPON gear tailored for cable that bakes in DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON (DPoE), a CableLabs interoperability spec that enables the equipment to speak the provisioning and backoffice language of DOCSIS. This essentially allows cable operators to deploy high-capacity, fiber-based EPON to serve business customers, while preserving the DOCSIS backend systems already used for high-speed Internet and voice services that run on an MSO’s hybrid fiber/coax plant.
“From a network management and provisioning perspective, an EPON customer will be indistinguishable from a DOCSIS customer” when DPoE is employed, explained Jay Fausch, senior direct of Americas customer marketing for Alcatel-Lucent. “EPON is about providing them [cable operators] with a vehicle to move up market.”
Stefaan Vanhastel, marketing director for fixed networks at Alcatel-Lucent, said the company has already inked EPON deals with two major North American cable operators. Bright House Networks, a cable operator that is already deploying EPON extensively in support of its business services strategy, was identified as one, while the other remains unnamed.
Click headline to read more--
The NBN could be a transformational tool for teaching, according to educators who spoke at the Connected Australia conference this week.
After connecting to the NBN in the McLaren Vale, South Australia, Willunga High School improved student attendance and engagement in learning, according to the school’s principal Janelle Reimann.
The NBN was a “catalyst in changing our teaching and learning practice,” she said.
“I cannot stress to you how powerful this has been in transforming our learning … Our students are now being able to produce work that is of a higher level than they had ever done before.”
Fast broadband and the NBN are also critical to the success of massive online open courses (MOOCs), which increasingly will rely on real-time video, said Remy Low, academic advisor for the Mount Druitt University Hub project.
MOOCs can potentially provide students with a near limitless range of courses and offer professionals an effective method to undertake continuing education and broaden their skill set, Low said. They also potential provide big institutions a means to provide job training and scout for fresh talent, he said.
However, problems with video streaming can be a deal breaker for students trying to take classes through a MOOC, said Low.
“If something is going to be buffering every two minutes ... you have the potential of losing a student every two minutes.”
Low estimated that 6 to 8 Mbps upload and download speeds are required to provide a “seamless” experience for students. Those speeds are well within the targets announced separately by Labor and the Coalition in their respective NBN plans.
Click headline to read more--
At least 17 people have been killed after a powerful typhoon lashed Japan's eastern coast.
An island south of Tokyo, Izu Oshima, was worst hit by Typhoon Wipha, suffering landslides and flooding.
Many people died when houses collapsed or were buried in mudslides. At least 50 people remain unaccounted for.
Work to protect the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant was carried out but the operators say it appears to have escaped the worst of the storm.
In Tokyo, flights were cancelled, bullet train services suspended and schools closed.
Click headline to read more and watch video news clip--
Anyone will tell you that if you really want great internet speeds, you have to hardwire in. But German researchers have shattered the world record for fastest wireless speeds, according to Nature, which opens the up potential to bring speedy connections to rural areas.
A team of researchers from Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (IAF) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) successfully completed a 100Gbps data transmission over a wireless radio network in the ultra-high frequency 237.5 GHz spectrum. The speed was clocked under laboratory-perfect circumstances that harnessed the latest optical transmission technologies over just 20 meters (66 feet), but researchers — part of the Millilink Project that has worked to speed connections over large swaths of land — say that they’ve clocked outdoor tests that push speeds to 40Gbps over 1km (0.6 miles) of distance.
The wireless signals were generated by a photon mixer, which creates two separate optical laser signals that are then imposed on a photodiode. Acting like super-charged microwave links, the setup is thus far not ideal for individual homes as 237.5 GHz wireless can have trouble penetrating walls. But it does have possibilities for extending the reach of fiber optics networks into rural or outdoor areas, and it certainly serves as an important foundation to continue making strides in wireless speed.
The researchers at the Millilink Project have certainly make significant breakthroughs in the wireless connection world, only passing 40Gbps in May of this year. This could mean that the group is on the precipice of pushing even more exciting connection speeds. The next goal? 1Tpbs.
The US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is a biennial competition that challenges college teams to build affordable, energy-efficient and aesthetically pleasing solar-powered houses. Team Austria (Vienna University of Technology) has just been announced the overall winner of 2013 event at Orange County Great Park in California, after the closest competition in its history. Second place went to University of Nevada Las Vegas and DesertSol, with the Czech Technical University achieving third place overall.
This year marks the first time that all of the entries tied for a win in the Energy category, as every house was successful in producing more energy than it consumes.
The Austrian team also shared a joint third-place award for the Engineering category. The team's LISI (Living Inspired by Sustainable Innovation) house is a tribute to the forested regions of Austria, but also showed its relevance to the temperate Solar Decathlon site as a model for open space and outdoor living with generous deck space and a fully opening living area.
Click headline to read more and view pix--
The director of the U.S. National Security Agency wants you to trust his people.
The NSA needs to regain the trust of U.S. residents and the country's telecom and Internet companies, General Keith Alexander said Wednesday, following recent media leaks about massive data collection and surveillance operations.
In addition to its surveillance role, the NSA also has responsibility to protect the U.S. against cyberattacks, and the agency needs cooperation and trust to accomplish its cybersecurity mission, Alexander said in a speech at the Telecommunications Industry Association's annual conference.
The media reports, based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, has hurt a foundation of trust between the NSA and U.S. businesses, the NSA's director said. Alexander defended the data collection and surveillance programs as necessary to protect the U.S. against terrorism.
Many of the media reports on NSA surveillance have been inaccurate, Alexander said. "People do not understand what's going on," he said. "The facts are not known."
In a recent conversation with a U.S. CEO, the executive had the impression that the NSA was conducting surveillance that would be illegal and "we'd probably be in jail," Alexander said. But that's not the case, he said, describing the NSA's collection of U.S. phone records as a "limited" program, with the phone records database queried less than 300 times last year.
The debate surrounding the NSA surveillance programs is holding up a needed discussion about new cybersecurity legislation, Alexander told the crowd.
While the NSA is monitoring telecom and Internet communications using court orders, it also wants companies to share more complete cyberthreat information. Private companies worried about privacy lawsuits want new congressional protections before sharing that information.
However, questions about the NSA surveillance programs have distracted from that debate, Alexander said.
"Cyber is where we need allies and partners around the world," Alexander said. "In order to get there, we need to change the rhetoric on media leaks, and fix the trust factor. We're not going to move much forward with all that hanging out there."
Click headline to read more--
|
