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When it comes to innovation, copyright debates tend to be one-sided. Consider the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. SOPA and PIPA. Congressional hearings. The Department of Commerce “green paper.” To various degrees, each reveals a copyright setting in which innovation is neglected or, at a minimum, insufficiently appreciated.
Why, for example, have copyright debates focused on piracy, theft, and rogue websites? Why is there an obsession with large copyright owners’ business models? Why are the benefits of peer-to-peer (p2p) technology and cloud computing underappreciated? Why are we not more troubled that technologies suffer early deaths because of overaggressive copyright law and enforcement? The reason is simple. I call it the “innovation asymmetry.”
I define the innovation asymmetry as an overemphasis on a technology’s infringing uses and insufficient appreciation of its noninfringing uses. Why is there such an asymmetry? Because infringing uses are immediately apparent, quantifiable, and advanced by motivated, well-financed copyright holders. Noninfringing uses, in contrast, are less tangible and less apparent at the onset of a technology.
The costs of infringing uses can be quantified. They roll off copyright owners’ tongues: $250 billion in losses to the U.S. economy each year from IP infringement. 750,000 jobs lost annually from infringement. It doesn’t matter if the figures are correct. For even if they are completely disproved, the mere articulation of numbers promises a precision that is difficult to dislodge from the audience’s consciousness.
The costs also are vivid in threatening copyright owners’ business models. This is clear from their panic upon the introduction of numerous technologies—from John Philip Sousa’s concern with the player piano to Jack Valenti’s famous tirade against the VCR. And the tasks needed to demonstrate harms from infringement can easily be undertaken by the large content holders.
In contrast, noninfringing uses are less tangible, less obvious at the onset of a technology, and not advanced by an army of motivated advocates. First, they are less tangible. Noninfringing uses are difficult to quantify. How do we put a dollar figure on the benefits of enhanced communication and interaction? Estimates of future noninfringing uses will be less powerful than the actual, hard-dollar figures presented by copyright owners.
Second, they are more fully developed over time. When a new technology is introduced, no one, including the inventor, knows all of the beneficial uses to which it will eventually be put. The path of history is replete with inventions for which nobody foresaw the eventual popular and revolutionary use:
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A rare winter storm struck the Middle East last week – beginning around Tuesday, December 10 and lasting into the weekend – producing heavy snow in areas that typically never see the white stuff. Jerusalem recorded an impressive 15-20 inches of snow, according to The Telegraph, with roads still blocked on Saturday, December 14.
It was the most snow ever recorded in that region in the month of December for at least 60 years. Behind the surge of wintry precipitation, cold temperatures were widespread across the Middle East last week. Snow and cold temperatures created difficult conditions particularly across Syria, where refugees had to embrace the extreme conditions outside.
The storm affected parts of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Northern Syria, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, while bringing torrential rains and serious flooding to low-lying areas. Where cold air wasn’t present, heavy rains resulted in flooding across the dry river beds around the Dead Sea. Meanwhile, Cairo had a once-in-a-lifetime snowfall, the first recorded snow to fall in that city in over 100 years.
Click headline to read more, view pix and watch video news clip--
Last week we wrote about how Norway had come up with a way to provide online access to all books in Norwegian, including the most recent ones, available to anyone in the country. Here, by contrast, is how not to do it, courtesy of publishers in the UK:
The UK is preparing to launch its official internet archive without internet access, after the publishing industry put restrictions on its release.
The archive was held up by a decade of negotiations between publishers and the British Library, meaning that regulations permitting the library to perform its first archive copy of every UK website were not passed until April this year, more than 20 years since the World Wide Web took off and 10 years since Parliament passed a law making it possible.
In my post about the Norwegian system, I joked about what form a typical copyright maximalist approach to providing online access to a nation's heritage might take:
"available in a specially constructed room deep in the basement of the National Library on a (small) screen, and with guards stationed either side of it to ensure that no unauthorized copies were made."
Little did I suspect that reality was way ahead of me, as the story in Computer Weekly quoted above explains:
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The view from the roof of the seven-story, mesh- and LED-covered Hypercube building is one of modern-day Russia, where just 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the household wealth. Immediately to the south is a golf course built by President Vladimir Putin's “favorite oligarch,” Roman Abramovich (net worth $10.2 billion), who reportedly owns a residence in the neighboring village along with Suleiman Kerimov (net worth $7.1 billion) and Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov (net worth $13 billion). The Hypercube is the first building of the Skolkovo “innovation city” at the edge of Moscow. While the Kremlin-connected billionaires next door all made fortunes off Russia's natural resources, the implicit goal of the Skolkovo innovation hub is to move the country's economy away from oil and oligarchs by jump-starting the tech startup industry. Allegations of corruption, construction delays, and political conflicts have plagued the project, but it has nevertheless continued to amass resident companies and further investment. But the jury is out on whether Skolkovo will be able to stimulate Russia's entrepreneurial environment—and justify an estimated $5.4 billion in government spending.
From the start, Skolkovo was trumpeted as Russia's answer to Silicon Valley. Soon after he started the project on New Year's Eve 2009, then-President Dmitry Medvedev jetted off to the actual Silicon Valley to schmooze with Steve Jobs and Arnold Schwarzenegger, then governor of California. Medvedev also visited Cisco, which signed an agreement to invest $100 million of venture capital in Skolkovo. IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia Siemens Networks, and others later signed agreements, too, while MIT signed up to advise on the creation of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech).
In some ways, Skolkovo is eerily reminiscent of Soviet utopian city-building projects. Plans for the 1,000-acre site include a technopark; a cultural center; research clusters for five strategic industries (IT, biomedical, energy, nuclear, space and telecommunications); 50 research and development centers; a hospital; a school; and apartments, townhouses, and offices where an estimated 30,000 people will live and work. Besides the Hypercube, only the foundations of the technopark building and the carcass of the Matryoshka office building—which will feature an eight-story atrium in the shape of a Russian nesting doll—have been built so far. Already, though, the 1,000-plus Skolkovo resident companies don't have to pay any income tax, value-added tax, or property tax for 10 years, as long as they remain under certain limits on revenues and profits.
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Initial trials of fibre-to-the-basement technology under the revised national broadband network have delivered peak internet speeds of 108 megabits per second, faster than those currently available at homes and businesses already connected to the network.
The trials involved a Melbourne apartment building that was connected with fibre-optic cabling in its basement, with the existing copper wiring within the building used to deliver broadband.
Upload speeds of up to 48 megabits per second were also attained. The highest-speed broadband plans currently available on the NBN peak at 100 Mbps and 40 Mbps, respectively, though NBN Co plans to introduce plans involving speeds 10 times that this month.
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Are you slowly killing your houseplants? Probably! But there might be a reason (other than neglect) why they’re all yellow and wilty: your Wi-Fi router.
An experiment by a handful of high school students in Denmark has sparked some serious international interest in the scientific community.
Five ninth-grade girls at Hjallerup School in North Jutland, Denmark, noticed they had trouble concentrating after sleeping with their mobile phones at their bedsides. They tried to figure out why. The school obviously doesn’t have the equipment to test human brain waves, so the girls decided to do a more rudimentary experiment.
They placed six trays of garden cress seeds next to Wi-Fi routers that emitted roughly the same microwave radiation as a mobile phone. Then they placed six more trays of seeds in a separate room without routers. The girls controlled both environments for room temperature, sunlight and water.
After 12 days, they found the garden cress seeds in the routerless room had exploded into bushy greenery, while the seeds next to the Wi-Fi routers were brown, shriveled, and even mutated. See for yourself in the pix above:
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Just a few years ago, the conference rooms of the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square, just across the street from MIT, were abuzz with venture capitalists who were going to solve climate change by funding startups with novel solar cell and biofuel technologies. I remember John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, tearing up as he talked about the importance of investing in technology to stop global warming.
Those same conference rooms were far more staid this year, at the annual MIT Venture Capital conference. Indeed, energy startups were talked about as charity cases. Literally.
In the last couple of years, funding for new energy companies has dried up or has shifted to companies with more modest goals, such as crunching data to cut energy bills. VCs got burned after several solar companies and advanced battery companies went bankrupt or were acquired for pennies on the dollar (see “For Energy Startups, a Glass Half Full or Empty?” and “A123 Systems Files for Bankruptcy”).
At the conference I learned that the Will and Jada Smith Foundation, along with four other foundations, are funding an effort to develop a new way for energy startups to get funded—by treating them as charities that no ordinary investor would touch.
As it turns out, there’s a provision in the tax code that says that investments in startups can be counted as charitable grants—even if those investments could in the long term bring in huge returns. The catch? The startups have to be ones that are too risky for ordinary investors.
That’s an increasingly easy requirement to meet for many energy companies these days. VCs are wary of energy startups that require large investments, and will take over a decade to provide returns.
Private foundations, however, don’t mind waiting around for returns. Indeed, they’re used to giving away a lot of their money.
In the United States, tax-exempt private foundations make grants totaling $50 billion a year—that could go a long way to helping energy startups. The donations are part of a requirement that such foundations donate at least five percent of their money to charitable causes. The Smiths’ foundation is providing seed money for a new organization—called PRIME—that is helping private foundations take advantage of a part of the tax code that will allow them make investments in startups, but count them as grants that help them meet that five percent requirement.
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Construction has begun on the long-delayed Cape Wind project, according to a high-ranking executive with the company chosen to supply the turbines.
But exactly what that means, whether it will qualify the proposed Nantucket Sound wind farm for federal tax credits and whether the project will survive a slew of outstanding legal and financial challenges are still unclear.
Markus Tacke, CEO of Siemens Energy's wind power division, told Bloomberg News that construction on some of the components for the project has begun. He said he expects Cape Wind to qualify for an investment tax credit that could defray 30 percent of the project's estimated $2.6 billion cost. In addition to supplying Cape Wind's turbines, Siemens officials have said they would be willing to invest $100 million in the project.
Cape Wind spokesman Mark Rodgers declined to comment specifically on Tacke's assertion.
"We're confident that we're going to secure financing and build the project," he said.
Officials for Siemens, which is headquartered in Germany, did not return multiple emails and telephone messages left by the Times seeking comment for this story.
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Anyone who took the time to read the UK government’s latest update on its cybersecurity strategy could be forgiven for thinking that a man called Edward Snowden never existed.
Most people who are even slightly plugged in to the world around them would agree, however, that we live in decidedly more interesting times for internet security and privacy than the document would have us believe. Not a day seems to have gone by since the summer without a new revelation of activities by the NSA or GCHQ that have gone just a little further than what most people find acceptable.
Brazil, the EU, and many individual European countries have made serious objections, as have tech companies and a group of 500 prominent writers, artists and academics.
In fact, the only place where you won’t see the NSA affair taking centre stage is in communications from the UK government.
This latest update brings us up to speed on the progress made towards the objectives and the forward plans relating to the cybersecurity strategy that was published two years ago. Yet neither appear to have been affected by the Snowden crisis. There is not the slightest mention of his name in either document. This may not surprise the cynics but it is highly inadequate.
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Carrier BT provides the British intelligence agency GCHQ and its American counterpart the NSA with direct access to customer data through the Internet modems it supplies, claims a 50-page document posted anonymously on the Cryptome site today.
The document, titled “Full Disclosure: The Internet Dark Age,” was originally post on Dec. 4 and reposted with updates a few days later. Its anonymous authors, calling themselves “The Adversaries,” say they are engineers in a business that supplies small office and home office networking in the United Kingdom. The document they posted goes into extensive detail about their claim that modems supplied by BT have secret backdoors that can be used both to send outgoing customer data directly to the U.K. and NSA intelligence agencies, or even to give surveillance agencies a means to attack, should that be required.
BT spokesperson Kris Kozamchak, head of BT Global Services, would not comment on the contents of the document, but simply stated: “We comply with the law wherever we operate and do not disclose customer data in any jurisdiction unless legally required to do so.”
Also on the security front at BT, Bruce Schneier, who has held the post of “security futurologist” at the company for about eight years, is leaving the telco at the end of December, according to a spokesman. Since the disclosures in June about the National Security Agency related to documents leaked to the media by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Schneier has been an outspoken opponent of the type of mass surveillance, backdoors and encryption weakening alleged to be done by the agency and its partners, which include GCHQ. Schneier’s commentary about the NSA appeared frequently online.
Schneier could not immediately be reached for comment.
The South Korean government has officially gotten behind the goal of making South Korea a major player in the market for Internet-based military and commercial communications. This is not unexpected, as South Korea has long been one of the most wired nations on the planet. That’s because South Korea was an early pioneer in making high-speed Internet access available inexpensively and on a wide scale. In 2000, 40 percent of South Koreans had Internet access and ten years later that had risen to 81 percent. Thus, by 2005, over 95 percent of South Korean mobile phones had Internet access and by 2006, over half of home Internet users had high-speed access. Now all South Korean Internet users have high-speed access and the speeds are the highest in the world.
Although an American firm (Apple) invented the modern smart phone in 2005, it was a South Korean firm (Samsung) that went on to become the world’s largest producer of smart phones. Samsung went on to develop encryption for its phones, a feature many commercial and military users insist on. Samsung also makes available versions of their smart phones and tablets that meet the encryption and security requirements for South Korean and American armed forces. Smart phones equipped in this way are being used by the South Korean military and offered to the armed forces of allies (especially the United States). The U.S. Army has already tested Samsung smart phones and tablets and found that they get the job done on the battlefield.
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The federal government has given the U.S. Navy the final green light to inflict millions of instances of harm on marine mammals in Southern California and Hawaii over the next five years, including thousands of instances of permanent injury or death.
The permitting agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS aka NOAA Fisheries) announced today the finalization of rules governing the Navy’s training and testing activities in an area stretching from Southern California to Hawaii for 2014–2019.
Incredibly, NOAA Fisheries—the agency charged with protecting whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals—continues to claim “no harm, no foul” while giving the Navy approval to kill hundreds of whales and dolphins, inflict thousands of instances of permanent hearing loss, millions of instances of temporary hearing loss, and millions of instances of significant disruptions of vital life functions (migration, nursing, breeding, feeding, etc.).
NOAA Fisheries continues to defy common sense and claim that these injuries and harms will have a “negligible impact” on the more than 30 species of whales and dolphins that make Southern California and Hawaii waters their home, including endangered blue whales and humpback whales and hearing-sensitive beaked whales. The permit was issued despite the mountain of science (including the Navy’s own science) illustrating the harm sonar and explosives cause marine mammals, including recent literature showing specific impacts to Southern California beaked whales and endangered blue whales from sonar. These studies confirm that activities that cause endangered and struggling populations to forgo foraging and other critical life functions can no longer be shrugged off.
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Why is the government delivering a second class network when a couple more years could deliver fibre to premises, asks Tony Brown.
It is pretty sure that Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull was expecting plenty more brickbats than bouquets from the local IT community when he released his much anticipated Strategic Review into the national broadband network (NBN) last week – and he was not left disappointed.
Not only did Turnbull announce that a third of the country would not be getting a new network but he also admitted his network would cost $11.5 billion more than he said it would at the election and that he would fail to meet his election commitment of delivering 25 megabits per second nationwide by 2016.
Turnbull’s proposal to deliver a much scaled-back NBN with existing HFC networks left in place to serve 30 per cent of Australian homes, with fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) servicing 44 per cent of premises and 26 per cent of premises receiving new fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) services met with a predictably hostile reaction.
Indeed technology journalist Renai Lemay declared “I have lost any faith I had in Turnbull in his role as the Communications Minister…[my] default position will be that the minister is not acting in the best interests of Australia from an NBN perspective.”
Those are strong words but – accepting that Turnbull was too aggressive in his election promise of 25Mbps to all by 2016 – was anything else in the Strategic Review really that much of a surprise?
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Water samples collected at Colorado sites where hydraulic fracturing was used to extract natural gas show the presence of chemicals that have been linked to infertility, birth defects and cancer, scientists reported Monday.
The study, published in the journal Endocrinology, also found elevated levels of the hormone-disrupting chemicals in the Colorado River, where wastewater released during accidental spills at nearby wells could wind up.
Tests of water from sites with no fracking activity also revealed the activity of so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs. But the levels from these control sites were lower than in places with direct links to fracking, the study found.
"With fracking on the rise, populations may face greater health risks from increased endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure," said senior author Susan Nagel, who investigates the health effects of estrogen at the University of Missouri School of Medicine.
Fracking involves injecting millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand deep underground to crack shale formations and unlock oil and gas. The process is exempt from some regulations that are part of the Safe Drinking Water Act, and energy companies do not have to disclose the chemicals they use if they consider that information a trade secret.
The study was published as the Energy Information Administration issued a forecast that natural gas production would continue to rise, and gas would overtake coal as the United States' main source of fuel for power plants. The fact that the domestic boom in oil and gas is driven by fracking has made discussions of its impact extremely fraught.
Nagel and her colleagues tested samples of surface water and groundwater from Garfield County, Colo., which, with its approximately 10,000 wells, is a center of oil and gas development driven by fracking. The research team gathered multiple water samples at five natural gas sites where spills of fracking wastewater had occurred over the last six years, Nagel said.
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Getting to the next generation of supercomputer isn’t just a function of making everything go faster — it’s about making things go faster without requiring multiple nuclear power plants dedicated to running the new machines. That’s been a problem dogging the researchers trying to build the next generation exascale supercomputers for the last few years, but scientists at MIT have discovered a new type of on-chip information transport that replaces wires with light that might help the problem.
Yup, a researcher named Michael Watts (let’s just take a moment to appreciate how he is fulfilling the destiny offered by his name) has built an on-chip photonics transport technology that only requires one femtojoule to transfer a bit. A femtojoule is a measurement of how much energy it takes to transfer a bit of data, but isn’t directly comparable to watts.
You see, the wires that connect the transistors on a chip shuttling information between them have long been problematic as we cram ever more of them on a chip. They consume a lot of power, they leak energy that interferes with the bits — it’s a hot mess. Literally.
Or from the MIT Technology Review article:
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Russian cellular operator MOTIV has announced that it is to deploy a 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network across the regions of Ekaterinburg, Kurgan, Yugra and Yamal-Nenets. The operator says it is bypassing 3G technology and moving straight from 2G GSM to 4G LTE.
Separately, regional operator Tattelecom has revealed that it will deploy 800MHz GSM and LTE base stations in the Tatarstan region over the next two years. Investment in the LTE network will total RUB500 million (USD15.2 million), Telecompaper reports.
A U.S. legislator warned the European Parliament Tuesday that inviting former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to address them could torpedo a transatlantic trade agreement worth more than a!2 billion a year.
Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan who is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters at the European Parliament that his thoughts on Snowden were "not fit to print" and that it was "beneath the dignity" of the E.U. institution to invite him to speak.
Rogers added that such a move would damage ongoing dialogue between the U.S. and the E.U. on issues such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
TTIP, which is currently being negotiated, is estimated to benefit the E.U. economy by a!119 billion a year and the U.S. economy by a!95 billion (US$130.7 billion) a year.
Parliament has asked Snowden to speak to the committee investigating allegations of NSA spying on E.U. citizens. MEP Sophie In't Veld said that, behind closed doors, visiting U.S. politicians had described Snowden as a traitor and attempted to put pressure on MEPs not to invite him to give a video address.
"It's incredible. They came here to warn us not to speak to him 'or else.' Well, we in the Parliament damn well decide ourselves who to speak to," she said. "It's about time we stopped behaving like a political midget. I hate protectionism, but we have 500 million consumers and American companies are going to want access to that market."
In't Veld said that she believed American businesses were more understanding of European citizens' privacy concerns than members of the U.S. Congress. "Privacy is the new 'green.' When you see companies advertising that they are in a so-called 'E.U. cloud,' you know U.S. companies are going to worry," she added.
MEPs were asked to submit questions to Snowden about the NSA's surveillance program. In't Veld said she wanted to know why he felt the legal avenues to report abuse were not open to him.
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The decision by Warren Buffett’s utility company to order about $1 billion of wind turbines for projects in Iowa shows how a drop in equipment costs is making renewable energy more competitive with power from fossil fuels.
Turbine prices have fallen 26 percent worldwide since the first half of 2009, bringing wind power within 5.5 percent of the cost of electricity from coal, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., a unit of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., yesterday announced an order for 1,050 megawatts of Siemens AG wind turbines in the industry’s largest order to date for land-based gear.
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In analysing the new NBN plan, as it has been at least partly unveiled by the government, the politics are a major factor; and depending on what side of the fence they occupy the reporters either follow the lead of the Minister in criticising the previous government, or, if their allegiance is to the other side, highlight the back-flips of the current government regarding their ‘faster and cheaper’ pre-election promise. We now have two competing NBN plans: - The new plan from this government, based on a mixed technology solution, at the cost of $41 billion; and
- The original FttH plan – the previous CEO of NBN Co, Mike Quigley, and the Labor Opposition have both indicated that they can do the superior job for $43 billion.
According to the latest timetable, the time difference between the two is only three years. I am sure that both sides can buy consultants to prove their point and dismiss the other. It is sad but I have become very sceptical about any NBN reports and reviews coming from politicians. Staying bipartisan, I sincerely hope that the government can actually execute its multi-technology plan because, if not, we will have again wasted three years. And if they fail to deliver the Opposition will have a powerful weapon going into the next election. Click headline to access website and scroll down to second blog post to read more--
A combination of slow growth, regulatory hurdles and rare exits in the education sector in India has hurt investor confidence, making life difficult for entrepreneurs who are starved of funds to scale up operations.
"We stopped looking for investments last month," said Aditya Kulkarni, cofounder of Learning Outcomes, a Bangalorebased venture that develops assessment tools for schools and expects to earn revenue of Rs 50 lakh this fiscal.
Kulkarni, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, approached about half a dozen investors who wanted to see more evidence of growth before putting their money. The 20-month-old startup had about 8,000 customers, but the venture funds demanded at least 30,000.
The 26-year-old entrepreneur has now decided to shelve fundraising plans and is focusing on gaining customers. This month alone, Kulkarni's company acquired 2,000 clients. Such wariness from investors is mostly due to a paucity of exits, the only noteworthy one being the buyout of online education company TutorVista by the UK's Pearson group in 2011. Since then, risk-capital funding for the sector has declined, this year investments totalled $13 million (Rs 80.5 crore) a drop of 83% from the previous year, according to research firm Venture Intelligence. "We've stayed away from the space," said Sanjay Swamy, managing partner at Angel Prime, an early-stage incubator that has backed ventures such as payment solutions maker Ezetap. To de-risk their portfolio, investors are insisting on working prototypes and higher number of customers before jumping on board. This refusal to fork out seed money is hurting their prospects, say entrepreneurs. Click headline to read more--
The European Union's top legal advisor ruled on Thursday that laws requiring communications providers to retain all data, even to combat crime, are incompatible with fundamental rights.
Advocate General Pedro Cruz VillalA3n of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in a published opinion that the E.U.'s Data Retention Directive is in conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the right to privacy.
The Directive requires providers of telephone and Internet communication services to "retain traffic and location data for a period laid down by law, in order to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute crime and to safeguard the security of the state."
The ruling came following a request from the High Court of Ireland and the Constitutional Court of Austria. Civil liberties group Digital Rights Ireland filed a case against the Irish authorities, including the police, saying they have "unlawfully processed, retained and exercised control over data related to its communications." A private individual has brought a similar case in Austria.
While Cruz VillalA3n's opinion is not legally binding, it is likely to be followed by the courts. The opinion did leave the door open for mass storage of data under stricter conditions. He said that the Data Retention Directive, which dates from 2006, needed to be reformed rather than suspended.
In particular he wants a clearer definition of the "serious crime" that the Directive is intended to target. He also questioned why the upper limit for retention of private data is two years rather than one.
The ECJ will now proceed to a formal, legal ruling on the case, but in practice the court tends to follow the advice of the Advocate General.
Remember the giddy highs of $1000 Bitcoin? That’s so two weeks ago. Lately, the virtual currency is in the midst of another of of its famous crashes — or swoons if you prefer — as bad news trickles in from overseas.
Here’s a chart, via Bitstamp, that shows the latest price tumble. The currency reached a new record high of around $1,132 on December 5th but has since lost nearly half its value:
After falling to lows of around $650 this week (it’s hard to pinpoint an exact price as rates vary significantly between various exchanges), the currency is slowly ticking up again.
The Chinese government appears to be the culprit for the currency’s latest misfortunes. Bloomberg reports that central bank officials have banned banks from clearing Bitcoin transactions, and said that all transactions in the currency must cease by Chinese New Years in late January. The announcement appears to make good on a threat from early December.
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LED-based visible light communication products will be commercialized during the first quarter of 2014 by Edinburgh, Scotland-based pureLiFi. The company, formerly known as pureVLC, made a beta release of its first product, the Li-1st, during 2013's third quarter and said it will "continue to design, develop and deliver Li-Fi components to the OEM market in 2014, with more Li-1st units being shipped to selected industry customers in Q1."
The company's product roadmap is geared toward speeding up sales and includes successive products that the company said will provide full networking capabilities while accelerating miniaturization. PureLiFi is spinout from the University of Edinburgh, which remains a partner and recently launched the Li-Fi research and development center. Harald Haas, who is behind the center and also serves as chief science officer of pureLiFi, which he cofounded, predicted that 2014 "will see even greater leaps forward in Li-Fi research and the Li-Fi industry." For more, see this pureLiFi release.
Avaya engineers are putting the final touches on a network capable of handling up to 54Tbps of traffic when the Winter Olympics opens on Feb. 7 in the Russian city of Sochi.
Sochi itself is a sprawling city of 350,000 people located on the Black Sea. Archeologists have found human remains in the area that date back tens of thousands of years. Today, Sochi’s subtropical climate makes it a popular Russian tourist spot.
The two locations where the Olympics will take place -- the Olympic village in Sochi and a tight cluster of Alpine venues in the nearby Krasnaya Polyana Mountains -- are completely new construction, so this project represents a greenfield environment for Avaya.
In addition to investing in a telecom infrastructure, Russia is spending billions of dollars to upgrade Sochi’s electric power grid, its transportation system and even its sewage treatment facilities.
“The whole town is nothing but a constantly changing, $50 billion construction site; for instance we’ve seen the road outside our hotel be torn up at least four times. As for modern IT infrastructure? There was none to speak of. We have really had to start from scratch, right down to the laying of conduit before we could even begin installing fiber and cabling,’’ says Dean Frohwerk, Avaya’s chief network architect.
That’s quite a contrast from 2010, when Frohwerk and his team provided telecom and networking services for the games in Vancouver.
And this time around, the demands for bandwidth and connectivity dwarf anything that Avaya delivered in Vancouver, where the network was capable of handling only 4Tbps.
The Sochi network will serve 30,000 athletes, administrators and staff, media, IOC officials, and volunteers with data, voice, video, and full Internet access through the Games sites.
Adding to the challenge, “We expect these people to be carrying and using multiple wireless devices,” says Frohwerk. “In Vancouver, we only had to provision one device per user. This means that we really have to have the capability to support up to 120,000 users on the Sochi Wi-Fi network, without issues or interruptions.”
Plus, Avaya has to deliver 30 IPTV dedicated HD Olympic channels via its telecom backbone, and has to make these channels available to Olympic family users over the converged network. (IPTV support is an Olympic first on the network, eliminating the need for a separate CATV HFC network.)
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The head of the UK's Department for Work and Pensions' welfare reform project, Universal Credit, was apparently explaining why the project was switching to open source technologies, when he was asked why they didn't do that originally, when the project launched two and a half years ago. His response? "such things weren’t available as they are today."
While there may be more open source available today, you'd have to have tried really hard to avoid learning about what was available just two and a half years ago. Oh, and this new open source project comes after they had to write off £40.1 million worth of IT assets, covering some of the original infrastructure investment, which they say "was of good quality" but "didn't reflect the needs of the project anymore because the specifications had changed so much."
So, to get this straight: you have a government welfare project, spending tens of millions of pounds on a proprietary system that was built for a different purpose than what they needed, and it was so inflexible that they have to scrap the whole thing and now start all over again.
At least they're using open source technology this time, but it really sounds like these guys are somewhat technologically clueless and got taken for a ride by some tech vendors who saw easy money the first time around.
Hopefully they're not using the same guys for this open source project.
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