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The oil and gas industry and Gov. John Hickenlooper’s “plan A” was easy enough to spot when it came to their shared desire to increase oil and gas development in Colorado. For its part, the industry spent millions of dollars on advertising to convince the public that fracking is as American as apple pie. As for our oil and gas geologist-turned-governor, his mission was to use the power of the state to provide the threat of filing economically devastating lawsuits against municipalities that dared to try to stop fracking within their communities. But as we saw in 2012 and again during this November’s elections, “plan A” is failing badly. Longmont passed a fracking ban last year and is currently being sued by the state and the oil and gas industry. But in the most recent elections, despite Longmont’s travails, Lafayette passed a fracking ban and Boulder and Fort Collins each passed five-year moratoriums on the controversial extraction practice that uses a mixture of water, sand and more than 500 chemicals, many of which are known or suspected carcinogens, to extract oil and gas from shale formations. Broomfield also voted on a five-year fracking ban, which for now appears to have passed by 17 votes. However, the margin of victory was so close that it triggered an automatic recount that will not begin until Dec. 2. So after millions of dollars spent by the industry and an endless stream of threats from the governor, the anti-fracking momentum has done nothing but continue to grow as one community after another votes to restrict the hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells within city limits. But it’s far too soon for the citizens of those towns and others around the state who are desirous of similar protections to think victory is at hand. That’s why they call it “plan A.” Within days of the industry’s recent defeat at the ballot box, “plan B” was rolled out in the form of a new set of air quality regulations proposed by the governor and agreed to by the largest oil and gas producers in the state, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Encana Corporation and Noble Energy. Click headline to read more--
It has been only a few years since China was widely regarded as an unstoppable economic colossus. For three decades, its economy grew about 10 percent annually; China seemed to be gliding through the global economic storm.
Well, maybe not. Many economists — Chinese and foreign — think China’s economic model is unworkable. Without a new model, they say, China will someday face a collapse of growth or worse.
The outcome has huge implications for China’s internal stability and its global economic footprint. The precedent of Japan, a highflier laid low, suggests that rapid growth can’t be taken for granted.
First, some background.
What kind of community fracking bans make sense?
Federal and state governments largely have embraced the oil-and-gas boom sparked by hydraulic fracturing. Fracking is a key part of Obama's "all of the above" energy strategy. States such as Texas have long touted its economic benefits, while the candidates for governor in Pennsylvania have moved the debate past the question of whether to frack to the question of how to make the most money from it.
But fracking looks different to the places hosting gas wells, pipelines and compressor stations. At the local level, it transforms from a matter of energy policy to a matter of land-use policy as it leaves the abstract realm of commodity and enters the lived place of community. Fracking brings jobs, but it also brings hazardous industrial activities that are uniquely invasive, because they feed on minerals regardless of what lies above them - even when it is neighborhoods, public parks, playgrounds or schools. The fact that the surface estate is subservient to the mineral estate makes it difficult for local governments to protect the health and safety of their citizens and to ensure compatibility of neighboring land uses.
In the face of such challenges, an increasing number of towns and cities have decided to ban fracking. Indeed, municipal bans have become the hottest flash point in the jurisdictional battle over the authority to write the rules for fracking. Much will depend on whether they can survive legal tests of pre-emption and regulatory takings.
Proponents of local bans often justify them on the basis of rights, especially the right of local self-determination. This framing makes intuitive sense - if a well is planned near your home or your child's school, you have a right to be involved in that decision.
But the idea of local self-determination is riddled with quandaries. Modern cities are not that "local" to begin with; they are made possible by materials harvested from around the world. This position of utter dependence makes any appeal to "self-determination" problematic. Can cities in the age of globalization exercise sovereignty over energy systems?
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It's the biggest find in 50 years and the media is completely ignoring it...
It is 6 times larger than the Bakken, 17 times the size of the Marcellus formation, and 80 times larger than the Eagle Ford shale.
All told the recent discovery outside a sleepy Australian town contains more black gold than in all of Iran, Iraq, Canada, or Venezuela.
The current estimates of 233 billion barrels are just 30 billion barrels shy of the estimated reserves in all of Saudi Arabia.
Now, one renowned international energy expert predicts the proven reserves will be much bigger.
"The find may land at 300 or 400 billion barrels, making it one of the greatest unconventional oil discoveries any of us will see in our lifetimes," says Dr. Kent Moors and advisor to six of the top 10 oil producers and active consultant to 20 world governments.
"It represents a bona-fide redrawing of the global energy map as we know it," Moors says, "and the mainstream media is completely ignoring it."
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The 11th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Symposium (WTIS) will be held in Mexico from December 4-6, 2013. It will be co-hosted by ITU and the Federal Telecommunications Institute (IFT), Mexico's telecommunications and broadcasting regulator.
The WTIS, open to all the membership, is primarily targeted at those responsible for ICT statistics in relevant Ministries, regulatory agencies, telecommunication operating companies and national statistical offices. Experts interested in the subject of information society measurements are also welcome to attend the meeting.
"The WTIS 2013 will feature an international high-level panel debate on the topics of monitoring international development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development goals, as well as national coordination," ITU said in a statement.
"The other sessions of the WTIS 2013 will address topics such as data quality assurance, measuring ICT and gender, and digital broadcasting. It will also discuss the topic of big data and evolving areas in the mobile sector, such the measurement of machine-to-machine connections and LTE-advanced services. Countries are invited to present their data collection and dissemination platforms during the event," it said.
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30 countries have faster Internet than America, at least according to the most recent update from Speedtest.net.
Speedtest.net compares and ranks consumer download speeds around the globe, calculating the rolling mean in Mbps. It updated its list this week, and found the U.S. falls far short of countries that are hardly known for being technological powerhouses, including Moldova and Uruguay.
Mbps, which stands for megabit per second, is a unit of data transfer.
Hong Kong topped the list, followed by Singapore, Romania, South Korea, and Sweden.
Speedtest is powered By Ookla, a company that makes applications for broadband testing and Web-based network diagnostics. It claims that its solutions have been adopted by nearly every Internet Service Provider in the world, and that its measurements of speed and quality go “way beyond” what most speed tests do.
Various reports about Internet speed differ greatly, however. Akamai’s State of the Internet report from July put the U.S. at number nine, below South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Sweden.
You’d think that in the country that invented the Internet, with one of the world’s most vibrant tech industries, we’d have the fastest Internet.
But America is a big country in terms of area of population, so building efficient broadband networks can be a challenge. A report from CNN earlier this year said a lack of competition among service providers is also a challenge.
However there is a big push in the U.S. right now to expand broadband access, in an effort to bolster wireless innovation, small businesses, and education.
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Harvesting power from the wind and the sun is nothing new. We've seen flying wind turbines and solar power plants that aim to provide clean renewable energy. UK-based New Wave Energy has a bolder idea in the works. The company plans to build the first high altitude aerial power plant, using networks of unmanned drones that can harvest energy from multiple sources and transmit it wirelessly to receiving stations on the ground.
The patent-pending technology aims to have drone networks hover in the sky harvesting both solar and wind power, while moving about at low speeds to keep track of the sun. The drones will operate at high altitudes where the winds are more stable and there's minimal chance of weather patterns or aircraft interfering with them.
"At 50,000 ft (15,000 m) there is very little air traffic and biodiversity, unless you go over the Himalayas," company director Michael Burdett tells Gizmag. "Implementing a system in these conditions will not obstruct any existing systems."
Each 20 x 20 m (65 x 65 ft) drone will have four rotors, multiple wind turbines and a flat base for generating solar power. It'll be able to power itself with the harvested energy and generate an additional 50 kW that can be transmitted wirelessly to the ground. Rectenna arrays installed inland or on offshore installations would receive the electromagnetic waves and convert them into usable power.
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None of the materials framing the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) provide a basis to recognize when the policies or technological solutions promoted as part of WSIS will affect the Internet. This basic oversight has critical implications as the World Telecommunications Development Conference (WTDC) approaches in early 2014. The implications relate not just to impacts on the Internet, but to impacts on developing countries, and on the objectives of the WSIS itself.
The following is an analysis of the 2010 WTDC Resolutions to identify where they need to be adapted to enable recognition of how the WSIS project will impact the Internet. It is organized based on the framework of Study Groups and Programmes for the work of ITU-D outlined in the Hyderabad Action Plan, issued at the 2010 WTDC.
We preface our commentary by first providing a description of the distinctions between the terms Internet, IP-based Networks and Next-generation Networks (NGNs), and then noting the important role of a number of 2010 Plenipotentiary Resolutions that are shaping the ITU’s WSIS activities.
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Bitcoin Internet Payment Services, a Denmark-based exchange billing itself as Europe's biggest, was robbed of bitcoins worth more than $1 million in a theft that took place over the course of the past several days.
Bitcoins are a decentralized digital currency generated by computers “mining” for the solutions to complex math problems, and authenticated on a peer-to-peer basis – not by a central banking authority. It’s the third major heist this month – about $1.4 million worth was stolen several weeks ago from an anonymous Australian who ran an online wallet service known as Inputs.io, and a Chinese exchange abruptly vanished two weeks ago, taking more than $4 million with it.
Smaller thefts, which affected consumer exchanges in the Czech Republic and Poland, have also taken place this month.
In the latest incident, BIPS was apparently targeted by a distributed denial-of-service attack earlier this month. A follow-up attack, according to bitcoin news site Coindesk, subsequently knocked out key security systems and allowed the thieves to make off with 1,295 BTC.
In response to the incident, BIPS said in a statement that it was forced to pull the consumer payments functionality of its services off-line, and warned users that they would have to transfer any balances to a different wallet service.
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The New York Times has published further details of an NSA operation that involves spying on the fiberoptic cables running between the data centers of companies such as Google and Yahoo.
The piece highlights the role played by Level 3, the company that runs such cables for Google and Yahoo. Level 3 has already been identified as one of the telecommunications firms working with the UK’s NSA partner, GCHQ.
These fiber connections are crucial to the affair, as they may provide a way for the NSA and GCHQ to effectively tap into major web firms’ systems without their cooperation.
Australia’s Optus is reportedly testing technology which will allow its customers to make voice calls over its 4G LTE network, according to ZDNet Australia, which cites the operator’s new managing director of networks, Vic Mcclelland. ‘Optus follows all mobile network technology developments closely… We have been carrying out trials for both HD Voice and voice-over-LTE (VoLTE), and we are examining the benefits these technologies can potentially deliver to our customers,’ the executive said. It is understood that some of the trials of the technology were conducted in partnership with Finnish vendor Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN).
The report comes hot on the heels of similar revelations by the news source last week that Australia’s largest cellco by subscribers Telstra was also trialling VoLTE, with a spokeperson for the operator having confirmed: ‘Telstra is currently trailing VoLTE in our lab environment but have no immediate rollout plans … However, our customers already experience the benefits of a High Definition voice service on compatible devices across our entire network.’ Nonetheless, it has been suggested that Telstra could actually look to deploy VoLTE commercially next year.
At first glance, there’s nothing particularly Jetsons-like about Marco Krapels’ 1940s-era home in a prosperous suburb that lies in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California. Open the garage door, though, and it’s Tomorrowland.
Attached to the wall is a charging station for Krapels’ Tesla Motors Model S electric sports sedan. And next to the charger are two metal boxes that effectively render Pacific Gas & Electric, the 108-year-old utility that serves Northern California, irrelevant. One box channels electricity generated by the SolarCity photovoltaic panels on the house’s roof. The other, a 10-kilowatt Tesla lithium-ion battery pack, can store up to three days’ worth of carbon-free electricity generated by Krapels’ solar array.
In other words, during the sunniest part of the day, when no one is at home and power demand is low, the Tesla battery pack can store the excess electricity for use in the late afternoon and evening when power prices spike. No dirty and expensive utility electrons needed. “I should technically be able to function with solar and just the battery indefinitely as long as the sun shines,” says Krapels, a renewable energy financer.
And the cost? Thanks to California incentives that subsidize 60 percent of the cost of energy storage, Krapels is paying less than $40 a month for the battery pack as part of a lease deal with SolarCity, the Silicon Valley company that installed the solar battery system.
“To be able to make my own power and store my own power and use it when I want to is liberating,” says Krapels as he stands in his garage. “I don’t want to have to buy power from PG&E at peak rates, I want to use my own power. You see this power line going from the street to my house? I look forward to the day when I cut that wire.”
But that day has not quite arrived. The Tesla energy storage unit – it’s is a smaller version of the battery pack that powers the Model S – has sat unused since it was installed in Krapels’ garage last spring. PG&E, like other big California utilities, has refused to connect residential solar-battery storage systems to the grid unless homeowners pay a fee that can run $800 or more.
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Fuel cells have long been lurking around in the shadows of the automotive world, promising great things but without much real-world availability to deliver them.
At this week's LA Auto Show, they took some small but sure steps into the light, as both Honda and Hyundai shared their respective visions for the future of fuel cell automobiles.
These debuts have people talking a little more about hydrogen-fueled electric driving.
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A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the 10 most important global trends, based on a poll of 1,592 leaders from academia, business, government, and non-profits.
Here are some data points that compare and contrast the public’s views around the world with the trends identified by the experts.
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Can you drop by your local supermarket and walk out with a year of free home broadband service? In the United Kingdom, Tesco shoppers can.
For several weeks, Tesco shoppers have been offered a “Broadband and Phone Deal” that will return $117 in savings during the first year by waiving the cost of the broadband part of the package.
Tesco Broadband normally runs around $9.75 a month on a one year contract for up to 14Mbps unlimited-use service including free installation and a free wireless modem/router combo. Customers are asked to pay a $24 monthly BT line rental charge, but part of these fees are returned to Tesco shoppers as part of the supermarket chain’s rewards program which supplies vouchers based on the amount spent on Tesco products and services.
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In a few short months, Bitcoin has gone from novelty to full-blown mania. In the last month alone, the virtual currency blew through the $400 and $700 mark and charmed Washington DC. Now, it has risen over 6 percent in the last week and cracked $1,000 on a popular exchange. This tweet sums up the price:
Adam Nash @adamnash Follow
BTC Prices: 1BTC = $1 Feb 2011 1BTC = $10 Jun 2011 1BTC = $100 Apr 2013 1BTC = $1000 Nov 2013 (via @coindesk)
The $1,000 hype has led to a spirited discussion on sites like Hacker News where some people suggest the price is heading ever upwards:
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Like many other parts of the world, Spain's Basque Country is currently faced with an increasing population of senior citizens placing strain upon the limited resources of the health care system. That's why the Teki project was instituted. It allows patients with chronic conditions to quickly check in with their doctors via an internet-connected Microsoft Kinect unit, thus reducing the number of time-consuming office visits, and catching problems before they require hospitalization.
Teki was developed by technology services company Accenture, along with partners including Microsoft.
Users receive a Kinect box that is hooked up to their TV and internet, along with a wireless heart rate monitor that measures the pulse via the finger, and a spirometer for measuring respiratory levels.
On a regular basis, via an interface on the TV screen, patients communicate with their doctor using video conferencing, voice communications, or text messaging. At that time, the doctor can check their vitals, inquire about their symptoms, and answer any questions.
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In late July, strange things started happening to Burma’s Internet. For about two weeks, the network—already sluggish at the best of times—sputtered and slowed to a crawl before going completely dark in the early morning of Aug. 5. The blackout came after numerous disruptions in the power supply to underground fiber-optic cables cut the country off from its only international subsea Internet cable. The timing of the outages, close to the 25th anniversary of the massive 1988 democratic uprising that brought activist Aung San Suu Kyi to prominence, raised a few eyebrows, but government engineers in the now nominally democratic state repeatedly denied any foul play, pointing instead to technical problems with the country’s Internet. After all, years of mismanagement by a paranoid military dictatorship had ravaged every sector in the country, including telecommunications.
When the Internet continued to suffer minor outages and slowdowns throughout the fall, many started asking: Why does Burma’s Internet break so much? The answer, surprisingly, tells us a lot about the current National Security Agency surveillance scandal in the United States.
People frequently think of the Internet as a gigantic cloud, magically connecting the world. In reality, at its core, the Internet is a series of long, hard wires that wrap around the world, connecting country to country and continent to continent. (The late Sen. Ted Stevens was sort of right!) Telecommunications infrastructure hasn’t changed much since the time of the telegraph—the materials in the cables have simply been upgraded from copper to fiberglass. The more long-haul international Internet links a country has with the outside world, the more stable its Internet is.
Burma officially hooks into the worldwide Internet in three places. The majority of traffic is routed over one “dry” link to Thailand and one “wet,” or subsea, cable connection known as SEA-ME-WE 3. A meager overland link to China also exists but has operated intermittently over the past few months because of upgrades, flooding, and technical glitches.
For scale, there are 10 subsea cables that connect into the New York City area alone. The United States has about 50 submarine cables in addition to a vast amount (currently not publicly quantified) of cross-border terrestrial Internet links.
Unlike the United States, Burma has never had an extensive wired infrastructure. Internet penetration rates are thought to be about 1 percent, but only 1 percent of all homes in the country have a fixed phone line. Cable television network? Forget it. Myanmar Post and Telecommunications, the government body that oversees the construction and functioning of the Internet, is essentially wiring the country from scratch.
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Google kicked off a project to build high-speed fiber-optic networks in parts of the world that lack fast broadband connections, starting with the Ugandan capital, Kampala.
The initiative, dubbed Project Link, aims to provide faster and more reliable Internet connections in areas where the current infrastructure is inadequate or nonexistent, the company announced Wednesday.
It picked Kampala because it's a dense urban center limited to "pre-broadband" speeds.
Google is involved with several projects around the world to provide faster broadband access, moves that indirectly help its business. It said it wants to help local businesses, schools and others to make better use of the Internet.
Google's fiber-optic network in Kampala is designed to help Internet service providers and mobile operators connect their customers to existing high-speed undersea cables that carry traffic to and from the continent.
Project Link is a business for Google. ISPs and operators who sign up for the service will pay fees, a Google spokeswoman said, though the company isn't disclosing specifics.
It's not saying yet if it plans to also build networks in other cities. For now, it's focused on serving the 3 million people in and around Kampala, the spokeswoman said.
Beyond basic access, local providers will be able to offer new mobile data plans or high-speed Internet to support new services. With a fast fiber-optic network in Kampala, for instance, ISPs can better support the city's entrepreneurs, Google said.
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None of the materials framing the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) provide a basis to recognize when the policies or technological solutions promoted as part of WSIS will affect the Internet. This basic oversight has critical implications as the World Telecommunications Development Conference (WTDC) approaches in early 2014. The implications relate not just to impacts on the Internet, but to impacts on developing countries, and on the objectives of the WSIS itself.
The following is an analysis of the 2010 WTDC Resolutions to identify where they need to be adapted to enable recognition of how the WSIS project will impact the Internet. It is organized based on the framework of Study Groups and Programmes for the work of ITU-D outlined in the Hyderabad Action Plan, issued at the 2010 WTDC.
We preface our commentary by first providing a description of the distinctions between the terms Internet, IP-based Networks and Next-generation Networks (NGNs), and then noting the important role of a number of 2010 Plenipotentiary Resolutions that are shaping the ITU’s WSIS activities.
Click headline to read more--
Wouldn’t it be nice to delete those geo-block usurping settings from your router or browser to access Netflix? Soon you might be able to, with a new report out this morning saying that geo-block jumpers are changing Netflix’s mind about coming to Australia.
A report in The Australian this morning says that Netflix has been swayed by the number of people jumping the geo-block to subscribe to the service from Australia.
In case you have been living under a rock, Netflix offers an all-you-can-eat TV and movie streaming service for $US7.99 per month. It accounts for a huge percentage of web traffic in the US, and is arguably the most popular streaming service on the planet, despite it only being available in select North American and European markets.
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Italian telecom operator Telecom Italia announces their plans to offer fiber optic services to Brescia. Brescia is the capital of the province of Brescia, which is in the northern Italy. Situated at the foot of Alps with a population of 197,000, Brescia is the second largest city in the region of Lombardy.
Telecom Italia has laid optical fiber cables spanning 210 kilometers to Brescia. This fiber optic cable network connects 454 street cabinets. Telecom Italia can cover around 75,000 houses with this network. The telecom operator can provide high speed broadband services through its optical networks in Brescia. Broadband speeds can be upto 30 Mbps. The operator plans to provide high speed broadband services to more than 50% of Italian houses by the year 2016.
The U.S. National Security Agency reportedly hacked into over 50,000 computer networks around the world as part of its global intelligence gathering efforts, and also taps into large fiber optic cables that transport Internet traffic between continents at 20 different major points.
The agency installed specialized malware referred to as "implants" on over 50,000 devices in order to perform Computer Network Exploitation (CNE), Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported Saturday based on documents it said were leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The information is reportedly taken from a 2012 top secret presentation about the NSA's worldwide signals intelligence gathering capabilities that was shared with the intelligence services of Australia, Canada, the U.K. and New Zealand that form the Five Eyes partnership.
CNE is one of three types of Computer Network Operations that NSA computer specialists perform. It "includes enabling actions and intelligence collection via computer networks that exploit data gathered from target or enemy information systems or networks," the NSA says on its careers website.
According to a presentation slide published by NRC, the NSA deployed over 50,000 CNE "implants" world-wide.
The Washington Post reported in August that the attack tools used for these implants are developed by a specialized NSA team called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) and are designed to compromise routers, switches and firewalls to monitor entire networks.
The implants persist through software and equipment upgrades and can be used to harvest communications, copy stored data and tunnel into the compromised networks from outside, according to the Washington Post. Their number is expected to reach over 85,000 by the end of 2013.
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When an environmental disaster occurs, it can be devastating to ecosystems. More often that not, the public only hears about these incidents when they first become a problem. What we don’t often hear about is the fact that the ramifications of such incidents reach far and wide – impacting the environment for years and years to come.
The monetary and health-related consequences of these types of disasters are enormous. Cleanup costs, the initial costs associated with a disaster are defined as the amount it will take to return the affected area to normal. What isn’t accounted for in these “cleanup costs,” is the impact on communities and wildlife that will span decades. Oftentimes, the true impact of a disaster isn’t truly known for years.
As this infographic from Vermont Law School’s Master of Environmental Law & Policy Online clearly illustrates, from the Exxon Valdez incident to the Deepwater Horizon spill, billions had to be spent on cleanup, lives were lost, and wildlife suffered. The only thing certain is that the impacted communities will continue to struggle to recuperate from the after effects of these environmental disasters.
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