I Broke The Computer

gManZboy writes "The space agency is widely known as a cloud computing success story in the government for its Nebula cloud computing platform. Now NASA will develop an app store for its scientists. The NASA CIO says it's about getting the science job done."

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The catastrophic flooding in Thailand is expected to cause a drastic shortage of hard drives according to researchers at iSuppli. Some 660,000 Thailand residents are reportedly out of work after the country shuttered 14,000 factories, including facilities that produce hard drives for Western Digital and Seagate. Hard drive shipments are...

alphadogg writes "On December 1, AOL will shut down its free LISTSERV-based mailing-list hosting operations, the company has told mailing list administrators. 'If your list is still actively used, please make arrangements to find another service prior to the shutdown date and notify your list members of the transition details,' an email notice sent out by AOL stated. At the peak of the service's popularity in the late 1990s, AOL was the third-largest provider of mailing lists, serving more than a million users."

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Commodore USA has launched an "Extreme" edition of its modernized Commodore 64. The C64x-EX is priced at $1,499 and comes outfitted with a 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-2720QM processor, a mini-ITX motherboard and power supply, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a slot-loading DVD burner, a 2TB 7200RPM hard drive, along with Wi-Fi...

Last night, Microsoft released a workaround to block a Windows kernel vulnerability recently found to be exploited by the installer for the Duqu virus, a Stuxnet-like worm discovered in October. The attack, discovered by Hungarian researchers, exploits a vulnerability in Windows' TrueType font engine. A full fix for the problem is still pending, and will not be part of Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday" fixes for November.

In the company's security advisory Microsoft said that attackers exploiting the TrueType vulnerability—which Duqu exploited through a Microsoft Word document—could gain access to the Windows kernel and run shell code. "The attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights," Microsoft's statement said.

As a temporary workaround, Microsoft recommends shutting off access to T2EMBED.DLL, the dynamic link library that allows applications to display TrueType fonts. While the fix will prevent attacks, it also means that fonts won't display properly in applications. But Microsoft's security team sees the threat from Duqu as limited, stating that "overall, we see low customer impact at this time." Microsoft Support has posted a "quick fix" app here.

The fix comes ahead of next week's Patch Tuesday security fixes, for which Microsoft announced some of the details yesterday. Microsoft will ship four security fixes, only one of which is rated as "critical." While Microsoft's security team did not give details on the vulnerabilities addressed, the critical fix applies only the company's more recent operating systems—Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.

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Apple was indeed attempting to woo TV networks into a content deal for an ad-supported Apple TV service at one point in time, CBS CEO Les Moonves has revealed. During CBS's latest quarterly earnings call (hat tip to GigaOm), Moonves spoke briefly about Apple's proposed service that would have involved splitting the revenue earned on advertising through the service, which is why CBS decided to walk away.

Rumors about Apple pitching a TV subscription service to TV execs began in late 2009—at that time, it was expected that Apple would launch it in the early part of 2010, and CBS was one of the networks reportedly in talks with Apple. That obviously didn't happen, or at least not on the timeline that was originally expected, but the rumor was revived in August of this year when unnamed sources claimed that Apple was working on "new technology to deliver video to televisions."

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An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the HST site: "A team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc — a brightly glowing disc of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy's central black hole. Their study makes use of a novel technique that uses gravitational lensing to give an immense boost to the power of the telescope. The incredible precision of the method has allowed astronomers to directly measure the disc's size and plot the temperature across different parts of the disc."

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Intel hasn’t been able to make much of a dent in the smartphone or tablet markets, but they’re not about to give up just yet. ComputerWorld reports that Intel is working to make Ice Cream Sandwich-powered devices a part of their future.

The mobile space represents a huge opportunity for Intel, which is made all the more maddening because they’ve never really been able to crack it. Less than a handful of Intel-powered Android tabs ever saw the light of day, and most (like the Cisco Cius, which ran Froyo of all things) were geared heavily toward enterprise use.

Meanwhile, if you were to peer into the innards of nearly any smartphone or tablet on the market, you would likely see an ARM-based processor. It’s a reality that can elude some, as processors can bear ostentatious names like Snapdragon and Hummingbird that obscure the nature of their architecture.

Now, it looks as though Intel is about to roll their sleeves up and fight ARM’s onslaught. Intel showed off some frankly impressive smartphone and tablet reference designs at a developer event back in September, both of which ran on Intel’s Medfield plaftorm. The company has also promised that the first Intel-powered smartphone would see the a release sometime next year, so it’s apparent they’re beginning to get the lead out.

Given that Intel has their eye on both the smartphone and tablet markets, their apparent zeal for Ice Cream Sandwich makes complete sense. Ice Cream Sandwich is intended to be Google’s unifying OS, one that will bridge the experience gap between smartphones and tablets alike. If Intel can ensure that Ice Cream Sandwich will run without a hitch on whatever mobile chipset they go with, they stand a serious chance at popping up in your next tablet.

For the time being though, Intel is stuck playing the waiting game. According to an Intel spokesperson, Ice Cream Sandwich “includes OS optimization for x86,” so the actual work of getting ICS running may not be too difficult. Still, a concerted effort can’t begin they actually get their hands on the software, so Intel still has a little while to go before they get cracking.

Barrett Brown, the "Face" of Anonymous, has had a busy week, promoting the hacktivist collective's extremely-confusing war against the notorious Zetas drug cartel in every outlet from CNN to Gawker. But a six-figure book deal probably helps with the fatigue. More »

MojoKid writes "AMD's initial layoff announcement yesterday implied that the dismissals would occur across the company's global sales force. While that may still be true, it has become clear that AMD has slashed its PR and Marketing departments in particular. The New Product Review Program* (NPRP) has lost most of its staff and a Graphics Product Manager, who played an integral role in rescuing AMD's GPU division after the disaster of R600, also got the axe. Key members of the FirePro product team are also gone. None of the staff had any idea that the cuts were coming, or that they'd focus so particularly in certain areas. These two departments may not design products, but they create and maintain vital lines of communication between the company, its customers, and the press."

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We had an Interesting Article by "Paul F Renda" in our The Hacker News Magazine's November Edition. We would Like to share this article with our website readers also. You can Download November Issue Here. This is a theoretical prima to bring out a discussion about whether an Internet doomsday worm can be created that is so intractable that it cannot be eradicated. This worm could also have the

Mobile Security and Lack thereof Nidhi Rastogi ,A Security Consultant with Logic Technology Inc, New York share her Views about the Mobile Security and Lack thereof . The Article is taken from our September Month Magazine Edition .Here we go.. Mobile technology, particularly smartphones, has come of age and is increasingly replacing PCs for internet surfing, emails, gaming and social networking.

DeviceGuru writes with this excerpt: "Barnes & Noble is expected to announce a 7-inch color tablet on November 7th, positioning it head-to-head with Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire. B&N's Nook Tablet is rumored to have a slightly faster processor, twice the RAM and flash, and a $50 price premium relative to Amazon's tablet, among other differences. The quick-reference table in this article compares key features and specs of the two 7-inch Android tablets, based on a combination of leaked data published at Engadget.com plus some additional data from B&N's existing Nook Color specs, which seems to have much in common with this new, higher-end Nook model."

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phands writes "SCO has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old lawsuit against IBM. Unbelievable! Details at Groklaw." From the article, quoting SCO's filing: "SCO respectfully requests that the Court rule on IBM’s Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO’s Unfair Competition Claim (SCO’s Sixth Cause of Action), dated September 25, 2006 (Docket No. 782), which motion is directed at the Project Monterey Claim, and IBM’s Motion for Summary Judgment on SCO’s Interference Claims (SCO’s Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Causes of Action), dated September 25, 2006 (Docket No. 783), which motion is directed at the Tortious Interference Claims."

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deadeyefred writes "Dropbox last month launched its Teams service, targeted at small and mid-sized businesses — but acknowledges it's not PCI-, HIPAA- or Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. Company executives say they also don't provide a highly visible warning largely because customers in beta tests didn't make it an issue. Should cloud services focused at businesses provide clear warnings if they are not compliant with key regulatory requirements, or should business customers just assume they are not?"

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alphadogg writes "With all the publicity about breaches of SSL certificate authorities and a hack that exploits a vulnerability in the supposedly secure protocol, it's time to consider something else to protect Internet transactions. If only there were something else to turn to. Protecting SSL and its updated version TLS is vital because they support most e-commerce transactions by setting up end-to-end encrypted sessions that are authenticated, and that requires certificates that are verified by certificate authorities. One new model for authentication is called Convergence, and it similar to one being trialed at Carnegie Mellon University called Perspectives. Rather than trusted third parties whose trust can't be assured, SSL/TLS authentication would rely on a reputation system of verification."

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First time accepted submitter ecorona writes "This Google Maps mashup was published in Science (paywall warning) this week. It shows genetic risk for multiple diseases distributed across the globe. It's easy to follow the migration path and see which diseases increase/decrease in risk along human migration paths. Click on the populations to see the relative risk of the selected disease for each population. You can pick your a disease and see which populations are more susceptible. The article is behind a paywall, but the website is free to use." On a similar note, an anonymous reader points out a British research project that "used Twitter to track and map flu-like illnesses across the U.K. to determine if epidemics were emerging. The research culminated into an online visual tool, the Flu Detector, that maps tweeted flu rates in several regions across the U.K."

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nixkuroi writes "Redbox, apparently not having noticed the backlash against Netflix, has decided to charge its customers 20% more per day. Though there will be a discounted grace period for the first day of rental until Nov. 30 2011, the full pricing increase will kick into effect on December 1."

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coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration wants you to go online to help it battle the growing safety problem of people pointing lasers at flying aircraft. The FAA today said it created a new website to make it easier for pilots and the public to report laser incidents and obtain information on the problem which continues to grow by leaps and bounds. This year, pilots reported 2,795 laser events through Oct. 20. Pilots have reported the most laser events in 2011 in Phoenix (96), Philadelphia (95) and Chicago (83). Since it began tracking laser events in 2005 reports rose from nearly 300 to 2,836 in 2010, the FAA said."

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New figures from Facebook reveal how often the social networking site’s users are hacked. In the blog post announcing the forthcoming “Trusted Friends” feature, Facebook also an included infographic detailing Facebook’s security measures. One figure in particular jumped out at security researchers: every day, “only .06%” of Facebook’s 1 billion logins are compromised. Or, to put it another way, 600,000 logins per day are compromised.

This tidbit was first noticed by Graham Cluley of Sophos, who, apparently didn’t ignore the infographic like the rest of us. (Marketers have ruined infographics for us – we’re too often infographic-blind these days).

Crunching the numbers, Cluley noted that 600,000 compromised logins per day means one compromised login every 140 milliseconds.

Facebook revealed the figure in a section explaining how it keeps spam at bay, as the majority of the time, Facebook accounts are hacked by spammer who send out messages to the victim’s friends. (Who hasn’t seen this? “Help, I’m in London and had my wallet stolen!”)

There were some other interesting numbers shared by Facebook, too, including:

• Less than 4% of the content shared on Facebook is spam (vs. 89.1% of email is spam)
• Less than 5% of Facebook users experience spam on any given day
• 50% of Facebook’s 750+ million users login to Facebook every day (wait, aren’t we up to 800 million now? Must be an old infographic).
• The average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes on the site per month

Despite losing 800,000 members, Netflix still accounts for a whopping 32.7% of all North American peak fixed access downstream traffic, according to Sandvine's fall 2011 Global Internet Phenomena Report. That's up nearly 10% since spring 2011 and almost double the peak traffic of the next largest source, HTTP at 17.5%.

An anonymous reader writes "The days of dealing with very reflective glass panels may soon be behind us. Nippon Electric Glass has used the FPD International 2011 conference in Japan this week to show off its new 'invisible glass' panel. What NEG has done is added anti-reflection films to both the front and back of the glass that are only nanometers thick. Look at a typical sheet of glass and you will see about 8% of the light reflected off of it. With NEG's anti-reflection film in place, that is reduced to just 0.5%."

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HP, having abandoned its own webOS tablet plans, is betting big that consumers and businesses will gravitate to Windows 8 on touch screens. - Hewlett-Packard, with its market-leading PC business back in the fold, is still in the tablet game. “I think we need to be in the tablet business,” HP CEO Meg Whitman told analysts and reporters during an Oct. 27 conference call. “Were certainly going to be there with Windows 8, and were going ...

crookedvulture writes "The initial reviews of the first Bulldozer-based FX processors have revealed the chips to be notably slower than their Intel counterparts. Part of the reason is the module-based nature of AMD's new architecture, which requires more intelligent thread scheduling to extract optimum performance. This article takes a closer look at how tweaking Windows 7's thread scheduling can improve Bulldozer's performance by 10-20%. As with Intel's Hyper-Threading tech, Bulldozer performs better when resource sharing is kept to a minimum and workloads are spread across multiple modules rather than the multiple cores within them."

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Dedicated support to expand mobile broadband nationwide will be provided through a new Mobility Fund. - The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to comprehensively reform its Universal Service Fund and intercarrier compensation systems. Efforts to expand the high-speed Internet to rural America over the next six years will increase economic growth by $50 billion over that period, th...

Google’s smart TV software platform, Google TV, is poised for its first significant overhaul since it launched in Logitech and Sony hardware a year ago. Via over-the-air updates that should begin streaming to hardware devices on October 30, Google TV users will find new TV-optimized Android Apps, an improved YouTube experience, and new features that provide easy, direct discovery of TV and movie content.

All this Googly goodness is wrapped up in a new user interface that aims to simplify a challenging information design—a design that has left many Google TV customers with a persistent sense of yuck.

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Samsung’s 2012 lineup of gadgets will include ones with flexible screens, the company announced during an investor call today. The company’s smartphones will likely get them first, possibly in the first half of the year.

Samsung isn’t the first company to pursue flexible gadget parts, as Sony showed a flexible display in 2009 at the Consumer Electronics Show. But Samsung may be the first major device manufacturer to get them to market, and with its new dominant market position, flexible displays stand to get a wide release.

The company’s pursuit of flexing screens stems from its purchase of Liquivista, a company that uses electrowetting technology to make screens that flex, but are still bright and low power. During the call, Robert Yi, vice president of investor relations, said that the company plans to introduce the displays “sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part. The application will probably start from the handset side.” Tablets and other devices will get the technology later.

On the one hand, flexible displays mean that dropping your phone or tablet directly onto their screens may no longer be the disaster it currently is. However, Samsung has said little about how the quality of the displays will compare to the AMOLED screens the company usually favors in its higher-end devices, or even the oft-denigrated PenTile displays.The company also didn’t indicate whether the displays will only appear in all its devices, or only a subset.

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Two new security features, App Passwords and Trusted Friends are designed to help Facebook users regain control over their accounts even if they are compromised and protect themselves from malicious third-party apps - Facebook is testing out two new security features to help users protect their accounts from being compromised by malicious third-party apps or hackers. In an Oct. 26 blog post, the social networking giant unveiled the quot;trusted friends quot; feature to help users regain control of their acc...

Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system. As recently as 2000, the U.S. was running a budget surplus, taking in more than it was spending every year — and economists were projecting that the entire national debt could be paid off by 2012. So the government commissioned a secret report outlining the possible harmful consequences of retiring the debt completely. For one thing, paying off the national debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds, a pillar of the global economy. Treasury securities are crucially important to the world financial system in a number of ways: banks buy them as low-risk assets, the Fed uses them for executing monetary policy, and mortgage interest rates vary based on Treasury rates. 'It was a huge issue ... for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy,' says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration. In the end, Jason Seligman, the economist who wrote most of the report titled 'Life After Debt (PDF),' concluded it was a good idea to pay down the debt — but not to pay it off entirely. 'There's such a thing as too much debt,' says Seligman. 'But also such a thing, perhaps, as too little.'"

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New submitter NarcoTraficante writes "After one of their members was kidnapped in Veracruz, Mexico by the Zetas drug cartel, Mexican Anonymous members have issued an ultimatum to the Zetas in a recently posted YouTube video. The video demands the release of the kidnapped member and threatens to publish information of cartel members and affiliates in Veracruz if the victim is not released by November 5. The Houston Chronicle article warns that there will be bloodshed if Anonymous publishes information on the Zeta's operations, either perpetrated by rival cartels or reprisal attacks by the Zetas themselves."

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There's nothing quite like a perfect cup of coffee, but what's perfect for you may be putrid to someone else. If you're a new coffee or tea drinker it may take a little experimentation to figure out your preferred balance of coffee/tea, sweetener, and/or creamer. The MyCuppa mug from British designer Suck UK has color samples for each shade of creamer, so if you want "Classic British" tea add creamer until your cuppa matches the color swatch. More »

If your laptop's integrated graphics just aren't cutting it for the games you want to play, you can actually connect a desktop graphics card to your ExpressCard slot with an external dock. More »

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California—There are few things in this world I despise more than software updates. Downloading hundreds of files, waiting for the progress bar to fill, restarting the device—it's all a thankless chore. Usually.

But Google's Android 4.0 operating system, better known by its tasty nickname "Ice Cream Sandwich ,"or ICS, is far from a mere mobile OS update. Ice Cream Sandwich is a complete OS overhaul that includes tweaks ranging from the geekily esoteric (widget resizing!) to the most surface-level of interface improvements (think "shinier," care of faux-polished surfacing effects). It's also destined for both Android smartphones and tablets, unifying Google's mobile OS platforms for the first time.

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Beware - Gaddafi malware on Internet As is not unusual when big news breaks, malware authors try to take advantage of the situation.A global computer virus that hides in an email about Gaddafi's death has been detected by Norman. The malware was caught in its worldwide network of spam traps. The email below was sent to a mailing list that receives information pertaining to the Uighur people.

Microsoft is looking to cut manufacturing costs on its Windows Phone 7 handsets, according to statements made by WinPho boss Andy Lees in Hong Kong today. The company has struggled through its push into mobile since the launch of the Windows Phone platform last year, which honestly made more of a ripple than a splash in the market.

Now that Mango is ready to emerge as a “third mobile ecosystem,” as Verizon CEO Lowell McAdams would put it, Microsoft wants to step up its volume, and cutting production costs seems to be the means to that end. Lees said Redmond is looking to cut manufacturing costs in half, taking them from around $400 per handset (which was the cost when the software debuted last year) to less than $200 per handset.

Strangely, though, Microsoft seems to be fine with the catch involved with cutting these costs. Due to Microsoft’s royalty structure, vendors pay the company for handsets based on a percentage of manufacturing costs rather than a fixed rate. If Microsoft can really bring its production costs down to less than $200, it may very well be making half of what it did last year per handset.

But for every goal, sacrifices must be made. And in the case of Windows Phone, profit isn’t necessarily the name of the game. Microsoft already makes plenty off of Android courtesy of patent royalty deals — in fact, last time we had specific numbers Redmond was seeing upwards of around $150,000,000 on Android from HTC alone, and that was before they signed a deal with Samsung.

In the words of Lees, the goal here is “volume, volume, volume,” reports Bloomberg. “We are supporting componentry that will allow us to go below $200.” But if volume is the plan here, there may be some other obstacles for Microsoft to worry about. In the opinion of some Windows Phone enthusiasts, namely Robert McLaws, vendors seem to push the iPhone and Android devices much harder than they market Windows Phone 7 handsets. McLaws even created a website dedicated to harping on retailers for poor WinPho sales.

If the issue McLaws outlines is, in fact, a real problem, perhaps volume (x3) coupled with the much-improved Mango platform will help turn the tide.

In a statement issued this morning on the company's blog, Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported for five years on the desktop instead of the usual three years that a standard long-term support release gets. The company says that the longer duration of desktop support is intended to better serve corporate desktop rollouts.

New versions of the Ubuntu Linux distribution are released on a time-based six-month cycle. Every two years, Ubuntu gets a special long-term support (LTS) release that is maintained for three years on the desktop and five years on servers. During the support period, Canonical provides security patches and other relevant updates. The move to offer five years of support on both the desktop and the server in version 12.04 is a significant change.

The predictability and long duration of update availability for the LTS releases have played a major role in making Ubuntu a practical server operating system. Canonical's statement says that approximately 70 percent of all Ubuntu server deployments use an LTS version.

Canonical hopes that extending LTS desktop support to five years will help encourage broader adoption of the operating system in enterprise environments, where the hardware refresh cycle for workstations can often be more than three years. The company's statement cites Qualcomm and the city of Munich as examples of organizations that have conducted large-scale Ubuntu desktop rollouts.

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The authorized biography of Steve Jobs isn’t slated for release until Monday but several news outlets have received advanced copies of Walter Isaacson’s new book and details are beginning to leak out.

Former rapper MC Hammer is planning to launch a search engine that he believes will rival Google and Bing. WireDoo was announced at O’Reilly Media’s Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco earlier this week.

Face Unlock, one of the flagship features of the newly released Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" mobile operating system, enables users to unlock their phones via facial recognition rather than a PIN code or by using other security credentials. But there might be a security risk involved, if recent reports...

jfruhlinger writes "TDL4, a rootkit that helps build a powerful botnet, is pegged by security vendor ESET as one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware in the world. But its creators aren't resting on their laurels; they're rewriting some of the code from the ground up to make it difficult for antimalware to detect it, creating a hidden boot partition that guarantees malware code will be loaded even before the operating system is. It's part of a plan to turn TDL4 into a turnkey product that can be sold to other criminal operations."

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bs0d3 writes "Right now the police and FBI are able to use GPS tracking devices, stingrays, and other tracking technologies without a warrant. They can read your personal emails without a warrant, they can recall your phone call history, all without a warrant. These are clear violations of the fourth amendment, but time and time again the courts are ruling that the fourth amendment doesn't protect people who use modern technology. This week Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Kirk (R-IL), and Jason Chaffetz (D-UT) announced a bill with bipartisan support called the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act. It provides sorely needed legal clarity for the use of electronically-obtained location data that can be used to track and log the location and movements of individual Americans. The G.P.S. Act is supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Constitution Project, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The full text of the bill can be read online."

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Hugh Pickens writes "DARPA reports that more than $300 billion worth of satellites are in the geosynchronous orbit, many retired due to failure of one component even if 90% of the satellite works just as well as the day it was launched. DARPA's Phoenix program seeks to develop technologies to cooperatively harvest and re-use valuable components such as antennas or solar arrays from retired, nonworking satellites in GEO and demonstrate the ability to create new space systems at greatly reduced cost. However, satellites in GEO are not designed to be disassembled or repaired, so it's not a matter of simply removing some nuts and bolts, says David Barnhart. 'This requires new remote imaging and robotics technology and special tools to grip, cut, and modify complex systems.' For a person operating such robotics, the complexity is similar to trying to assemble via remote control multiple Legos at the same time while looking through a telescope."

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chrb writes "According to Security News Daily, Anonymous has taken down more than 40 darknet-based child porn websites over the last week. Details of some of the hacks have been released via pastebin #OpDarknet, including personal details of some users of a site named 'Lolita City,' and DDoS tools that target Hidden Wiki and Freedom Hosting — alleged to be two of the biggest darknet sites hosting child porn."

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The author of several classic histories of pop music including Rip It Up And Start Again, Generation Ecstasy and Retromania, Simon Reynolds is as well placed as anyone to understand how the Internet has changed the music industry.

But while Reynolds might not go as far as critics like Jaron Lanier, he is nonetheless far from optimistic about the impact of the Internet on the music industry. As Reynolds told me when he came into our San Francisco TechCrunchTV studio, the Internet is bad for artists because it’s much harder now to make a living recording music. And it’s bad for fans too, Reynolds insists, because all the free music on the Internet has created a problem of what he calls “over abundance.”

So is Simon Reynolds correct? Has the Internet really had such detrimental impact on artists and fans alike? And if so, then how can we return to a time when musicians like the Beatles, Stevie Wonder or Talking Heads, rather than Steve Jobs or the iPhone, captured the zeitgeist of our age?

It transpires that the government of Nunavut, a remote territory of Canada between Hudson bay and Baffin bay, recently acquired some new digital cameras for the purpose of creating driver’s licenses. The files created by the cameras, presumably a handful of megabytes unless they’re using Hasselblads, were too big to be effectively emailed for processing due to the extreme limitations of internet connections in the area. Instead, they were loaded onto flash drives and flown hundreds of miles to Iqaluit, where they were processed and returned.

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is jokes: haven’t they heard of “save for web”? Did they try the wi-fi at the coffee shop? And in the frozen tundra, shouldn’t they be issuing sledging licenses? But the truth is that this rather absurd little situation is just one of thousands in which huge swaths of the world are being left behind in our rush toward connectivity. While the haves are complaining about losing 4G service when they’re in their apartment, the have-nots are paying hundreds of dollars for speeds we would have laughed at ten years ago. Is it possible to bridge the gap, or are the Nunavuts of the world simply out of luck?

Begging the question

Practically speaking, it’s easy to dismiss the issue entirely by making some noises about how living in the sticks is a choice, and the physical isolation is a natural match for informational isolation. You see pictures of a llama farm in the Andes or an Inuktikut native in Nunavut, and you think “do these guys really need broadband?” There’s a grain of truth to this, but really it’s a form of entitled bigotry and a refusal to acknowledge the purpose of civilization, which (briefly stated) is to grow and improve human communities. Cities don’t “deserve” broadband any more than the some ice-encrusted region with more bears than people.

Besides, problems are interesting. And solutions have a tendency to breed other solutions. Finding a way to serve remote areas with real and affordable broadband could easily yield serious improvements to the efficiency and reach of our existing and future networks. This isn’t about just buying enough copper to lay down cables to every home in the arctic, it’s about acknowledging limitations in our current systems and thinking about whether those limitations are something we want to work and live under. But there are very few limitations that people will truly accept as permanent.

The cost of not doing business

It should probably be acknowledged up front that nobody is going to make any money providing remote areas with internet. Profit is a powerful motive, and it is completely absent here, at least on the face of it. Companies like Comcast and Hughes exist to make money; it just so happens that they make money providing connectivity. National and local governments, however, serve the people, and part of their mandate is the standard of living. The absence of a working internet connection, or at least the absence of one that belongs in this decade, is a serious problem in that category of government responsibility. The Artic Communications Infrastructure Assessment report (which inspired this article) makes this point very clear.

India is about to invest some 20 billion dollars into a huge roll-out of broadband services. A huge amount of this will be going to foreign contractors, who will be thrilled to be laying their own style of foundation in a market set to explode. The situation is, unfortunately, somewhat different in places like Nunavut. The population of the entire territory is around 35,000 people. If it were a country, it would be the 15th largest in the world by area. Subtracting the ~6000 people who live in the largest city, Iqaluit, you have on average one person for every 28 square miles. In Bombay, the number of people per square mile is over 50,000.

Resistance

In Canada, there has actually been a lot of discussion on this topic. The northern territories make up only a tiny fraction of the population, and a tension exists between the south and the north as to just how much the big cities should be subsidizing the rural areas. The Canadian telecoms regulatory agency, the CRTC, actually put together a requirement that the existing telecoms should establish a “deferral account” by skimming money from their subscriptions in urban areas (high-profit, low-cost), 95% of which was to be used for remote and rural connectivity (the remaining 5% would go to accessibility for the disabled).

But lacking a specific spending plan, the money just piled up. Maybe $670 million was set aside when someone questioned the jurisdiction of the CRTC over things like expanding broadband access. Some people wanted the money to go back to the customers. Some questioned the legitimacy of requiring urban users to subsidize rural areas.

It seems a little misguided to me that such a war chest should be squandered on a one-time refund to customers, or spent on areas where the telecoms are already voluntarily investing billions. But there you have it — it’s the kind of questionably justified resentment that some people feel when they see the amount of their paycheck that goes into Medicare or Social Security.

It’s not big big money, as far as government spending goes, but half a billion dollars sure isn’t small money, either. And as we have seen, it presents a kind of ethical quandary: can we justify spending that much money so a few people in the sticks can check Facebook?

It’s more than that, though: without modernization in this area, services that increasingly rely on connectivity as an adjunct to their functions (licensing, law enforcement, hospitals) will suffer and the standard of living will truly be lower. So I think the answer is that at some point, we’re going to have to. And by the time you have to, you always wish you’d done it earlier. So what are the options?

For Nunavut and places like it (rural Russia and China, developing regions in Africa and India), options are actually very few when you get down to it. The combination of extreme isolation and environmental conditions makes for a logistical nightmare.

Solutions

If the town is lucky enough to be in range of current data-serving satellites, which understandably mainly orbit in range of the more habitable zone of the planet, you can install a base station. The trouble is that these are expensive to install and upgrade. The stations serving Nunavut now are slow enough that sending photos was impractical, and even slight population growth would instantly render the bandwidth totally inadequate. What if a refinery were to be established, and a few hundred people move into the area? All of a sudden that seven-year-old base station, barely sufficient for a population of 50, becomes absurd. And all of a sudden, that location becomes a risk because critical services can’t be reached during, say, inclement weather, which may be when they are most required.

You could establish a series of relays bouncing signals from a central area connected to a backbone. This is common practice elsewhere, good for getting a signal from downtown to the suburbs, but in a places where the hub is separated from the other points by miles of rough territory, it becomes problematic. After all, the towers can only be so far apart, and require regular maintenance. In Nunavut you’d have to have someone going around knocking the ice off the dishes so they don’t collapse. Not a job I’d volunteer for, and not a sustainable or affordable model. Besides that, it would be extremely costly to radiate these tower relays to every far-flung community.

The only solution seems to be industrial-sized. In coastal communities like Nunavut, an undersea cable seems to be the tool for the job. But inland areas would need a buried cable. To future-proof it a bit, it should probably be fiber, not copper. I don’t even want to estimate the kinds of costs it would take to put three or four thousand miles of fiber under the ground, with repeaters, protection, maintenance roads, and so on. To be honest, that $670m figure saved by the telecoms starts to look like a down payment.

But what other option is there? Connectivity is a necessity these days for prosperity. Without reliable internet, one is limited to places one can reach physically, which in rural areas may not be more than a few hundred or thousand people in a handful of towns. With reliable internet, the possibilities expand almost infinitely. Education and social awareness increases, and people can become involved in industries that require nothing but data to be exchanged — which makes up quite a lot of the economy these days. Some growth might be achieved by putting a little money into fishing or mining, but it’s nothing compared with the opportunity to take part in the world’s “virtual” economy, larger and more real than any local economy.

Necessity

It’s a problem without a definite solution, currently, but so was getting messages across the Atlantic in good time, until someone took the trouble to sink a telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland. This is one of those problems with continental scale.

Who will volunteer to undertake this enormous task? At this level of investment, it’s too great a risk for any one entity to take on alone. Google, for instance, isn’t going to just say “all right, we’ll build that billion-dollar fiber backbone for Africa.” And neither is the African Union, which likely has more important things to manage. And neither is the government of Canada, apparently, until absolutely necessary. Australia, on the other hand, is spending billions per year to establish high-speed internet in its most remote regions.

One option might be an international fund being contributed to by ISPs and telecoms; Canada alone raised half a billion in a few years on the subscriptions of perhaps 15 or 20 million people. A similar requirement in the US and other rich, connected countries, guaranteeing a certain level of outlay for the establishment of remote networks, would produce a very substantial sum of earmarked money. The telecoms would fight it, of course, but the deal could be sweetened with low-interest matching loans or what have you. I’m not a politician, if that wasn’t clear from the get-go, and I’m sure this idea of an international fund is astoundingly naive in many ways. But I can’t think of another way to advance the state of global connectivity, such is the size of the problem.

Right now there are thousands of communities like Nunavut, underserved and perhaps in danger of being extinguished through neglect. As Nunavut found, the internet is quickly changing from a convenience to a necessity. Not that even necessities are guaranteed by the government or global community — but it means something to class basic connectivity among such other basic public services as medical care, clean water, and police and fire departments.

It may be that research is underway that will make laying fiber or cable seem positively primitive, but I doubt there’s anything in Alcatel-Lucent or Cisco’s labs that’s going to obsolete basic broadband infrastructure. And skimming the income of an industry already in rapid expansion internationally seems a timely solution, however unpopular it may be among the carriers.

The internet is a promise. A promise that physical distances will be rendered irrelevant. At the moment that promise seems only half fulfilled, as the internet is limited by, of all things, physical distance. The world will be connected, though it be at great cost. Such has always been the trend. But those who would pay the greatest cost, as usual, stand to gain the most by it. They wouldn’t agree to it any other way, though a little coercion is sometimes necessary.

The ever-expanding Google corporation doesn't seem to care very much if people regard it as a creepy, evil monopolizer. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has talked to "at least two" private equity firms about helping them buy Yahoo, one of its major competitors. More »

edesio writes "Many satellites and spacecraft require accurate timing signals to ensure the proper operation of scientific instruments. In the case of GPS satellites, accurate timing is essential, otherwise anything relying on GPS signals to navigate could be misdirected. The third technology demonstration planned by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the Deep Space Atomic Clock. The DSAC team plans to develop a small, low-mass atomic clock based on mercury-ion trap technology and demonstrate it in space."

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Facebook CTO Bret Taylor responded to the oft-repeated maxim (“meme” is what he called it) that Facebook privacy settings are needlessly complex by asserting that “the majority of people on Facebook have modified their privacy settings” in a conversation with John Battelle at Web 2.0 Summit today.

While “most” can mean anything between 51% and 99%, Taylor was adamant that the Facebook privacy settings were intelligible, “If you talk to college students they know what their parents can see, they know what their ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend can see.” (I heard a “Yeah right” emanate from the audience when he said this.)

On the same privacy kick, Taylor brought up a little publicized feature of Facebook’s new Timeline called Activity Log, which can be accessed by toggling the View Activity feature next to Update Info in the upper right of your Timeline. Activity Log reveals all the data that you’ve shared on Facebook over time.

The new feature pane, which basically functions as a shortcut to privacy settings, allows you to customize the sharing of statuses. Whether or not it was easy to access the Facebook privacy settings before — And I’m going to go with NOT, as the company itself once revealed that only 15%-20% of  users had ever accessed the settings — there’s no question that it will be to access those settings as Timeline rolls out in the next couple of weeks.

“If we can give people granularity on these things … we can be successful,” Taylor said.

Google said it is making HTTPS security via SSL encryption the default option among searchers who are signed in, which should delight privacy buffs afraid of referrals floating around. - Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Oct. 18 said it will begin redirecting most of users signed into their Google accounts to the HTTPS version of Google.com, which encrypts searches that users perform, as well as the results. The encryption comes courtesy of SSL (Secure Socket Layer), a security standard us...

First time accepted submitter otaku244 writes "I spent a day in Vancouver this week while working in Seattle. While I enjoyed the area, some Vancouver citizen decided to enjoy my Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, I didn't discover this until I was already back at my Seattle hotel. Needless to say, I am quite miffed at the whole experience. Fortunately, I have LogMeIn installed on that machine. I provided the IP address to the VPD, but they say that laws don't allow warrants solely on the physical address tied to an IP. It sounds like the silver bullet is to take a picture of the person using the laptop. The question becomes, how do I convince the guy to run a script that will take a picture of him and smtp it to me? I promise to post pics of the guy if this get's pulled off successfully!"

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