Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Skylon spacecraft unveiled
A British company called Reaction Engines has unveiled plans for a new unmanned, reusuable earth to orbit spacecraft. The ship will be able to carry 12 tons of cargo into orbit and then return to earth. The spacecraft uses a new kind of dual use rocket engine that is air-breathing for take off and then switches to liquid oxygen in the upper atmosphere. The company says it will take about ten years to get the design into space. In the meantime, the firm's Web site has a really nice animation of operations with the ship, and sci fi buffs will recognize a hat tip to Stanley Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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Is iPhone the interface?
Ed Dreistadt sent me this link about using the iPhone as an in-vehicle interface for information like tire pressure and reminders about changing your oil. One key design feature of the iPhone is its interoperatbility--it has WiFi, so it can talk to any other WiFi device, it supports standard email and Web data, and it has an open software API so it is fast and easy to write custom applications for the iPhone. Small start up software shops (usually one or two people) are writing all kinds of software that use the iPhone to control other devices or as an interface to information in other places--because it's easy and fast. Other smartphones are finally starting to roll out that offer many of the same features, but the iPhone has an enormous head start.
Technology News:
Verizon cracks down on spam
Verizon gets a pat on the back for cracking down on spam. The company has announced that it will finally close Port 25 on its mail servers. Port 25 allows email be sent without any authentication, making it easy for spammers to use "zombie" PCs infected with spambot software to send spam email. The change will make it more difficult to send spam from infected PCs and will also make it easier to identify infected machines, since the infected machines will have to now provide authentication before sending the spam. Judging from the comments in the this article, anyone who provides PC support for a fee will see a surge in business helping some home users make the change. A single setting buried in each user's email client on their PC has to be changed; it only takes a minute if you know where it is, but if you don't, it can be frustrating (you won't be able to send mail until it is changed). Verizon will likely provide detailed instructions for a variety of email software.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Researcher cracks face recognition
A Vietnamese researcher has cracked face recognition technology that has been built into some laptops. Built in or add-on cameras are designed to do facial recognition with the aim of making the laptop more secure. But the researcher found the software could be easily duped by displaying a picture of the owner, and a brute force attack (by showing the software many face images in succession) also worked.
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Design Nine has a Twitter feed
Those of you that are using Twitter can now get my blog news via Twitter.
Rural Wyoming business creates 700 home-based jobs with fiber
Via Broadband_Report's Twitter feed, here is an NPR story that shows the impact fiber can have in rural areas. An entrepreneurial start up business in tiny Ten Sleep, Wyoming (pop. 350) is on track to employ 700 home-based workers by the end of this year. The business? Teaching English to Koreans. Oh, and the 15,000 students are in Korea.
Why does this work? Ten Sleep has fiber, which enables inexpensive hosting of the live two-way video connections needed to support the individual student-teacher sessions.
How about your rural community? Would 700 new jobs help the local economy? And these are green jobs--no commuting, no use of fossil fuels to get to work. These folks pour a cup of coffee and walk to work--in the next room.
Technology News:
100 meg fiber connections are $11/month in Japan
Danny Choo guestblogs at BoingBoing about getting a SECOND 100 megabit fiber connection at his home in Japan. Why get a second connection? He's using it run a server, and the cost is only $11/month for the first year of service. The second year, the price goes up to a whopping $52 per month. One interesting tidbit if you read through the photo gallery--Japanese building codes require telecom conduit to be installed in homes and apartments during construction, so that fiber cables can be pulled quickly and easily into the premise. How many localities or states in the U.S. require this "Internet ready" approach (which adds only a few hundred dollars to the cost of a new home)?
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Community news and projects:
iPhone and iPod Touch grow in market share
A new study of mobile access to the Web indicates that in less than two years, Apple's share of that market has grown to 51%, with the popularity of the iPod Touch growing rapidly. The Blackberry is in second place with 19%, and most other portable devices with a Web browser have much smaller shares.
Technology News:
Pay a toll to go to the grocery store?
A section of a Colorado highway now has cashless toll booths. High resolution cameras take a picture of the license plate on each car passing through the toll plaza. If the car does not have an EasyPass, the license plate is matched with vehicle registration records and you get a bill at the end of the month. While this system reduces costs by elminating the expense of tolltakers and should speed traffic, the technology could be applied on local roads by governments starved for cash to maintain roads. Privacy issues abound, since the system creates a record of where you have been, meaning the government and/or civil lawyers can rummage through those records later for evidence.
Knowledge Democracy:
Facebook changes content rights
Facebook has quietly changed its terms of service. Formerly, if you canceled your account, all your content was deleted and that was that. Under the new terms, Facebook retains an "irrevocable, perpetual" license allowing the company to do whatever it likes with whatever you have posted.
The change is likely an indication that Facebook ad revenue is not paying all the bills, and they want the ability to harvest email addresses and contact information and resell the data forever, basically.
While this is an issue in its own right, another issue is the potential for legal discovery to create problems for people years or decades later. For example, someone in their forties who is being sued might find out the opposing attorney has subpoenaed data from a Facebook or Google account that you had closed out twenty years ago. There is no "free" in these "free" services, and these kinds of service agreements continue to underscore the need for local services that have some degree of community control over the terms of use and content. Facebook is an interesting social networking tool with many good things in its favor, but the buyer must beware.
Updated....
Today (2/18/2009) Facebook reversed course and has reverted to the previous Terms Of Service (TOS). There was a huge online backlash against the proposed changes. Kudos to Facebook for recognizing a mistake and fixing it.
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