Tag: Internet

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Facebook’s second drone test raises the bar

Facebook Aquila drone
Facebook’s Aquila drone takes to the air. (Facebook Engineering Photo)

The drive to provide global internet access from the air is more of a horse race in the wake of Facebook’s second test flight of its full-scale Aquila high-altitude drone – a flight that the company said was more successful than the first one.

Facebook is developing the ultralight, solar-powered drone as a platform for beaming down network connectivity from a height of more than 60,000 feet, for months at a time. The idea is to provide internet service – including, of course, access to Facebook and its advertisers – to some of the billions of people who are in areas too remote for existing avenues of access.

A year ago, Facebook’s first test flight ended in a crash that substantially damaged the aircraft, apparently due to a gust of wind that put the drone in the wrong configuration for landing.

It took months for Facebook to fine-tune the drone’s design for the second flight, conducted May 22 at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

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Toys that listen spark privacy concerns

Hello Barbie
Hello Barbie is designed to take part in conversations with kids. (Mattel Photo)

The kids who play with internet-connected toys such as Hello Barbie and CogniToys Dino may not fully realize their voices are being recorded – but when they find out, University of Washington researchers say even the little ones understand the privacy concerns.

“That’s pretty scary,” one child was quoted as saying.

The researchers explored the attitudes of kids and parents toward Wi-Fi-enabled toys in a study presented today at the CHI 2017 computer conference in Denver.

The study found strong support for parental controls, leading the researchers to recommend taking such controls to the next level. They suggested that toys should be designed to delete their recordings after a week, or that parents should be given the ability to delete conversations permanently.

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SpaceX updates plan for internet satellites

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch
SpaceX plans to launch its own satellites on Falcon 9 rockets, like the one shown here lifting off from NASA’s Launch Complex 39A in Florida. (SpaceX Photo)

SpaceX has laid out its latest schedule for the satellite broadband service it’s developing in the Seattle area, starting with the launch of a prototype satellite by the end of this year.

The ambitious plan foresees beginning the launch of operational satellites into low Earth orbit aboard Falcon 9 rockets in 2019, with the constellation reaching its full complement of 4,425 satellites by 2024.

That constellation would provide high-speed internet access to billions of people around the globe, beaming data via the Ku and Ka transmission bands to SpaceX’s laptop-sized user terminals. Another 7,500 satellites operating in the V-band could be added later to boost the network’s capabilities.

This week’s update came in testimony provided to the Senate Commerce Committee by Patricia Cooper, SpaceX’s vice president for satellite government affairs.

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Facebook tests ‘Tether-Tenna’ for broadband

Tether-Tenna demonstrated
Yael Maguire, who heads the Facebook Connectivity Lab, shows off the Tether-Tenna system during Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Jose, Calif. (Facebook Video)

Facebook is adding tethered helicopters known as “Tether-Tennas” to its toolkit for widening internet access around the globe, even in emergency situations.

The Tether-Tenna concept calls for sending a car-sized helicopter equipped with telecommunications equipment hundreds of feet up in the air, to provide connectivity in areas where wireless capacity has been lost due to a disaster or other emergency.

A tether keeps the copter anchored to the ground and provides the cable links for electricity and data, theoretically allowing the Tether-Tenna to stay on duty for months at a time.

“We call this a type of insta-infrastructure,” Yael Maguire, the head of the Facebook Connectivity Lab, said today during Facebook’s F8 developers conference in San Jose, Calif.

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SoftBank backs Intelsat-OneWeb merger

OneWeb satellite
An artist’s conception shows a OneWeb satellite in orbit. (OneWeb Illustration)

Intelsat and OneWeb today laid out plans for a mega-merger aimed at bolstering their satellite internet services, with a $1.7 billion investment boost from SoftBank.

The arrangement is a head-turner, due to the complicated conditions of the deal as well as its ambitious objective. It comes just a couple of months after Japan-based SoftBank announced a $1 billion investment in OneWeb, which is gearing up to launch a constellation of satellites for global internet access.

“We believe that combining Intelsat with OneWeb will create an industry leader unique in its ability to provide affordable broadband anywhere in the world,” Intelsat CEO Stephen Spengler said in a news release.

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Strobe tweet sparks seizure for Trump critic

Seizure graphic
A flashing graphic can cause people with epilepsy to suffer seizures.

Yes, flashing online images can set off an epileptic seizure – and Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald, a frequent critic of President-elect Donald Trump, says he’s planning legal action after just such an attack.

This isn’t the first time Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, has been hit with a griefing GIF. He reported facing a similar threat back in October when someone tagged him in a tweet showing a flashing online image of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been appropriated by extremists.

Strobe lights and rapidly flashing graphics can be epileptogenic – that is, capable of inducing seizures or other health effects for those with photosensitive epilepsy. One infamous case involved a Pokémon TV cartoon that sent hundreds of Japanese children to hospitals in 1997. (Mass hysteria may have played a role.)

In 2008, malicious Internet users posted hundreds of epileptogenic graphics to an online message board run by the Epilepsy Foundation, causing some patients to suffer headaches or seizures.

The causes of photosensitive epilepsy are poorly understood, but the phenomenon appears the primary visual cortex. In vulnerable people, the neural networks that handle rapid changes in imagery may be overly excitable, leading to sensory overload.

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How the Internet of Things is hitting home

In a 2011 video, Corning Glass showed off a lot of the technologies that would come to be known as the Internet of Things. The touchscreen bathroom mirror hasn’t yet come to pass, however. (Credit: Corning Glass via YouTube)
In a 2011 video, Corning Glass showed off a lot of the technologies that would come to be known as the Internet of Things. The touchscreen bathroom mirror hasn’t yet come to pass, however. (Credit: Corning Glass via YouTube)

Most consumers don’t know what “the Internet of Things” means, and People Power’s David Moss thinks he knows why.

“Before you can experience what an Internet of Things is, you actually first have to go out and buy an internet-connected thing,” he said Wednesday night at Town Hall Seattle, during an MIT Enterprise Forum presentation about intelligent homes. “And why would you go buy an internet-connecting thing if you don’t know what value it can add to your life?”

To capitalize on the Internet of Things, or IoT, People Power came up with a free app called Presence, which turns a spare smartphone or tablet into a Wi-Fi home security camera.

Moss said he was amazed to discover that the app was being used for much more than home security.

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Jeff Bezos compares space to the internet frontier

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos says he plans to spend his “Amazon winnings” on Blue Origin’s effort to build the heavy lifting infrastructure for space ventures. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says he’s trying to do for outer-space ventures what delivery services and the internet did for him: provide the “heavy lifting infrastructure” that will make it possible for entrepreneurs to thrive.

And he’s willing to commit billions of dollars of his “Amazon winnings” to make it so.

Bezos has talked about the parallels between the internet and space commercialization several times before. In April, for example, the subject came up during our fireside chat at the Space Symposium in Colorado.

But at this week’s Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco, Bezos made a strong linkage between the work being done at Amazon and the work being done at Blue Origin, the space venture he founded 16 years ago.

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Facebook founder bummed over satellite loss

Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg saw the Amos-6 satellite as the first step in Facebook’s plan to provide satellite internet access to underserved regions of the world.

Today’s loss of a Falcon 9 rocket and its satellite payload was a bummer for Facebook billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as for SpaceX billionaire founder Elon Musk.

“As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post (of course).

This weekend’s scheduled launch of the Amos-6 telecommunications satellite on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket would have marked the first step in Zuckerberg’s vision of providing low-cost internet access via satellite for millions if not billions of people in underserved regions of the world.

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The promise and politics of the Internet of things

When U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene and a Republican colleague set up a congressional caucus focusing on the Internet of Things, also known as IoT, some of her colleagues were puzzled.

Suzan DelBene
U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene

“We got many responses back to our office saying, ‘What’s the ‘Eye-Ott’ project?’” the Washington state Democrat recalled today during a Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce roundtable about “Eye-Ott” … that is, IoT.

Even now, a year after the IoT caucus was formed, a lot of policymakers aren’t up to speed about the implications of having everything from airplanes and refrigerators to the assembly lines where they’re made connected to the internet.

“Technology is moving quickly,” DelBene said. “Policy is not moving as quickly.”

You could say that about a lot of technological issues, of course, but the Internet of Things is a particularly tricky and fast-moving concept. The engineers at Kymeta – a venture that has its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and has the backing of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates – are finding more and more things that can be connected to the Internet of Things. Some experts estimate that as many as 38 billion devices around the world could be part of the IoT by 2020.

“IoT is a moving target,” Cate van Oppen, Kymeta’s business development manager, told GeekWire.

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