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Massachusetts expands trial of train-Fi: The state's train authority will spend $1.4m to expand a trial program for Wi-Fi on certain state commuter lines to all 258 coaches. The program's formal launch is Wednesday. The annual cost is estimated at $300,000, but the authority didn't try to estimate savings or other expenses involved in shifting people from cars to trains as a result of the service. Skyhook says 300 iPhone apps access location: Location guru Brady Forrest breaks down the data about how many iPhone applications are aware of their surroundings. No numbers here about the number of queries per day Skyhook is handling from iPhones, which we would all love to know, but is certainly proprietary to their deal...
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ElcomSoft accelerates cracking WPA/WPA2 keys: The Russian firm offers what it delicately terms password recovery software. They've now paired their WPA/WPA2 key crackin with the power of graphic processing units (GPUs), the brains that drive video cards, and which can carry out certain kinds of calculations vastly faster than CPUs, a computer's main processor. (Apple plans to tap GPUs for Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, due out next year.) ElcomSoft claims a 100fold increase in the ability to brute force extract a WPA or WPA2 key. Further, their software can be used in a distributed fashion. A network of computers with fast graphics cards could provide the equivalent of multiple supercomputers' worth of focused cracking power. Short WPA/WPA2 passphrases...
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Mozilla releases early version of geolocator technology: Geode, an add-on for Firefox 3.0 from Mozilla Labs, uses Skyhook Wireless's Wi-Fi positioning system to provide approximate coordinates for your current location. A more full-blown geolocation service will be built into Firefox 3.1, allowing choice among providers, use of GPS, and other extensions. Firefox 3.0 with this add-on supports a Web site querying a user's location; the browser prompts the surfer for whether they want to reveal this and at what granularity (exact, neighborhood, or city). Mozilla is supporting the W3C Geolocation spec in both this add-on and the full 3.1 implementation. Starbucks page gone missing from Apple, Engadget discovers: Apple's had a page up about its partnership with Starbucks, one that's...
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A few days ago, I wrote that CSIRO had come out on top in an appeal by Buffalo of a district court decision: CSIRO, the Australian technology agent, has a broad patent that appears to cover aspects of OFDM, a technique for improving throughput in multi-path (reflective) signal environments. OFDM is used in 802.11a, g, and n, as well as in WiMax, and other wireless technologies. CSIRO has Cisco signed as a licensee, as Cisco bought an Australian firm a few years ago (this covers Linksys as well), but other makers are fighting. Buffalo lost a district court decision and has an injunction preventing the import of Wi-Fi gear, which has likely cost them tens of millions of dollars. They're...
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Delta has mid-air reversal on filtering Web content: Delta said it wouldn't filter its in-flight Internet system (not yet launched), but now says it will have a short list of inappropriate sites that no one would disagree were inappropriate. That might work. While filtering is impossible to enforce on a broad scale, choosing a small list of sites the airline feels are off limits, that might balance some basic interests. Wi-Fi attraction for students: Nearly half of students surveyed would prefer Wi-Fi over beer at school. Three-quarters think Wi-Fi makes helps them get better grades. Take that, Lakehead University! MetroFi antennas won't fall like autumn leaves: Portland, Ore., must wait until April 2009 to declare MetroFi's Wi-Fi nodes abandoned and...
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The credit-card industry has finally revised rules to make WEP persona non grata: The PCI Security Standards Council was founded by Amex, Discover, JCB, Visa, and MasterCard, and each organization agreed to adopt the standards that the group decides on. The latest update of the Data Security Standard (DSS), drafted early this year, was adopted and released yesterday, and profoundly alters Wi-Fi security practices for any company that accepts any of major credit card. A summary can be downloaded under PCI DSS Summary of Changes. The new rules prohibit the use of the highly broken WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) standard as part of any credit-card processing--such as from a store terminal to a server--after 30-June-2010, and prohibit any new system...
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Philadelphia network has 100,000 monthly sessions: NAC, which took over Phila.'s network from EarthLink, has assumed full control at the end of a 3-month transition period, Wi-Fi Planet reports. The company said that sessions average 4 hours. The new owners are looking to entice Phila. to have them build a wireless public-safety network and offer business services as well. While NAC's head Derek Pew say that EarthLink didn't focus on "municipal and commercial usage," I'd argue that the statement is half right: EarthLink's plan was to offer such service, and their networks were built with that in mind; they just didn't get enough traction, such as a complete and well-functioning network, that would have allowed them to take the next...
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Devicescape has gone legit on the iPhone, iPod touch: I was tired of entering hotspot passwords 15 months ago, a few days after I bought the first-generation (2.5G) iPhone. I've been waiting ever since for Devicescape to bring their Wi-Fi connection software to the iPhone, even at one point jailbreaking my iPhone--rendering it able to install any software, not just that approved by Apple--in order to use an early package they'd developed. Devicescape has finally wended its way through Apple's tortuous application release process for the App Store, and its Easy Wi-Fi program can be yours for $1.99. (The application release date is 13-Aug-2008, but the press release about its availability showed up in my mailbox last night.) I purchased...
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Southwest Airlines will try out Row 44's satellite-backed Internet service on one plane this year: The discount carrier plans to equip one 737-700 with Row 44's Ku-band satellite Internet service by the end of the year for a 2-to-3 month trial. In first quarter 2009, FlightGlobal reports, other 737-700s will be added, and a variety of flight durations will be tested. Row 44 continues to claim what seems to me to be an impossibly high speed: here, Southwest is saying 31 Mbps downstream. I will believe this when I see it. Ku-band transponders are capable of very high speed data transmissions, but I'm not convinced that this rate is sustainable to each plane and represents actual net throughput. We'll see.
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Atheros has released an open-source version of the driver software that talks directly to its chips: The company has long maintained that it required a closed HAL (hardware abstraction layer) to prevent rogue developers from changing settings in its Wi-Fi chips that would cause the chips to perform activities that were against its interest. For instance, it's a/b/g chips can use the 4.9 GHz band, which is illegal in the U.S. and many other countries, but allowed in Japan. Those objections must have been overcome, as the firm is providing a full, ISC-licensed free software code base for their HAL for 802.11a/b/g chipsets. This should allow the ath5k project to create a fully Linux kernel integrated driver for Atheros chips...
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Broadcom adds Skyhook positioning to portfolio: Broadcom already has a variety of tools for allowing its chips to determine position quickly, including a ground-based system that tracks GPS satellite positions and uses this to feed out data over cell and other networks to provide assisted GPS, where a GPS receiver doesn't have to find satellites, just lock onto signals where it's told the satellites are located. Adding Skyhook means that Wi-Fi can be used as another variable in quickly providing a fix on coordinates, especially in locales where GPS signals penetrate weakly, such as urban canyons. The Minneapolis Wi-Fi provider uses point-to-point wireless for high-rise: Steve Alexander of the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune reports that residents of one 34-story building in...
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Go? No: Go Networks, a metro-scale Wi-Fi equipment maker acquired in Jan. 2007 by NextWave, is being shut down. Go announced their technology on 3-April-2006 at the height of interest in the municipal Wi-Fi market, at which point they thought their beamforming, MIMO gear would take hold. They believed they could provide superior coverage at far lower cost, especially when factoring in the need for fewer utility poles. As far as I can tell, they never had a huge win, and then the easy market evaporated. It's amazing to me that the four independent metro-scale firms have survived this long; all are privately held, and so we know only what's publicly announced about their well being. BelAir has scored the...
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This is a study I've been waiting for since the University of Essex research was released last year: New research using MRIs from the University of Regensburg, Germany, indicates that electrosensitives are suffering both cognitive and neurobiological reactions--but not to the presence or absence of electromagnetic signals that these sufferers believe are causing their symptoms. (The link is to an Economist summary; the abstract is all I can find online so far of the actual study.) Back on 25-July-2007, I wrote about the cross-disciplinary, tightly controlled study of electrosensitivity carried out by an Essex (UK) team with government and industry funding. The study was yet another in dozens that showed that self-identified electrosensitive sufferers performed no better at chance in...
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Trapeze Networks usually announces enterprise products and deployments, but not so with today's Chinese network rollout: Partnered with Commnet in China, the two firms will deploy 3,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in Hangzhou, a city of 6.5m. But rather than focus on a ubiuqitous network, it's clear from what's not stated in the press release that this is an efficient deployment of service where it's needed. The city has six urban districts that total 260 sq mi and nearly 2m people' 3,000 nodes couldn't possibly offer total coverage even if just those areas (rather than "eight metropolitan districts") were what was to be covered. But that's not really what's needed. The network will be built over the next 15 months.... Copyright ©2008 Glenn...
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In-flight call providers form lobbying group to dissuade formal ban on in-flight calling: FlightGlobal reports that OnAir and Aeromobile have formed the Passenger Communications Coalition--Peacekeeper missiles, anyone?--to prevent the Hang-Up Act that would provide a formal, instead of regulatory and procedural ban on placing phone calls in flight. OnAir's CEO makes the specious remark that this would be "putting the US behind the rest of the world." Hardly. Americans aren't used to paying $2.50 per minute in the air that used to be a typical ground roaming rate until EU regulators pushed hard. US flyers would (surveys show) prefer the broadband that American, Delta, and Virgin are in various stages of commitment to. In any case, how would having a...
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