According to a Bloomberg report, Amazon has tested its own wireless network. As in a network that people would use to connect to the Internet. As in axing the middle man and essentially becoming a carrier or ISP on its own. As in potentially using a ‘Amazon Wireless’-type service to get on the Internet from our Amazon Kindle Fire tablets to shop on Amazon.com or stream Amazon Instant Videos. Crazy.
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Let’s not kid ourselves: We don’t control the Internet, the Internet controls us. Any notions to the contrary are foolish at best, but a new Kickstarter project called Circle wants to help families fight back against the Internet’s omnipresence with hardware and software that allows individual control of devices connected to a local network.
Circle isn’t a router, like the Skydog, which was created by the Xerox PARC company PowerCloud Systems and is based on a similar concept. Instead, it’s a network device that can communicate with your router, and with all of your connected devices, offering up a filter between your existing gear and the unfiltered Internet, allowing you to set limitations for kids’ devices based on age, time, ad content and more. You can receive notifications about different types of Internet activity to your own device, too, and get reports about both “negative” and “positive” browsing, Circle claims.
In other words, Circle makes you the NSA PRISM program for your own household, but with a little bit of China’s Great Firewall thrown in the mix. You can schedule timed access to different categories of site, so that Facebook or YouTube time doesn’t get crazy, cut off access temporarily via Pause mode, turn off access once it’s time for bed, and even block ads entirely on devices that your kids use. All of this is managed via an app for iPhone.
Circle says their solution is better because it doesn’t require setting up user profiles or installing nanny software on every individual device, and because it works with your existing router, you don’t need to get an expensive replacement or change any network settings.
The team behind Circle includes Tiebing Zhang, a former network security engineer for the Department of Defense, and Honeywell Wi-Fi control systems engineer, as well as Jelani Memory, an entrepreneur with experience in design, sports, business development and much more besides. Circle definitely manages to look the part, thanks possibly to founder and Product Designer Sean Kelly, but whether it can back up those good looks with performance remains to be seen.
Circle is $150 to pre-order via Kickstarter pledge, with an anticipated delivery date of August, 2014. Nice to see a hardware startup give itself a reasonable amount of time to deliver. The startup is also looking for roughly $250,000 in total funds to make the project work, which will take the working prototype that currently exists and make it production-ready.
For the first time in over two years, Yahoo came in at number on on ComScore‘s list of Top 50 US Web Properties. The list, which was just released today, is a bit of a surprise, as Yahoo hasn’t claimed the top position since May 2011. While initial speculation made it seem like the acquisition […]
Lavabit shut down its email services a couple weeks ago in response to governmental pressure regarding NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s account. At the time, founder Ladar Levison stated he was shutting down Lavabit because he didn’t want to “become complicit in crimes against the American people,” but didn’t expound upon what that statement meant due to a governmental gag order. The Guardian spoke with Levison recently, however, and while he still didn’t deliver details about his legal dealings with Uncle Sam, he did share some thoughts about governmental surveillance in general.
As you might expect, Levison is against ubiquitous governmental surveillance of communications between citizens. To that end, he’s calling for a change to be made in US law so that private and secure communications services can operate without being used as “listening posts for an American surveillance network.” He’s not wholly against the feds tapping phone lines, though, as he recognizes the role such surveillance plays in law enforcement. However, he thinks the methods that are being used to conduct that surveillance should be made public — not an unreasonable request, by any means. You can read Levison’s full take on the matter, along with a recounting of reasons behind Lavabit’s creation at the source below.
Source: The Guardian
Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.
My mom loves to tell the story about the first time I ever saw Star Wars.
“He was 6 years old,” she tells anyone within earshot. “Barely able to see over the seat in front of him, grasping a popcorn in one hand, soda in the other. It was the only time I ever let him drink soda,” she lies to assuage any doubts about her parenting abilities.
“Then the words come up, the ones that disappear into space. And the John Williams music. Joshua’s mouth drops open. He then clutched the popcorn and soda and didn’t touch them for the next two hours. He was lost in another world.”
The Chrome 30 beta has one of the longer lists of new features we’ve seen from the browser in quite some time. One of the most immediately visible will be a new option to search by image when you right-click or long-press on one. It’ll use your default search provider to perform the task, but chances are you’ll be using Google’s own top-notch photo-mining service. The Android edition is also revamping its various gestures to make them easier to perform and lessen the chance of accidentally triggering them. Now all the gestures are performed in the top tool bar: swipe left or right to switch tabs, down from the middle to initiate the tab selector or down from the upper right-hand corner to open the menu.
As if that wasn’t enough, the back-end tech is getting a slew of new features on both the desktop and mobile sides. The Android version of the Chrome beta now supports WebGL, the MediaSource API and DeviceMotion, for making use of the accelerometer in the browser. MediaSource is particularly useful for generating dynamic streams of content that can adjust bit-rates on the fly, based on the quality of the connection. On the desktop, a load of new APIs have been added to the Chrome App framework, including support for in-app payments and downloads. WebRTC and speech recognition have also received improvements across all platforms. You can find out more details at the source and download the new Chrome beta at the more coverage links below.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Google
Source: Chromium Blog, Chrome Blog
Well, this is rather peculiar. The Nasdaq stock market — the entire Nasdaq, which lists major tech firms such as Apple and Facebook — has temporarily suspended all trading due to a technical issue. The exchange sent an alert to traders at 12:14PM ET today announcing that it was halting all trading “until further notice,” according to a New York Times report. Reuters is reporting that Nasdaq will reopen trading soon, but with a 5-minute quote period. The market will not be canceling open orders, however, so firms that don’t want their orders processed once everything’s up and running should cancel their orders manually now. It’s not entirely clear what caused the issue, or how and when it will be resolved, but you better believe it’s causing some commotion on Wall Street, and could impact traders for days and months to come.
Update (2:28PM ET): CNBC and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Nasdaq will resume limited trading beginning at 2:45PM ET.
Update (2:32PM ET): CNBC is now reporting that trading will resume with just two securities at 2:45PM ET. Full trading will begin at 3:10PM ET.
Update (3:28PM ET): It appears that trading has resumed as of 3:25PM ET.
Update (5:47PM ET): One final tweet here from CNBC. Nasdaq is claiming that today’s issues were resolved within 30 minutes. The remaining 2.5 hours were used to coordinate the re-opening.
Update (6:29PM ET): Nasdaq has issued an official statement following today’s market close. In part, it reads: “NASDAQ OMX will work with other exchanges that are members of the SIP to investigate the issues of today, and we will support any necessary steps to enhance the platform.”
Filed under: Internet
Source: Nasdaq
Sure, we hear about DARPA’s robots all the time, but they’re not the only things keeping the agency busy. Take CBMEN, for example — a DARPA project that’s goal is to create a private ad-hoc data network for the military, and it’s recently completed initial field testing. CBMEN, or Content-Based Mobile Edge Networking, allows soldiers to share images and other info without a traditional mobile internet connection. Each device loaded with the CBMEN software will automatically blast data to other hardware within reach via WiFi, cellular and radio frequencies — no intermediate infrastructure required. Early trials of the tech using Android smartphones and Army Rifleman Radios were deemed successful. We don’t know if CBMEN will ever be available to civilians, but seeing as DARPA mentioned its potential use in disaster response operations, it’s not entirely impossible. Before anyone else can test drive the nebulous network, though, it first has to ace the second phase of field testing that aims to make it more efficient and secure.
Filed under: Cellphones, Networking, Internet
Luckily, most of us don’t have to think about the tangled infrastructure that keeps the internet ticking along. But, as profiled by Wired, that’s the obsession of the crew at CoreOS, who are building an operating system it ambitiously hopes will help make the web tidier and more nimble. It’s underpinned by Chrome OS, which the team aims to fork so that it can run every web service imaginable. That’d give smaller players in the web server game access to modular web infrastructure tech, like that used by Google on desktops and laptops with ChromeOS. It would also keep servers up-to-date automatically without the need to install brand new versions of an operating system — a peril-fraught hassle administrators often postpone as long as possible. If successful, the project could result in better server security, quicker response to evolving web technologies and less downtime. CoreOS is still early in its development, but the group has already sold another of its open source projects to cloud player Rackspace, and counts Linux kernal specialist Greg Kroah-Hartman among its collaborators. For more, check Wired’s in-depth take on it at the source.
[Image credit: Wired]
Source: Wired
Before you know it, you’ll be enjoying a cleaner, shinier Firefox UI on Android — but not before Mozilla gets the more adventurous to test it out. The brand-spanking new interface merges the Start Page and the Awesomescreen, which is what you see after tapping on the URL bar. Thus, it will house your history, bookmarks, reading list and most visited websites in one place. While Mozilla UI engineer Lucas Rocha calls it the “biggest UI change in Firefox for Android” since the app was released, the update isn’t quite yet ready. If you’re unafraid of testing unstable releases, however, you can take the new UI for a spin via Firefox Nightly — Mozilla’s launchpad for new features. Everyone else, feel free to head past the break for a comparison image of the current and future interfaces.
Via: Android Police
Source: Lucas Rocha, Firefox Nightly
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