AT&T Jumps Into the 5G Race

AT&T on Friday announced plans to start testing 5G technology, with a possible limited commercial rollout before the end of 2016. 5G offers the promise of besting the speeds of today's fastest wireless networks by a factor of 10 to 100, through the use of millimeter waves, network function virtualization, and software-defined networking.

Through a collaboration with Ericsson and Intel, AT&T will be ramping up its efforts to bring 5G to market starting in the second quarter of this year. The planned tests follow extensive research, patent filings, and the development of software-defined networking, which allows AT&T to update systems without touching the hardware -- a faster, more efficient method of introducing new versions of programs and technology, the company said.

Bumps in the 5G Road

The race to 5G isn't without its challenges, however. It's no small feat to create a working fixed broadband network that delivers at least a gigabit of speed to consumer and business customers.

"Some of the things AT&T will be testing for are power and performance in rain or other disruptive weather conditions, like cold," said Fletcher Cook, AVP of global media communications at AT&T.

"If it goes well in the summer, you could start seeing point-to-point limited commercial availability for limited fixed broadband soon after," he told TechNewsWorld.

However, "that isn't for the wireless phone, wide-area network type 5G," Cook pointed out. "That's much longer term, because we have the standards that need to be sorted."

AT&T is working diligently with IEEE to establish uniform standards, he said. "The standards piece is the biggest hurdle. Identifying how networks between carriers will work and how those standards are set are two things we've got to figure out."

Driving Forces

Advances in new technologies, coupled with the rise in using smartphones for bandwidth-gobbling video consumption, are propelling AT&T and other companies to get 5G networks up and running.

"The combination of connected cars, the Internet of things, speed, and new technology like virtual reality is driving this," Cook said.

Marketing agencies also are jumping on the new tech bandwagon.

"Ever since CES, especially, the stage has been set for 2016 to be the year virtual reality becomes a household name," Cook noted. "It's become a checkbox for marketers and creative directors to have in their marketing strategies. For example, there are a lot of Fortune 500 brands that are making content for YouTube360, Facebook360 and Little Star; this is a new way to get their message out."

The trick will be finding enough bandwidth to seamlessly deliver all that content. As more and more people are investing in affordable means of watching VR content -- like Google Cardboard which requires only a viewer (priced as low as US$6.99) and a smartphone -- the demand for faster speeds and more bandwidth is growing exponentially.

"Streaming a lot of virtual reality content requires a lot of bandwidth," observed Austin Mace, CEO of Subvrsive.

"The introduction of a 5G network would definitely accelerate the mass adoption of virtual reality because it gets content to people faster," he told TechNewsWorld. "One of the biggest bottlenecks we face in live-streaming VR content is data speeds, so I can see this really alleviating that."


Source:

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/ATT-Jumps-Into-the-5G-Race-83114.html

FBI Paid Carnegie Mellon $1M to Crack User IDs, Claims Tor

The Tor Project last week claimed the FBI paid Carnegie Mellon University $1 million to crack the anonymity of Tor users.

Tor's claim appears to have been triggered by areport last week in Motherboard that said the FBI's arrest of an alleged member of the Silk Road 2.0 drug ring was based on "information obtained by a 'university-based research institute' that operated its own computers on the anonymous network used by Silk Road 2.0."

That network was Tor, and the research institute was Carnegie Mellon, Tor said.

"Apparently these [Carnegie Mellon] researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes," Tor Project Director Roger Dingledine wrote in a statement posted on the Tor website.

"We have been told that the payment to CMU was at least $1 million," he added.

Dingledine did not respond to our request for comment for this story. The million-dollar figure came from "friends in the security community," he told Wired.

The university declined to comment for this story.

Kicked Off Network

Tor discovered the attack on its network in July 2014.

"If a person controls a large fraction of the computers that operate the Tor network, there are attacks that they can run that correlate where a user's traffic is being bounced around the network," explained Matthew Green, a professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins University.

"By doing that, you can de-anonymize users, actually track them back to their real address," he told TechNewsWorld.

After identifying the computers, which had been on the network since January, Tor took action.

"They kicked the computers off the network. There was also a bug in the Tor software that was making it easier to correlate the hops, so they fixed that bug," Green said.

"That seems to have fixed the problem," he added, "but there's always a worry that someone will come up with a new way to de-anonymize users."

However, Tor's trust model could lead to future problems with the network, suggested Lance Cottrell, chief scientist with Ntrepid.

"They've worked hard with the technology to prevent this, but the reality is there's effectively no vetting of new Tor nodes," he told TechNewsWorld.

"You sort of know a fraction of the network is absolutely untrustworthy to begin with, and you're hoping that it's a low enough fraction to keep you safe," added Cottrell. "That's the assumption that seems to be breaking down."

Although Tor uncovered the attack, it still didn't know who was behind it -- until August 2014.

Then, at the Black Hat conference held in Las Vegas, two CMU researchers, Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, were scheduled to present a session titled "You Don't Have to Be the NSA to Break Tor: De-anonymizing Users on a Budget."

"In our analysis, we've discovered that a persistent adversary with a handful of powerful servers and a couple gigabit links can de-anonymize hundreds of thousands of Tor clients and thousands of hidden services within a couple of months," the pair noted in a description of their presentation.

The talk was canceled, which led Tor to believe that the researchers were behind the attack on the network earler in the year.

Neither Volynkin nor McCord responded to a request for comment for this story.

Ethics Questions

"We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users," Tor's Dingledine wrote.

"The research that these researchers did does not seem to have been that careful," Johns Hopkins' Green said.

"They certainly went after some criminals, but along the way they could de-anonymize people whose governments would torture them if they found out who they were," he said.

"As computer science researchers, when we do this kind of work, we have these incredibly strong requirements to meet ethical standards and have our work reviewed by university research review boards. It does not sound like that happened with this work," Green added.

"It crosses an ethical line, because you're vacuuming up the data of lots of innocent people," added Jeremy Gillula, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"For a long time, computer science researchers haven't thought about the ethical aspects of their research, because their research has just been about computers," he told TechNewsWorld, "but when it starts to affect people, researchers have to start thinking about the ethical implications."

Sidestepping Civil Liberties

The FBI's action threatens more than research ethics -- civil liberties are at stake, Dingledine maintained.

"Legitimate privacy researchers study many online systems, including social networks," he added. "If this kind of FBI attack by university proxy is accepted, no one will have meaningful Fourth Amendment protections online and everyone is at risk."

An FBI spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

Although Tor is touted as a way to protect political dissidents in repressive regimes and whistleblowers, criminals also have used it to hide their illegal activity.

"You have to take the good with the bad when it comes to these kinds of anonymous communications networks," Green said.

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82759.html

Google Tears Down App Walls

Google on Wednesday began streaming content from certain mobile apps in its search results, with no download required.

The company is working initially with nine partners, including Weather, Chimani, My Horoscope, New York Subway and Hotel Tonight.

Technology Google acquired when it purchased Agawi lets it stream virtual versions of mobile apps.

Devs who want their app content streamed in response to search results have to implement Google's app-indexing API. Apps no longer need to have related websites.

How App Streaming Works

Users have to be in Google Search on a mobile device and must run Android Lollipop or higher. They need a good WiFi connection.

The app streaming feature currently is live only in the United States.

"Being able to run the streaming apps from a smartphone that doesn't have them loaded is simply running them in a browser. In effect, they're cloud-based apps," explained Mike Jude, a research manager at Frost & Sullivan. "That's why a good WiFi connection is necessary."

Response to the announcement has been overwhelmingly positive.

"Basically that means you will be able to see some content in the corresponding apps without actually having to install them," commented Andreas Proschofsky on the Google Search blog. "Neat."

It's "a bold move," wrote Vilmar Simson.

However, "breaking down the app install barriers will lead to more app-first development," cautioned Brad Brewster. "If this works, websites as we've known will begin dyin

In-App Search Results

Google started surfacing in-app content along with other results two years ago, likely to prevent its search functionality from becoming obsolete.

"Apps were largely seen as a way to make Google Search redundant for anything the app did," noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

"Google is responding by effectively making search central to app use," he told the E-Commerce Times.

That actually could "make certain apps redundant, or steal much of the value from them," Enderle pointed out. "Well played."

Google has more than 100 billion deep links to app pages in its index, including in popular apps such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Thousands of apps on both iOS and Android already have been indexed.

App content surfaces on 40 percent of searches people conduct on Android, Google said.

Winners and Losers

This technology will let consumers begin with a search and then be guided to the app, "so you won't have to know which app is needed," Enderle said.

Others will suffer, though.

The app-streaming capability "is primarily a way to stream Google apps," Jude told the E-Commerce Times.

"These, of course, are aimed at driving Google content and advertising," he pointed out.

"This may substantially lower the value of apps, because Search will choose for the user, and the value will be in the aggregation of apps, not in any one app," Enderle suggested. App developers may then cease to support platforms involved in the technology.

For businesses in general, the technology "gives Google far more control, so businesses that work well with it should benefit over the short term," Enderle remarked. "Those that don't, not so much."

Advertisers "can again look to Google as the central place to go for ads," he said. "If the apps don't make it, one of the major reasons will be Google making them redundant en masse."

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/mobile-tech/82764.html

12-Mile-High Tower May Launch Spacecraft Horizontally

Thoth Technology last month won patents in the U.S. and UK for a space elevator -- a 12-mile-high tower that could herald a new era of space transportation.

If all goes as planned, the freestanding ThothX Tower will be the tallest structure in the world by far. Dubhai's Burj Khalifa, currently the world's tallest building, is a mere half mile in height.

Thoth plans to build a rigid inflatable structure around an elevator that will be actively guided through its pneumatically pressurized interior.

Spaceport One

Launching spacecraft from the tower would be about 30 percent more fuel-efficient than using Earth-bound rockets, Thoth has projected, and the tower would be reusable.

Along with making launches more energy efficient, the ThothX tower would eliminate one of the most volatile variables fundamental to spaceflight. From the tower, spacecraft would launch horizontally rather than vertically.

Vertical landing technology, currently under development, would complete the puzzle.

"Landing on a barge at sea level is a great demonstration, but landing at 12 miles above sea level will make space flight more like taking a passenger jet," said Thoth CEO Caroline Roberts.

In addition to serving as a spaceport, the ThothX Tower could generate wind energy, the company said. It also could be used for communications and tourism.

Meet the Jetsons

Imagine this: A caravan of driverless cars, gliding through turns faster and safer than humans could do, brakes, idles and powers down. Before the fleet, somewhere in Wyoming, lies one of the United States' two spaceports -- two of eight in the world -- which, like the others, scrapes the regulatory 12-mile ceiling.

In this scenario describing one of humankind's possible futures, anxious family members and caffeinated media await the explorers who embarked on the first expedition to Mars -- the one that was supposed to be one-way; the one the was supposed to fail.

The space elevator concept could offer more than an alluring fantasy for anyone intrigued by space exploration but impatient with the slow pace of its progress.

Show Me the Engineering

Thoth's proposed embodiment of a space elevator is "an intriguing, promising concept, because a successful design would hugely reduce the fuel required to put a vehicle into space, thus lowering costs and increasing the feasibility of commercial space travel," said Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT.

Promise is one thing but practicality is another, he noted. Thoth has been aiming to eliminate the hard tether or cable that previous designs have required, because material of suitable strength doesn't yet exist.

"In other words, there are numerous stages of simple workability for the structure that Thoth has yet to demonstrate," King told TechNewsWorld. "Practicality comes after that."

Stability is a key concern, noted Roger Entner, principal analyst at Recon Analytics.

"It's promising -- it's just that physics stands in the way," he told TechNewsWorld. "I think transmuting lead into gold would also be an awesome idea."

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82394.html

Found on Mars: Cool, Clear Water?

Dark, narrow streaks going downhill at four locations on Mars are evidence of water flowing on the planet, NASA confirmed Monday.

Called "recurring slope lineae," the streaks are approximately the length of a football field, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They are believed to have been formed by the seasonal flow of water.

Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology noticed these lineae as an undergraduate student at the University of Arizona in 2010. He and seven coauthors wrote a report on the research, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

All four locations, including the walls of the Garni and Hale craters, show evidence of hydrated salts, most likely magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate, Ojha wrote.

The findings strongly support the team's hypothesis that recurring slope lineae form as a result of current water activity on Mars, he said.

"They're likely 95 percent correct," said William Newman, a professor of earth and space sciences at UCLA.

"We know there's water in [Mars'] polar caps -- that's irrefutable -- so the picture they paint is plausible," he told TechNewsWorld.

Figuring Out the Proof

Ojha noticed back in 2010 that the lineae appeared during Mars' warm seasons, when temperatures were above -23 degrees Celsius, and seemed to indicate the downhill flow of some liquid. They would fade in cooler seasons.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is equipped with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, made the initial observations. HiRISE observations have documented recurring slope lineae at dozens of sites on Mars, NASA said.

Ojha's study pairs HiRISE observations with mineral mapping by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The researchers found the hydrated salts only when the seasonal features were widest, Ojha said, suggesting that either the dark streaks themselves, or a process that formed them, were the source of the hydration.

Where's the Water Coming From?

Mars' atmosphere consists of about 95.3 percent carbon dioxide and 2.7 percent nitrogen. Water is a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, which raises the question of where the water could come from.

Perchlorate salts are powerful oxidizing agents, which would explain how the oxygen in the carbon dioxide might be freed to combine with hydrogen -- but where's the hydrogen?

Hydrogen "exists as a trace element, but it's highly reactive and would likely bond to any free oxygen to form water," said Mike Jude, a research manager atFrost & Sullivan.

"Even Earth has a hard time retaining free hydrogen," he told TechNewsWorld.

The major source of water in the inner solar system is comets, and Mars could have retained "a significant fraction" of that water, UCLA's Newman speculated.

Daily temperature changes are severe on Mars and could cause liquids to freeze and crack the surface, creating more places for liquid to collect, as happens in alpine terrains on Earth, he said.

The Meaning of Water

The existence of water posits life on Mars, although other requirements would have to be fulfilled.

Still, a non-oxygen-breathing life form could well exist on Mars.

Here on Earth, scientists in 2010 discovered three anoxic life forms, meaning life forms that don't need oxygen to live. They belong to the phylum Loricifera.

Further, just what passes for water on Mars has yet to be determined.

While explanations for the lineae revolve around water, "the nature of the water involved is subject to some debate," Frost's Jude said.

Whether that will impact any native life forms on Mars, and how, remains to be seen.

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82543.html

NASA Awards Space Robot R&D Projects to MIT, Northeastern

NASA on Tuesday announced it has awarded one R5 humanoid robot each toMIT and Northeastern University to conduct research on adapting them for use in space.

The universities were selected from U.S. entries in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge held in June.

NASA seeks to engage a diverse and talented pool of engineers and scientists to develop and test unique solutions that will "have the potential to significantly enhance, or potentially enable, missions that we can only dream of today," NASA program executive Ryan Stephan told TechNewsWorld.

Each team will receive up to $250,000 a year for two years. They also will get onsite and virtual technical support from NASA.

NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate is funding the projects.

Autonomous and tele-operated robots will reduce humans' exposure to potentially toxic conditions on other planets or asteroids, said Mike Jude, a research manager at Frost & Sullivan.

Robots would cut costs for initial Mars explorations because "humans could stay in Mars orbit or perhaps land on Phobos" one of Mars' two moons, "and operate ground robots in real time," he told TechNewsWorld.

"Highly autonomous, reliable robotic systems will be required for a variety of missions and functions to prepare and support human Mars missions," Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate, told TechNewsWorld.

What the Universities Will Do

Northeastern's team will write algorithms for the R5, known as "Valkyrie," that will improve walking and balance control, Steve Gaddis, a NASA director, told TechNewsWorld.

"We will focus on advancing Valkyrie's autonomy through software development and rigorous validation," said team leader Taskin Padir, an associate professor at Northeastern. These will be in three areas: full-body constrained-motion planning and control, grasping of unknown objects, and human-robot interaction.

"We will help NASA validate tasks relevant to future space missions, such as exiting a habitat airlock hatch and using a ladder to reach the terrestrial surface; removing a communications or power cable from soft goods storage and attaching it to a connector at least 10 meters away while traversing an irregular rocky terrain; repairing or replacing damaged components on complex equipment, such as a broken valve; and collecting or recovering desired samples or items," he told TechNewsWorld.

Northeastern's team will use teleoperations to get Valkyrie to perform various tasks, then progress to full autonomy.

The team will undergo training at NASA's Johnson Space Center, Padir said. Valkyrie is scheduled for delivery in February.

MIT will develop algorithms for Valkyrie.

Valkyrie Details

Valkyrie, which was introduced in 2013, is a 6-foot-tall, 290-pound robot, designed with an extended chest area and clothed in custom-designed and fitted panels of fabric-wrapped foam armor.

Its arms have seven degrees of freedom; its wrists and hands, which have three fingers and a thumb, are actuated; and it has a head that can tilt and swivel, a waist that can rotate, legs with six degrees of freedom, and feet with six-axis force-torque sensors, according to IEEE Spectrum.

Valkyrie has a removable battery with a one-hour life; its arms are removable and can be swapped with each other.

It also has lots of sensors -- cameras and Lidar in its head, more cameras and sonar in its abdomen, and still more cameras in its forearms, knees and feet.

Another Option

NASA should have selected the RoboSimian for R&D instead of Valkyrie, which "was a piece of junk from the moment it was turned on," argued Keith Cowing, editor at NASA Watch.

Valkyrie placed last in the DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2013, he told TechNewsWorld.

Its bosom design is stupid "because, like humans, you want the center of gravity close to the hips," said Cowing, a former space biologist at NASA.

However, one consideration for robotics is that they perform human tasks using human-designed equipment, Frost & Sullivan's Jude pointed out, which "makes R5 or something like it a good choice for precursor missions."

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/82774.html

Blue Origin Rocket Sticks Landing

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket this week made history when it landed intact in Texas. The unmanned crew capsule returned safely from a test flight that took it 330,000 feet into the air.

The New Shepard could become the first reusable booster -- it's scheduled to return to space in a few months. It's now tucked into a storage facility at a launch site in West Texas.

Blue Origin, founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, aims to lay the foundation for an enduring human presence in space -- a goal that reusing rocket boosters could help to achieve.

The company's effort to bring back a rocket earlier this year was doomed by a hydraulic failure. This time, the New Shepard succeeded in using its hydraulic thrusters and fins to slow and guide its descent.

This time, the rocket was able to weather crosswinds whirling at speeds of up to 119 mph. It's BE-3 engine powered on to slow the descending rocket from a speed of about 387 mph to 4 mph during the last 100 feet of its landing.

Blue Origin's Big Implications

Commercial spaceflight companies have been engaging in a quietly competitive race, with each careful not to give away too much, while working to gain mindshare despite the public's loss of passion for space exploration following the Apollo missions.

Tesla Motor CEO Elon Musk's SpaceX and others have been pursuing reusability aggressively, believing that it is one of the "most game-changing technology developments available in the immediate future," said Dale Ketcham, chief of strategic alliances at Space Florida.

"The deployment of that capability into the marketplace will provide a competitive cost advantage to commercial launch providers that will be unrivaled," he told TechNewsWorld.

While the rules and dynamics of this current competition are different, the space program began as a race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, said Ketcham. The Soviet Union jumped ahead of the U.S. by being the first to put a satellite into orbit -- Sputnik -- and then by sending the first human into space, he noted.

"We ended up winning the big prize, with Neal Armstrong's footprints on the moon, but it was the race that drove the accomplishments which we all remember and continue to benefit from," Ketcham said.

Dream Again

What's exciting now is that two of America's most successful entrepreneurs have been engaged in a highly competitive race to dominate the market for commercial space, said Ketcham.

"Both of these initiatives are occurring without government money or even government customers," he said. "This is the private marketplace doing what it does best, and America will be the better for it. This commercial race can again inspire and excite the American public."

Despite the likes of Bezos and Musk replacing the U.S. government's long-term leadership, public interest in this latest race for space "seems notably lacking" when compared to engagement with the early days of space exploration, observed Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

"It's hard to say why that's the case, though the current attitude of U.S. society toward science seems stuck between profound ignorance and deep cynicism," he told TechNewsWorld. "If competition between Bezos and Musk can somehow reverse or repair that situation, then more power to them."

While the public may be slow to show enthusiasm for the rapid rise of the commercial spaceflight industry, the accomplishments are no less profound. Blue Origin deserves kudos for being the first firm to perform a successful vertical takeoff and landing with a rocket, King said. "If the company can press ahead from this achievement into successful orbital travel and landing, it will be a huge leap forward for commercial space travel."

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Blue-Origin-Rocket-Sticks-Landing-82797.html