Two Manawatu fathers have won a major battle in their fight to have wi-fi removed from their local school, TVNZ reports.

Fathers Damon Wyman and David Bird have been leading a campaign to remove the wireless networking from Te Horo School and replace it with cable-based internet due to concerns it could cause cancer and other health problems.

Science Media Centre manager Peter Griffin says the death of Te Horo pupil Ethan Wyman from a brain tumour was a tragedy for his family, friends and school mates, but that to blame it on wi-fi is wrong.

Mr Griffin notes there is no evidence anywhere in peer-reviewed literature to suggest wi-fi signals pose an elevated risk of developing brain cancers.

The board says it shares the government’s view that wi-fi is safe.

Tucked into the mammoth defense budget bill that President Obama signed into law on Thursday is a measure that virtually bars Russia from building about a half-dozen monitor stations on American soil that critics fear Moscow could use to spy on the United States or worse.

Russia first broached the idea of erecting the domed antenna structures here nearly two years ago, saying they would significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of its version of the Global Positioning System, the American satellite network that steers bomb-bearing warplanes to their targets and wayward motorists to their destinations.

Congressional Republicans, however, harbored suspicions that Russia had nefarious motives behind its plan

The monitor stations have been a high priority of President Vladimir V. Putin for years as a means to improve Moscow’s global positioning network — known as Glonass, for Global Navigation Satellite System — not only to benefit the Russian military and civilian sectors but also to compete globally with GPS.

Europe’s newly-minted 5GPPP Association plans to launch as many as 20 research projects in 2014, open to all comers, with a total budget of about 250 million euros. The ambitious effort, described in an interview with the new group’s chairperson, is one of a handful of collaborations around the globe to lay the groundwork for 5G, an ambitious vision for a next-generation network of networks that’s still being defined.

“No one really knows today what 5G will be because there are still several views, but it will include different access and radio systems,” said Werner Mohr, chairman of 5GPPP which will have an estimated budget of US$1.8 billion over its seven-year life.

When 5G arrives perhaps starting sometime in 2020, it could bring maximum date rates of as much as 10 or 20 Gbits/s, probably confined to dense urban areas. It may operate at millimeter or even centimeter frequencies of 30 to 300 GHz using new air interfaces.

“Given reports that various vendors and encryption algorithms have been compromised. Is it still possible to trust any commercial hardware routers or is ‘roll your own’ the only reasonable path going forward?”

Comment:

actually the obvious answer is that trust is not a binary thing. Evaluate your threat models. If you want to be safe from the NSA, and you are protecting information they want to know, then yes, I would say that eschewing any technology from corporations that are easily coerced by the NSA would be a good idea. Of course, that is practically impossible. But you do what you can. And wanting a device with all source available, in a form that is easy to (perhaps modify and) compile to a verifiable equivalent of the stock firmware and operating system would be the first obvious step.

Actually, the obvious answer is that you don’t have a choice. No matter how much effort you put into it, you will always be depending on third party hard- or software that simply have to trust. So, you want to solder your own PCB? Sure, go ahead, but your Ralink SoC is still manufactured somewhere in China. Don’t trust Cisco’s IOS? Sure, write your own, and let me know how you designed and manufactured your own ASICs.

Yes, there is a lot that you can do and I think the closest real answer to the poster’s question is to just get an OpenWRT capable router and compile from scratch, but to not trust anyone is simply not an option.

The European Commission officially formed the 5G Public-Private Partnership Association (5GPPP), aiming to accelerate work on fifth-generation cellular networks for 2020 and beyond. The effort follows the footsteps of the 3GPP, a de facto standards group that develops the specifications for today’s Long-Term Evolution (LTE) nets.

5GPPP is not the only group expected to work on standards for next-generation cellular networks, but it could become one of the most influential. For example, China successfully led a global effort to develop a variant of LTE after marginal success creating a version of 3G cellular.

Earlier this year a forerunner of Europe’s new 5GPPP group published a draft proposal for 5G. It laid out a broad vision and research agenda for next-generation cellular networks.

A group of 24 carriers, system makers, and research groups worked on the draft proposal. They included Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, France Telecom, Huawei, Intel, Nokia Solutions and Networks, and Telecom Italia.

Now that the Internet is on computers, phones, and eyeglasses, a lot of people think it’s time to get the Internet on everything.

That’s why the Internet of things has become such a popular catchphrase, based on the premise that Internet connectivity can be embedded into nearly any product and form a larger network of devices that collaborate for the benefit of consumers. But actually making devices from a variety of manufacturers work together is a lot easier said than done.

The Linux Foundation and Qualcomm say open source software is what’s needed to bridge the gap. Qualcomm already developed the open source project, AllJoyn, available under the Apache and BSD licenses. Now the company is contributing what it likes to call its “Internet of Everything” software to a new collaborative project called the AllSeen Alliance, which will be overseen by the Linux Foundation. Consumer device makers, service providers, retailers, appliance makers, and chipmakers have joined the effort.

I was on a trip, and I left her to the uncaring care of an automatic fish feeder. A week later, I returned home to a broken fish feeder, a polluted tank, and an overfed Goldie. It took a whole night to clean the tank, and I vowed I would never let this happen again.

Despite my constant worry, there was nothing I could do that week. And that’s when I realized I want to watch over Goldie, no matter where I am. I want to be the one to feed her. I put my engineering experience to the task. Using a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino Uno, I developed a system to meet all my requirements. It is a true remote fish tank controller.

The Raspberry Pi is central and network/Internet connected, and it streams a live camera feed of the tank. I can move the camera around to see different parts of the tank.

When developing today, there is almost no need to reinvent anything. Motor control was handled through an Arduino Motor Shield — I send the stepper driver pulses, and it handles the rest. The entire development board setup was attached to the handy Bud Industries Boardganizer, where I combined two of them for more space. The moving platform was pulled from a printer/scanner. I simply adapted a NEMA17 stepper motor to the pulley mount. Instead of moving the entire system, as I had planned, I moved the Raspberry Pi Camera Module.

China Mobile has come up with a rather interesting way to help out customers who run out of data before the end of the month – a new trading platform which allows other customers to sell data bundles they haven’t used.

The 2nd exchange market, aka “2cm”, is a new app which the operator’s Hong Kong 4G Pro Service Plan customers can download.

Once in the app, sellers can price the data they want between HK$15 (£1) and HK$60 (£4.70) in 1GB bundles.

“Through the 2cm platform, users can check data transaction status, adjust prices and numbers of new orders at any time,” a China Mobile spokesperson clarified to The Reg.

“The platform will automatically search for, match and notify 4G data sellers once a 4G data buyer is found. Extra data bought from other 4G Pro users can only be used during the same billing month.”

The new embedded standard lets devices connect to the Internet of Things without having to change their SIM

The GSMA has published the technical description of a SIM card designed specifically for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication and the Internet of Things.

The new embedded electronic circuit allows remote provisioning and management of network information, which means customers will never have to open an M2M device to replace a SIM. The design was created to ensure interoperability and security, and has attracted interest far beyond the mobile industry.

“Without a globally recognised, standardised and harmonised connectivity solution the automotive industry will become unnecessarily complex and fragmented. As a car manufacturer an embedded SIM that can be remotely provisioned is absolutely key for us in driving efficiency and simplicity and is to be welcomed. We thank the GSMA and partners for agreeing this specification,” commented Marcus Keith, project manager at Audi Connect.

First deployments of the new embedded SIM are expected in 2014.

Traditional SIM cards were designed to be interchangeable, with this consideration defining their shape, size and layout. While they are currently successfully used in M2M devices, these pieces of plastic need to be replaced every time a device has to connect to a new network.

To fix this issue, the GSMA has developed a non-removable SIM that can be embedded in a device for the duration of its life, and remotely assigned to a network. This information can be subsequently modified over-the-air, as many times as necessary.

The GSMA says its new SIM can reduce ongoing operational and logistical costs. Replacing one SIM is not going to break the bank, but replacing a few million could make a dent in any budget, it reckons.

The embedded design is backed by leading mobile network operators and device manufacturers, including Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom and China Mobile.

The standard eliminates the need for network operators to develop their own solutions for remote provision of SIMs, and allows customers to easily switch networks at the end of a contract.

Despite the convenience of over-the-air management, the GSMA says the embedded design is not meant to replace conventional SIM cards, even though this exact idea was floated when ETSI was deciding on the future of the nano-SIM in 2012.

“A new remotely-programmable embedded SIM design from the GSMA operators’ group means that devices can be operated on the Internet of things and won’t have to be opened up to have their SIM card changed if they move to a different operator. The design could speed up embedded applications.”