Sting’s particular magic is that it glows blue whenever orcs or goblins are nearby. This is useful for hobbits, but in today’s day and age, a real Sting would be unfortunately boring.

But what if Sting could detect unsecured Wi-Fi networks?

To celebrate the launch of the new Hobbit flick, we made a version of Sting that turns blue near unsecured Wi-Fi networks. And when you slash the sword, Sting will jump on the network, and publish a message: “{YOUR WI-FI NETWORK} has been vanquished!”

Google Strikes an Upbeat Note With FCC on Title II
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/31/google-strikes-an-upbeat-note-with-fcc-on-title-ii/

In a rare public comment by Google on net neutrality, the Internet giant this week said it sees a silver lining in the potential to be regulated like a telecom company.

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed treating broadband Internet providers like Google Fiber as telecommunications services under Title II, which President Barack Obama supported in November to complaints from the telecom and cable industries.

Title II would expose Google Fiber to new regulations usually targeted at communications utilities and monopolies. Rates and service quality would be regulated by the government and Google Fiber may have to ask permission to stop providing some services, according to Tom Cohen, a communications lawyer at Kelley Drye & Warren.

Cable and telecom companies, like Comcast CMCSA 0.00% and AT&T T 0.00%, have long had the right to access utility poles and other important infrastructure, such as ducts, conduits and rights of way, he noted. Google Fiber, which competes against these companies, has not had this right and the service has had trouble getting access to some poles as it builds out its fiber-optic network to homes.

Gaining better access to utility poles would be a big boost for Google Fiber, which has been seen as an expensive experiment by some investors and analysts.

“Pole access is fundamental and Google will never be able to make the case for Google Fiber without pole access,” he said. “If Title II gives Google pole access, then it might really rock the world with broadband access.”

There’s no clear end in sight for the protocol wars in the Internet of Things, says the chief technologist of a building controls startup. The CTO of Enlighted, which developed its own 802.15.4 protocols, believes the outlook for Zigbee is particularly dim.

The IoT needs a set of open APIs and protocols that work with a variety of physical-layer networks, says Tanuj Mohan. In this way, he feels, IoT networks should act more like IT nets. Mohan was a co-founder of Enlighted and is a networking expert who worked at Cisco, Novell, and Tropos and built multiprotocol routers at Hughes.

“Anyone who tries to build a physical layer and drive a software stack based on it all the way up to the application layer is a fool,” he says:

The IP and network layer should have nothing to do with the media. The last-mile protocols have some play, but they are not as important as people make them out to be. It doesn’t matter if[nodes] talk over one protocol or another. In any case, you will need mediation devices.

Today Zigbee is the most cost effective, but tomorrow WiFi will figure it out. Networks talk SNMP or CORBA — every few years there’s a new management protocol. In some sense, that’s what will happen in IoT, it will keep moving, and people will need open APIs.

Mohan criticized the 250 kbit/s Zigbee standard as too slow and complicated for use in building automation

There has been an ongoing debate between which technology is the best overall solution for Home Automation: ZigBee or Z-Wave? Obviously one will win but can we predict which one?

According to the ZigBee Alliance, ZigBee Home Automation offers a global standard for interoperable products. Standardization enables smart homes that can control appliances, lighting, environment, energy management and security as well as the expandability to connect with other ZigBee networks.

On the other hand, Sigma Designs explains Z-Wave as a wireless RF-based communications technology designed for control and status reading applications in residential and light commercial environments. Target applications for Z-Wave are home entertainment, lighting and appliances control, HVAC systems and security.

So what is the difference then?

As one can read in the introduction, both technologies address similar environments and applications.

The first obvious difference is in the physical layer. Z-Wave took the Sub-1GHz approach, which has superior range versus the 2.4GHz approach of ZigBee. However, Sub-1GHz home automation requires different SKUs for different regions. How many? Well it depends

When it comes to availability of silicon and software, there is a huge difference between ZigBee and Z-Wave.

ZigBee chipsets are developed and manufactured by multiple silicon vendors including Texas Instruments, Atmel, Silcon Labs, Freescale, STMicroelectronics and more. Whereas, Z-Wave products are only manufactured and sold by Sigma Designs.

If we compare packaged modules – the picture is the same, multiple ZigBee module makers vs. very few of Z-Wave (I found only the Digi-Sigma Designs collaboration).

When it comes to software, there is even a bigger gap. ZigBee software has multiple vendors.

Both ZigBee and Z-Wave are supporting mesh network topology, which is a strong requirement towards the revolution of “internet of things”.

The number of nodes you may support with a single Z-Wave product is limited to 232 (theoretically), however practical use cases will support a 10 nodes network. The number of nodes you may support with a single ZigBee network is 65,000 (theoretically), however practical use cases support a 500 nodes network (on a single channel, single PAN ID).

Interoperability is a big issue. The Z-Wave protocol is not open, and can be provided only under licensing with Sigma Designs and can only run on their silicon receivers. The Z-Wave devices will interoperate well with similar Z-Wave devices.

ZigBee on the other hand, as an open industry standard, will allow interoperability with any ZigBee certified device. ZigBee has defined several profiles per market segments. The ZigBee Home Automation standard is fully interoperable with a variety of devices such as door locks, sensors, alarms, smoke detectors, blinds, motor control etc.

ZigBee supports multiple layers of security including those based on chips, networks and application levels.
Z-Wave recently added security with AES128 level encryption.

The ZigBee Alliance was established in 2002 and has approximately 500 member companies, while Z-Wave, established 2005, has approximately 150 member companies.

Conclusion

Consumers and specifically homeowners are looking for an easy, out-of-the-box solution for controlling the devices in their homes particularly for lighting control and smart home appliances. Most are marking decisions on proven technology that is easy to use and is secure. Based on findings from IMS research, designers favor worldwide standards and one common frequency, such as 2.4GHz, so that it allows for worldwide interoperability and connectivity. Based on the details and the openness of ZigBee, it is the best mesh technology for consumers.

The Hague Security Delta (HSD) is the official title of a collaborative effort between Netherlands businesses, their federal government and multiple research institutions, to identify emerging security threats, share best practices, and foster collaboration between industry, governments, and universities. One of the most pressing issues they’re tackling is that of mobile network and internet security. One point that the Netherlands’ officials made repeatedly is that the country is essentially the “digital gateway” to Europe. This might seem like hubris but once you look at the arrangement of undersea cables between the U.S. and Europe, it makes a lot more sense.

Security Research At The Hague: The Mobile Malware Threat
http://hothardware.com/reviews/security-research-at-the-hague-the-mobile-malware-threat

The Hague is the name of the government seat of the Netherlands (and yes, the article is capitalized). The Hague Security Delta (HSD) is the official title of a collaborative effort between Netherlands businesses, the government, and multiple research institutions to identify emerging security threats, share best practices, and foster collaboration between industry, governments, and universities.

One of the most interesting topics that came up during our visit was the issue of mobile network security, particularly now that Edward Snowden has let the cat somewhat out of the bag.

One point that the Netherlands’ officials made repeatedly during our conversation is that the company is the “digital gateway” to Europe. In other contexts, this might seem like hubris — but once you look at the arrangement of undersea cables between the US and Europe, it makes a lot more sense.

The Netherlands is far from the only transatlantic connection hub between the US and Europe, but it certainly accounts for a significant chunk of total cable capacity.

There are currently more devices connected to the Internet than there are people in the world. The Internet now connects a staggering 10 billion devices today. And this number will continue to grow, as more devices gain the ability to directly interface with the Internet or become physical representations of data accessible via Internet systems. This trend toward interactive device independence is collectively described as the Internet of Things (IoT).

To put the IoT’s explosive growth into perspective, Gartner estimates the IoT market at 26B devices by 2020. Cisco says IoT will add over $14 trillion dollars in economic value add by 2020. McKinsey predicts IoT will add $310B in incremental revenue to companies that embrace it. The numbers are huge with good reason: IoT embodies a revolution in the way enterprises are interacting with customers and how customers experience the enterprise world.

A recent foundational technology for IoT is a good proxy to illustrate the enormity of the most significant market disruption since the dawn of the Internet – IPv6. With IPv6, everything can have a unique number or IP address, making it easier and quicker for devices and data to find their way around the Internet. In comparison to IPv4’s 4.3 billion IP addresses, IPv6 can assign about 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses and corresponding devices.

IoT can seem like a nebulous abstraction with no link to daily life or business so one has to think in terms of “vertical industry applications” or “smart solutions” of vertically integrated networks for this to make sense. IoT ushers in a different sort of economics when devices and users start to communicate in these Enterprise “Smart Solution” networks. It’s called the network effect when adding more users and devices to that network increases the value that network.

Service Management and the automation of maintaining the automobile’s systems and functions provide a great customer driving experience.

Healthcare is an industry where IoT “Smart Solutions” systems are changing the landscape of patient care.

The impact of the IoT on healthcare is already significant. This includes everything from patient check-in using a “virtual” electronic medical record such as a tablet to tracking hospital medical equipment, teaching surgery procedures remotely using Google Glass or outpatient self help and care.

When it comes to developing new products, all development cycles take too long. That seems especially true for wireless designs. To help engineers get wireless designs to prototype and test more quickly, National Instruments has developed the LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite, a set of integrated hardware and software tools.

The suite includes a stand-alone version of LabVIEW

It works with NI hardware to let you develop software radios by programming them in LabVIEW, C, or Matlab m code, integrate them, and compile and download the code to an FPGA for prototyping and test. LabVIEW Communications System Design Suite provides a single development platform for R&D, design engineering, and implementation of the technologies such as 802.11, LTE, LTE-A massive MIMO, and others.

Nordic Semiconductor’s IPv6 over Bluetooth Smart protocol stack for its nRF51 Series SoCs puts, Nordic says, Bluetooth-direct-to-Internet connectivity – “Thing-to-cloud” – on one chip at micro-amp power levels, enabling small, low cost, ultra-low power Internet of Things applications.

Now available for download, the nRF51 IoT Software Development Kit (SDK) is a complete IPv6-ready Internet Protocol Suite for Nordic’s nRF51 Series Bluetooth Smart SoCs. The SDK enables native and interoperable IP-based connectivity between a Bluetooth Smart ‘thing’ and a cloud service. It also enables Bluetooth Smart to be used in large, distributed, cloud-connected, heterogeneous networks such as home, industrial, and enterprise automation.

Nordic sees a particular market opportunity in what it calls the “Internet of (my) Things”; of things around us that don’t necessarily belong to use but that “notice” us – the emerging market in beacons being an example. For such devices, the company sees an urgent need for a “headless router” – some means of enabling devices (nodes or ‘things’) to operate directly to Internet without the intervention of bridges or gateways.

BeyondStudio IDE for the NXP Semiconductors JN516x family of wireless MCUs for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is a software development environment, developed by Beyond Semiconductor, that simplifies the development of software on the JN516x family improving code density, reducing development time and improving code quality.

Used in conjunction with the Beyond Debug Key, it provides full access to the JTAG software debug feature of the chips, simplifying and accelerating the development process.

“For almost a decade, the JN51xx microcontroller family has provided the optimum hardware platform for Zigbee products, integrating the highly efficient BA22 32-bit processor and a 2.4 GHz radio transceiver on a single chip,”