Ignore Qualcomm's excitement, the Internet of Things hasn’t arrived in homes

The future is here! We are actually living in the future. The futuristic sci-fi imaginings of the 1960's are not only a reality, they have been bettered, exceeded and trumped. At least that's what we're led to believe. The reality is rather different.

A lot of excitement has been pinned on the Internet of Things -- little more than connected, communicating devices -- but Qualcomm is taking things even further. In a video released ahead of CES 2015, the chipmaker waxes lyrical about not the Internet of Things we're supposed to know and love, but the Internet of Everything. And it's here. Apparently.

The idea's pretty much the same: it's Qualcomm's take on the Internet of Things polished up to add a little extra hype and buzz. The video itself is typical advertising-style guff, all shiny surfaces, beautiful people and white paint as we're treated to a peak into the lives of couple living in a smart, connected house.

A smart water meter is the first thing we're introduced to. It gives a running tally of how much water is being pumped out by the faucet while the lady of house wanders off to take a phone call -- quite why she couldn't remain by the sink isn’t made immediately clear. What's also not made clear is the cost and upheaval involved in getting the water system set up. Replacing faucets is something most people will do when there is a problem with the existing one. Faucets last for years, and the extra cost that would almost certainly be involved in upgrading to smart versions will be a deterrent for many, many years to come.

The same can be said of the smart washing machine that alerts Mr Smart House that the washing cycle has finished -- because just knowing how long a cycle takes to complete is clearly a great chore. A washing machine is not cheap and, like faucets, tend to be part of the family for many, many years. Even if you're in the market for a new one to replace your old unit that’s about to give up the ghost/has died a death, what are you more likely to opt for -- something that similar but perhaps more economical to run than your current machine, or one that's a few hundred dollars more that lets you know when it's done? That's what the beeping is for. And the big display. And common sense.

Oh… Smart Lady is back. The house knows she's left the tap running -- as she probably did. An alert is generated -- because that's what smart houses do; alert you to things, constantly. A text message or alarm is not deemed sufficient. Nope, we need to flash the lights! Hopefully there are no photo-sensitive epileptics in the house, or people chopping vegetables late at night in the kitchen. Flashing lights aren't a good way to alert people to things, it's just bloody annoying and potentially dangerous!

Standing in front of the TV - clearly not a very smart one because it didn’t explode with fury when the occupants of the house left it unattended and unwatched for a few moments, unlike the moaning faucet -- a message pops up as a reminder to take medication. From, of course, a smart pill box.

So smart is the house, and so comprehensive are the warnings, alerts and reminders, that the couples -- poor dumb meat sacks that they are -- have regressed. They no longer have a need to speak with each other. Communications appears to be carried out telepathically or via touch as not a word or hand gesture passes between them. They venture outside, but who knows how long they'll survive out there when they realize that the trees aren’t going to give them directions to the shops, and lamp posts don;t tell them that it's time to use the toilet.

Of course, the house we see in the video is not a typical house -- it's meant to be a showcase of what's possible, and what a small number of people might expect to see and implement in their homes many years down the line. Is it cool? Yeah, kinda. Is it the best use of technology? Arguably not.

Check out the video for yourself and see what you think:

Qualcomm asks "why wait?", to which I say, well, I'm perfectly capable of turning off water, I can remember to take pills if I need to, and having been alive for 35 years I think I'm well-versed in use of a washing machine. Oh yeah, and I'm not replacing hardware that works perfectly well just to add the gimmick of connecting it to other devices. For now, I'll pass thanks. I'm happy with a smartphone, I don’t need more "smart" devices -- I've not regressed to the state of a helpless child yet. And I'm not quite ready to be told off by my house.

Photo credit: charles taylor / Shutterstock

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Alcatel Pixi 3 comes with a choice of three OSes -- and Android will still win

When it comes time to buy your next smartphone, will you be swayed by hardware or operating system? Forget iOS for a moment; put Apple's mobile OS out of your mind for right now. Hardware to a large extent determines price, and an upcoming range of budget phones from Alcatel offers an interesting choice.

The Pixi 3 -- that rainbow-colored delight you see above assaulting your eyeballs -- comes with a choice of four screen sizes, and three OS choices. The smallest measures just 3.5 inches, but 4, 4.5 and 5 inch models are also available. But the interesting thing is that each is available with a choice of Android, Windows Phone or, erm, Firefox OS installed.

The hardware is identical for each phone, save for a couple of things. Firstly, obviously, there is the difference in screen size, but the smallest device is 3G only while the remaining three are LTE-compatible. At this stage we know little more about the specs, but more will be revealed at CES 2015 next week.

There have long been rumors -- and even botched examples -- of phones that run two or more operating systems, but that's not what we're seeing here. The choice you make when you buy the phone determines the OS you are stuck with. It's hard to imagine that even when the dilemma of hardware is taken out of the equation that Windows Phone or Firefox OS will prove more popular than Android.

Interestingly, as pointed out by the Verge, there's a chance that Alcatel's upcoming handset could be tied in to a revival of the Palm name. Tellingly, just a couple of months ago the trademark was sold to a company owned by Nicolas Zibell, President, Americas and Pacific at Alcatel One Touch. The Palm website, Palm.com, recently sprang back to life, now redirecting to mynewpalm.com, a site that bears the words Coming Soon.

We'll know more in the next few days.

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11 Ways Old Journalism Was The Worst

In October of last year, Brookings published an essay by Robert Kaiser entitled “The Bad News About The News,” which was probably well-intentioned, but was also — I’m sorry to say — hilariously bloviated, self-important, and wrongheaded. It did, however, accidentally raise a few quite interesting points.

Some selections from that piece, to give you a sense of it:

Accelerating technological transformation has undermined the business models that kept American news media afloat … the great institutions on which we have depended for news of the world around us may not survive … no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival … “By undermining the economic basis of professional reporting and by fragmenting the public, [the digital revolution] has weakened the ability of the press to act as an effective agent of public accountability … its institutional distress may weaken democracy itself.”

The usual lamentations of yesterday’s news. But I want to focus on its two most illustrative quotes. First:

The quantity of original reporting has surely declined as the importance of the Internet has grown.

That is, to put it mildly, ridiculous. Every first-person report of a nearby event, on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Blogger, is “original reporting.” It is not all good original reporting. It is not all accurate. But there is a colossal, and still growing, amount of it. Increasingly, a “reporter’s job” is to identify and highlight the good and accurate reporting which has already been done by other people, some of whom may–shock! horror!–not be professional journalists.

(It is worth noting that the “traditional journalism” deified by Kaiser is/was also often neither good nor accurate. Have you ever had first-person knowledge of, and then read traditional journalists’ coverage of, a situation or topic? Every time that’s happened to me, I have found myself thinking either “wait, that’s not quite right,” for non-tech stories, or “that is at best a massive oversimplification and at worst just flatly wrong,” for tech stories.)

It’s true that there may be fewer reporters investigating and writing first-person reports, because of the economic transformation of the news media. But it is sheer insanity to cling to that old model when, at the same time, that transformation has also brought us a gargantuan trove of Internet-published first-person reportage from ordinary people, along with enormous amounts of in-depth analysis from, and conversation among, brilliant experts. There is journalistic gold in them there posts, tweets, Vines, and threads. The modern reporter’s job is to find and sift that gold, as much as it is to mine and smelt her own.

On one level this leads to Buzzfeed (who, to give them credit, do a lot of interesting hard reporting these days) repurposing amusing Reddit threads as listicles. But on another you get riveting and insightful news coverage that is only possible because of the Internet. Don’t write off the latter as cotton-candy nonsense because of the former.

I remember breathlessly following a few Twitter feeds–in particular, that of unaffiliated freelance journalist Seth Mnookin–to get coverage of the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers. And again during the early Ferguson protests, when the “traditional media” who Kaiser so inexplicably lauds were still days and miles behind. And think of

or

Last month, when protests raged in Berkeley, where I live, I followed the superb local coverage of Berkeleyside — one of the “new media” blogs disparaged by Kaiser and his ilk — who dispatched their own reporter to the protests, but also contributed enormously to their coverage by retweeting/citing tweets from many others on the scene.

I’ve lived in a dozen different cities, and Berkeleyside is, by far, the best local news organization I have ever seen, in considerable part because they don’t share the knee-jerk disdain for “aggregation” of information from people who don’t happen to be their reporters. They seem to have the strange belief that people who are actually on the scene, in the moment, are able to make valuable contributions to the coverage of an event, especially if they live nearby and understand the context, even if they are not professional journalists. This belief is apparently anathema to traditional news organizations.

Now, let’s not kid ourselves: not all such people can be trusted. Reporters and editors have to make judgement calls, and be quick to correct themselves when they’re shown to be wrong. And of course hoaxes and misrepresentations fly around the Internet on a daily basis. But solutions exist for these problems as well. In particular, I give you Emergent, a clearinghouse and antidote for online hoaxes, i.e. an ongoing snopes.com for the news.

(Disclaimer/disclosure: I know Emergent’s founder Craig Silverman socially, in that we used to attend the same Montreal boxing gym, though I don’t think we ever actually traded punches.)

I submit that the immense quantity of on-the-scene coverage from the public, coupled with the copious availability of online analysis and discussion from experts, can–in most cases–more than make up for the diminishing financial resources available to news organizations. This means less reporting and more aggregation and editing, to be sure. But think about it. Doesn’t that make sense — isn’t it obvious — in a world where, for the first time, every single person is now empowered to report?

Granted, “fewer reporters, supplemented by on-the-scene public coverage and armchair expert analysis” doesn’t work for all stories. You can’t have first-person investigative journalism. So I want to quote another line from Kaiser’s piece:

Repeatedly, journalists have broken significant news stories that government officials hoped would never be revealed … from accounts of the government’s eavesdropping programs to descriptions of its vast, post-9/11 intelligence apparatus.

Wait wait wait wait wait a minute. Journalists didn’t break those stories. Wikileaks did. Edward Snowden did. Journalists just packaged and promulgated those scoops, which came to them ready-made. That is not at all the same thing as the romantic Hollywood notion of Woodstein digging the dirt no matter where it leads.

Yes, tech-driven economic changes may mean there will be fewer investigative journalists — but technology also brings us far more sophisticated whistleblowers, with access to enormous amounts of information vital to the public interest. Are Kaiser and his ilk really so sure that the latter is so much worse, in terms of holding governmental feet to the proverbial fire of the public eye? I’m not.

It is true that the old, clubby, elitist-gatekeeper world of news and journalism, the world in which Kaiser lived and worked, is being forced by the relentless onslaught of smartphones and the Internet to reinvent itself entirely. If you ask me, though, this is no bad thing at all.

Featured Image: Wikimedia Foundation/Wikimedia Commons UNDER A CC BY-SA 3.0 LICENSE



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How Self-Balancing Electric Skateboard Onewheel Goes From Assembly Line To Users’ Homes

Last year at CES we were introduced to Onewheel, a crazy new self-balancing skateboard built by electromechanical engineer and board sports enthusiast Kyle Doerksen. Less than a year after the project went up on Kickstarter, Onewheel is shipping to early backers and those who pre-ordered the device.

A few weeks ago, we got a tour of the Onewheel assembly line to see how it gets put together and to sneak a peek at some new features the team has added to the device’s mobile app. Onewheel is assembled in a factory in San Jose, where the different components are pieced together and tested out before being shipped out to customers.

While the hardware has made strides since the earliest prototype the team put together last year, some of the biggest changes have come in the software that helps control the board. By connecting to Onewheel via Bluetooth, the app can be used to customize the way the board handles.

For the novice rider, Onewheel has a basic setting that restricts the speed and handling to help users get used to the board. But as they get more advanced, they can change to a more advanced setting, which allows them higher speeds and more control over it.

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U.K. Police Arrest Alleged Lizard Squad Hacker

Vinnie Omari, alleged member of the Lizard Squad, the hacking crew that took down both Xbox Live and the Playstation Network on Christmas, was arrested in Twickenham on December 31. Omari provided details to the Daily Dot regarding the arrest and the police issued a press release announcing the raid.

From the release:

The South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) has arrested a 22-year-old man from Twickenham on suspicion of fraud by false representation and Computer Misuse Act offences.

The arrest yesterday (30/12) is in connection with an ongoing investigation in to cyber fraud offences which took place between 2013 and August 2014 during which victims reported funds being stolen from their PayPal accounts.

Omari said police took his computers, game consoles, and USB drives.

The Lizard Squad are a loosely affiliated hacking group and are accused of taking down Xbox Live and PSN by directly attacking the game servers. The group also recently announced the launch of something called the Lizard Stresser, a paid tool that allows sysadmins to send denial of service attacks at their own servers. Contacting the Squad has, needless to say, been a bit difficult but we’ll have more detail soon.

Omari is currently out on bail.

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Sony offers compensation for PlayStation Network DDoS attacks

You don’t have to be a gamer to be aware that Microsoft and Sony's gaming networks were hit by DDoS attacks over Christmas. Hacking group Lizard Squad found itself on the receiving end of threats from Anonymous after disrupting gamers' holiday fun, and PlayStation owneers found themselves unable to enjoy online games.

To thank its users for putting up with the outage, Sony is offering compensation to PlayStation Network users. As well as extending PlayStation Plus memberships by five days to make up for holiday disruption, the company is also offering all PlayStation Network users a discount code for the PlayStation Store.

All members of the PlayStation Network will be treated to a ten percent discount code that can be used to obtain a one-time discount in the PlayStation Store. The discount can be applied to the full contents of a carts, so the more you buy, the more you save. The codes are not yet available, but will be released "sometime this month".

In a post on the PlayStation blog, Sony said:

Since access to PlayStation Network was impacted during the holidays, we wanted to show our appreciation for your patience by offering all PlayStation Plus members that had an active membership or free trial on December 25th a membership extension of five days. The extension will be automatically applied, so no action is necessary to receive the extension.

With Lizard Squad now offering DDoS attacks for purchase, it's quite likely that Sony will be hit again.

Photo credit: Quka / Shutterstock

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