Wired

Public Wi-Fi is great. But it’s infuriating when your connection at the neighborhood coffee shop goes down minutes before deadline and the baristas have no clue what’s wrong. This frustrates the hell out of the coffee shop, too. It wants to offer secure, reliable service but usually lacks the expertise. That’s true of any business that offers free Wi-Fi, especially airports, hotels, and others that offer Wi-Fi on a huge scale. Google plans to fix this with Google Station, a suite of tools designed to make creating and maintaining public Wi-Fi a breeze.

The company isn’t saying much beyond that, but it is working with unspecified Internet service providers and hardware companies to make it happen. Google is now enlisting partners like cafes and shopping malls. This goes beyond a set of recommended tools or preconfigured Wi-Fi routers. Google will handle login info for the different hotspots. You’ll access the Internet from any of them using a single username and password—no more asking the barista for the network name and password. Google also promises to help Wi-Fi hosts to monetize their connections, the suggestion being that it will handle payments for anyone charging for access.

The Google X lab launched a balloon into the stratosphere over Peru, and it stayed there for 98 days. Launching balloons into the stratosphere is a usual thing for the Google X lab—or just X, as it’s now called after spinning off from Google and nestling under the new umbrella called Alphabet. X is home to Project Loon, an effort to beam the Internet from the stratosphere down to people here on Earth. The hope is that these balloons can fly over areas of the globe where the Internet is otherwise unavailable and stay there long enough to provide people with a reliable connection. But there’s a problem: balloons tend to float away. That’s why it’s so impressive that the company managed to keep a balloon in Peruvian airspace for over three months. And it’s doubly impressive when you consider that the navigation system can only move these balloons up and down—not forward and back or side to side. They move like hot-air balloons—avoiding the weather or catching it at the right time, rather than pushing right through it—and that’s because a more complex navigation system would be too heavy and too expensive for the task at hand. Rather than navigate Peruvian air space with some sort of jet propulsion system, the Loon team turned to artificial intelligence.

When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the National Security Agency’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar.

On July 21 at the MIT Media Lab, Snowden and well-known hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang plan to present designs for a case-like device that wires into your iPhone’s guts to monitor the electrical signals sent to its internal antennas. The aim of that add-on, Huang and Snowden say, is to offer a constant check on whether your phone’s radios are transmitting. They say it’s an infinitely more trustworthy method of knowing your phone’s radios are off than “airplane mode,” which people have shown can be hacked and spoofed. Snowden and Huang are hoping to offer strong privacy guarantees to smartphone owners who need to shield their phones from government-funded adversaries with advanced hacking and surveillance capabilities—particularly reporters trying to carry their devices into hostile foreign countries without constantly revealing their locations.

A list of speakers for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland (OH) includes Peter Thiel, the litigious Silicon Valley billionaire investor, Facebook board member, and Donald Trump delegate, who, most recently, funded a revenge lawsuit against Gawker that forced the media company into bankruptcy. In a statement, Thiel explained why he wants to appear at the convention, an obligation even top Republicans have ducked. “Many people are uncertain in this election year,” he wrote, “but most Americans agree that our country is on the wrong track. I don’t think we can fix our problems unless we can talk about them frankly.”

In any other election year, Thiel’s presence at the convention wouldn’t be all that surprising. A known libertarian, he was one of the most prominent backers of Ron Paul’s 2012 Super PAC, and during primary season he was a key donor to Carly Fiorina’s Super PAC. But the fact that Trump is 2016’s presumptive Republican nominee makes Thiel’s support curious. On everything from trade to immigration to government data collection, Trump’s policies stand in direct opposition to the ones laid out by major industry groups like the Internet Association and TechNet.

Watching Netflix using Comcast is about to get a little easier. The longtime rivals recently confirmed that Comcast’s X1 interactive television box will offer Netflix, obviating the need for a smart TV or third-party device like a Roku or Chromecast. The two companies said little more than the combination arrives later in 2016 and it remains to be seen whether you’ll pay a separate fee to use Netflix. The answer almost certainly is yes. The bigger question is whether you’ll also need Comcast Internet service to watch Netflix over X1—and, if so, whether watching Netflix will eat into your Internet data plan.

Comcast did not respond to request for comment, but content viewed via X1 doesn’t typically count as data because it’s considered television. Making Netflix part of its television service would be great for customers who use Comcast’s television service and worry about exceeding the one terabyte threshold the company is testing in places. But such an arrangement would raise net neutrality questions, since it could put Comcast in the position of choosing sides in the streaming video market.

Facebook isn't in the wireless business. But it continues to build all sorts of new-fangled wireless hardware. Mark Zuckerberg and company unveiled a creation they call OpenCellular. This is a Sunday-dinner-platter-sized hardware device that attaches to a tree or a street lamp or a telephone pole, and from there it can drive a wireless network, including traditional 2G cell-phone networks, higher speed LTE cellular networks, and smaller Wi-Fi networks like those inside your home, office, or local coffee shop.

Facebook plans on open sourcing the designs for this device, freely sharing them with the world at large, and the hope is that it can provide a simpler and less expensive way of erecting wireless networks in the more rural areas of the developing world, including parts of Africa and India. “There’s not yet a viable business model for operators to set up shop and bring connectivity to rural villages,” says Subbu Subramanian, an engineering director on the project. “We want to make sure people have that connectivity—and that there’s a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem that can spur innovation ever further.”

[Commentary] We'll never realize broadband's potential if large Internet service providers erect a pay-to-play system that charges both the sender and receiver for the same content. That's why we at Netflix are so vocal about the need for strong network neutrality, which, for us, means ISPs should enable equal access to content without favoring, impeding, or charging particular content providers.

The Federal Communications Commission has historically focused only on last-mile connections -- the final leg of the Internet that connects individual homes to the World Wide Web. Today's problem spots are further upstream, at the choke point where companies like Netflix pass our traffic off to the ISPs. If the FCC doesn't expand its purview to include these transactions, it would be better to have no rules than the ones being proposed -- which simply legalize discrimination on the Internet.

[Hastings is the CEO of Netflix]

South Korea now boasts nearly 99 percent coverage for LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks. Anyone who has tried to rely on consistent 4G coverage in the UK, even in the capital, will note that statistic with envy.

When this technology makes its way to Europe, Category 6 devices will allow those speeds to theoretically top out at 300Mbps. Considering most of us are lucky to get 15Mbps on home broadband it seems clear the significant impact this will have on our mobile lives.

According to the most recent national security revelations leaked by Edward Snowden, an intelligence officer told him that Tailored Access Operations (TAO) -- a division of National Security Agency hackers -- had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war.

The public didn't know that the US government was responsible, and if the NSA were caught, the finger could always be pointed at Israel, as people joked back at TAO's operations center.

Aside from massive surveillance, Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind, a program that would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. When he was working for the defense contractor Booz Allen, analyzing potential cyberattacks from China, Snowden realized the United States had crossed the line.

“We're hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets,” he said. Snowden went on to warn that such cyberattacks can be spoofed. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia,” Snowden explained.

Statistics from the New York Times say roughly half of the people who read it now do so with their mobile devices, and that jibes with figures from the latest Pew report on the news media broadly.

But if you were to assume that means people have given up reading actual articles and are just snacking instead, you'd be wrong.