Wired

In the waning days of Barack Obama’s presidency, his team has a new plan to shore up America’s protections from digital threats. Whether any of it happens, though, is up to President-elect Donald Trump.

Recently, the White House’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity released the results of a nine-month study of America’s cybersecurity problems. But as President Obama acknowledged in a statement accompanying those recommendations, actualizing them is largely out of his hands. He asked the cybersecurity commission to brief President-elect Trump’s transition team on its work as soon as possible. Whether the Trump team will in fact accept the commission’s advice—or even its briefing request—remains a mystery. “No one in Washington knows what he’s going to do,” says Alan Paller, the director of research at the security-focused SANS Institute and a former cybersecurity advisor to the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. Paller says that even Trump’s potential appointments for cybersecurity policy positions remain an unknown. “It’s very challenging to know who will be picked, and whether this [report] will have anything to do with their priorities.”

The second week of August isn’t ordinarily a time given over to novelty and ambition in New York. The air is a jellied vapor of sweat and refuse, and anybody who can afford to be elsewhere is. But the vast Queensbridge housing complex was an unlikely scene of neon-vested hustle. The six-story brown-brick apartment blocks along 41st Avenue had been encased in green scaffolding and draped with long, heavy bolts of cream burlap, which gave the blunt rectilinear forms a veil of anticipation. Queensbridge had been recently named the beneficiary of millions of municipal dollars for neighborhood development, and the attitude, a young press secretary from the New York City Housing Authority told me, was one of “all hands on deck.” Workers mended the leaky roofs and repointed the brick facades. Permanent LEDs had been ordered to replace the broken sulfur fixtures; in the meantime, mobile arrays of large klieg lights had been set up in the courtyards and along the thoroughfares. CCTV cameras were going to be ensconced along the perimeters and above the entryways, and layered-­access doors, like shuttle airlocks, were to be introduced along with key-fob admittance. Perhaps the most consequential upgrade, however, was invisible: the introduction of free, grounds­-­wide wireless broadband.

Facebook and several other Western companies tried to give away free Internet in India, but regulators wouldn’t allow it. The trouble is that the service provided free access to some online apps—including Facebook—but not others. This is called zero-rating, and regulators believe it harms online competition, giving certain companies an unfair advantage over others. So far, despite complaints from various public advocates, US regulators have just let zero rating happen. But the issue may soon come to a head, now that AT&T, one of the world’s biggest Internet service providers, has signed an $85.4 billion agreement to acquire Time Warner, one of the world’s biggest media companies.

The overarching problem here is that widespread zero-rating harms innovation. It prevents newer and smaller players from challenging the established companies, and that’s particularly true when those established companies start consolidating and getting even bigger. And companies of a certain size can have an influence on the rest of the playing field—as the Justice Department seeks to show with a new lawsuit against none other than DirecTV, accusing the company of colluding with other pay-TV companies to block content (before its merger with AT&T). Among public advocates, the hope is that regulators will bar a combined AT&T-Time Warner from practicing zero-rating, but that’s not enough. The bigger hope is that the AT&T deal leads to stiffer rules for the entire industry—a firm declaration that zero-rating harms competition wherever it’s practiced.

The October 9 debate attracted 63 million TV viewers, a 20 percent decline from the first. But on YouTube, debate content—including all videos related to the debate—garnered 124 million views, a 40 percent spike compared with the first. And that’s just on YouTube. Another 3.2 million tuned into Twitter’s livestream, and Facebook’s Live broadcast partnership with ABC News now has 7.4 million views.

Blame it on football season, blame it on the cord cutters, blame it on the gutter-level mudslinging driving some traditional viewers away, or blame it on humans’ technologically enabled short attention spans, but it seems Americans are increasingly interested in watching the debate in bite-sized portions, rather than sitting through the long slog. According to YouTube, viewers tuned into its livestream for an average of 25 minutes. Altogether, though, they watched 2.5 million hours of the livestream. That’s still smaller than the total TV hours watched, but it’s nearly six times more views than YouTube received in 2012. Of course, it can be a little tougher for campaigns to parse these online numbers to figure out whether likely voters actually tuned in.

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.”