NASA installs space laser on the ISS, uses it to transmit high-speed data back to Earth

NASA has successfully completed the first test of the International Space Station’s new OPALS laser communications system. OPALS links the ISS to an observatory here on Earth at very high speeds (around 50 megabits per second), allowing for the real-time transmission of high-resolution video among other things. This is orders of magnitude faster than existing radio-based links, and is a significant step forward for future space exploration. If we ever want a real-time video feed from the surface of Mars — or if you ever want to have an intergalactic Skype call with your loved ones after humanity colonizes the Milky Way — then lasers, and other advanced communications technologies, will be required.

OPALS, which stands for Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science, was shipped to the ISS by SpaceX resupply mission CRS-3 back in April. It was hooked up to the exterior of the ISS on May 7, and the first test was presumably carried out in the last couple of weeks. The first test transmission was a high-definition “Hello, World!” video lasting 30 seconds. If you watch the video below, which I recommend, the test clip is included at the end.
OPALS is essentially a self-contained laser turret, with a two-axis gimbal that’s used for very accurate targeting. As ISS comes over the horizon, Table Mountain Observatory turns on an optical beacon that OPALS locks onto. Because the ISS orbits at such a low altitude (~230 miles) it’s only in contact with the observatory for approximately 100 seconds. The most complex part of OPALS is keeping the laser on-target for the full duration. “It’s like aiming a laser pointer continuously for two minutes at a dot the diameter of a human hair from 30 feet away while you’re walking,” explained Bogdan Oaida, an OPALS engineer at NASA’s JPL.

OPALS mission architecture diagram

During that 100-second window, OPALS modulates a 2.5-watt infrared (1550nm) laser with digital data — in this case, a repeating loop of a 30-second “Hello, World!” video. 2.5 watts is very weak, so you probably don’t have to worry about GoldenEye-like misuse. During the first test, the laser link was maintained for 148 seconds, transferring a total of around 1 gigabyte of data — a transfer rate of around 6MB/sec, or a link speed of around 50 Mbps. NASA says it would’ve taken more than 10 minutes to transfer the same amount of data via traditional S-band and Ku-band radio links. [Read: High-frequency stock traders turn to laser networks, to make yet more money.]

The OPALS instrument. From what I can tell, the laser is created in the big silver barrel. The white cowling on the right is protecting the gimbal/targeting system, where the laser is emitted.

As you can probably tell, NASA is rather excited at the prospect of using lasers instead of radio links. OPALS follows on from the success of LADEE last year, which beamed data back from the Moon at 600Mbps. Both OPALS and LADEE are important steps towards future probes and rovers that will travel deep into the cosmos and use lasers to beam high-resolution scientific data back to Earth. So you have some idea, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — which relays data from Curiosity — has one of the fastest deep-space radio links, and it maxes out at just 6Mbps. If it was capable of 50Mbps or 600Mbps we’d be able to learn a lot more about the red planet. Likewise, if humanity ever colonizes some other planets, we’re going to need something a lot better than radio waves if we want to build a high-bandwidth galnet (galaxy network).

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Europe and South Korea unite to standardize 5G, even though true 4G still isn’t available

Europe, perhaps a little bit embarrassed about being so far behind the US’s deployment of 4G LTE, has announced that it will work together with South Korea to develop the next-gen 5G standard. Both the EU and South Korea will work to harmonize the spectrum requirements of 5G networks, too, to ensure easy global roaming (at least between Europe and Asia, anyway). As you may be aware, though, all of this is much easier said than done: While carriers and marketing bods are keen to move onto 5G for obvious reasons (money!!!), the rest of the industry is still working on LTE and LTE Advanced, with no real intention of moving to 5G any time soon.

Over the year or so, we’ve started to see some early trials of purported “5G” networks. We say purported because, at the moment, 5G doesn’t have an actual definition — it just means something that’s somehow faster or better than 4G, but has had “5G” strapped on to make it sound a bit sexier. As you’re probably aware if you read ExtremeTech, it’s not inherently hard to beam oodles amount of data through the air — but doing it efficiently, from a device the size of a smartphone, and getting hundreds of patent holders to sign off on it… that’s another matter entirely. (Samsung’s 5G demo, for example, used a van full of batteries and antennas.)

Almost indefinitely faster speeds are possible with more antennas and more power… but that doesn’t necessarily work in something the size of a smartphone.

The main problem with standardizing 5G, though, is that LTE has a long, long way to go. LTE was designed from the get-go to be used for decades. The clue is in the name: Long-Term Evolution. As we have already seen with LTE-Advanced, this is a mobile network technology that has the ability to scale up gracefully and efficiently — and there are enough provisions and space for expansion in the standard that it could stick around for a long time come. Trying to push a brand new 5G standard before the first commercial LTE-Advanced deployments seems a little hasty.
But hey, it’s not like we should be surprised. Believe it or not, but LTE-A — which is still only being trialed! — was originally designated as the first 4G wireless system. WiMax, HSPA+, and original LTE were merely 3G networks until American and Canadian carriers lobbied the ITU into designating anything significantly faster than 3G as 4G — and thus WiMax was relabeled as 4G, along with HSPA+ and LTE. If ITU had stuck to its guns, the world would still be using 3G, with 4G just about to arrive.

One of Samsung’s ’5G’ lab tests

Nomenclature aside, though, the main thing is that conversations around the 5G standard need to begin soon. The rest of the tech industry is moving too fast for anything other than an accelerated timeline: It just doesn’t work to have consumers upgrade from their current 4G phone to another 4G phone, when every other bullet point on the box is bigger and faster. If the ITU doesn’t standardize 5G, then there’s every chance that someone at Verizon or AT&T will simply do it anyway — perhaps in quotation marks first, but it’ll quickly become a de facto standard as other companies hurry to catch up. The EU and South Korea say they want to have “the broad definition” of 5G nailed down by the end of 2015.
As for what form 5G will eventually take, my bet is that it’ll just be a more-advanced version of LTE with some neat new features and download speeds in the gigabits-per-second range. Hopefully this is the kind of technology that Europe and South Korea intend to work on, rather than van-sized tech demos that are the telecommunications equivalent of car drag racing: Exciting and headline-inducing, but ultimately rather pointless.

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Comcast’s public Xfinity WiFi program actually costs you money

Last year, Comcast announced that it would begin rolling out a WiFi program that uses customer hardware to throw a wide public net. While it’s free to Comcast’s own Xfinity subscribers, everyone else is expected to pay for it. Needless to say, Comcast doesn’t offer any kind of compensation or credit to end-users who provide this service — even though providing public WiFi inevitably costs the end-user money.
How much money? An engineer at Speedify set out to test that question using a standard Xfinity Business Hotspot setup, consisting of a Cisco DPC3008 cable modem and a BelAir 20E WiFi router. According to Speedify’s testing, the router draws 0.14 amps when idle and 0.22 amps when loaded. By the company’s calculations, this comes out to roughly $23 per year at mid-Atlantic power rates. Comcast, meanwhile, has disputed the test fairness and wants Speedify to retest using different hardware. Speedify has promised to update the blog post when it hears back.

Objectively speaking, $23 isn’t much, even if you’re dirt poor, and the $23 figure assumes that the WiFi router is used 24/7. A more realistic assumption might be $10 to $12. Electrical costs, however, are only the beginning of why we have a problem with this kind of program. First, there’s no indication that Comcast explicitly assigns different IP addresses to temporary network guests versus standard users. This means that you could wind up on the hook for something a guest did while using your hotspot. It’s pitifully easy to spoof the SSIDs of these types of public hotspots — and while that speaks more to security precautions in Android and iOS than a problem with Comcast, the company is still opening users up to increased attacks by pushing ahead with its network plans.
Finally, there’s the fact that, once again, cable companies get to play by different rules than everybody else. It’s perfectly fine for them to charge you rental fees in perpetuity for your cable modem and to increase those fees at will, and to charge you for the privilege of running a WiFi hotspot on which they make money — and then to charge you for the electricity used to run their own for-profit WiFi network. It’s an issue of principle as much as anything, and while Comcast does provide the ability to turn the Xfinity setting off, they’re fully aware that the overwhelming majority of customers lack the expertise to find the setting or disable it themselves.
Speedify isn’t a neutral party in this — the company sells a software product that’s supposedly designed to help Comcast customers recover bandwidth through channel aggregation — but their data shows how telcos are shifting costs to their own customers to prop up profit margins. It may only be $8 to $10 a year, but take that amount times Comcast’s millions of subscribers, and it’s a healthy chunk of cost that the company doesn’t have to pay for.

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How to watch hacking, and cyberwarfare between the USA and China, in real time

You’ve no doubt heard countless stories about how the internet is rife with hackers and ruled by malware-peddling malcontents. You’ve probably read dozens of paragraphs on how the next great theater of war will be online rather than offline, and how China and the US are already battling each other for cyber supremacy. The truth is, though, unless you’ve actually been hacked, it’s hard to appreciate just how real the prospect of cyberwar actually is; after all, the effects of hacking are mostly invisible to the untrained eye, with the exception of very-high-profile database breaches. Now, though, a security company has produced a fascinating geographic map that shows you global hacking attempts in real-time — and sure enough, you really can see China waging cyberwar against the US.
The real-time map, maintained by the Norse security company, shows who’s hacking who and what attack vectors are being used. The data is sourced from a network of “honeypot” servers maintained by Norse, rather than real-world data from the Pentagon, Google, or other high-profile hacking targets. In hacking a honeypot is essentially a juicy-looking target that acts as a trap — either to gather important data about the would-be assailants, or to draw them away from the real target. The Norse website has some info about its “honeynet,” but it’s understandably quite sparse on actual technical details.
If you watch the map for a little while, it’s clear that most attacks originate in either China or the US, and that the US is by far the largest target for hack attacks. You can also see that the type of hack used, indicated by the target port, is rather varied. Microsoft-DS (port 445) is still one of the top targets (it’s the port used for Windows file sharing), but DNS (port 53), SSH (22), and HTTP (80) are all very popular too. You’ll probably see CrazzyNet and Black Ice, too — two common Windows backdoor programs often used by script kiddies and criminals, rather than actual cyberwar fighters.

Norse real-time hacking map, showing a coordinated attack from China towards the US

Occasionally, you will even see a big burst of coordinated attacks from China towards the US. It’s obviously hard to directly link these attacks to the Chinese government, but it does appear that there is someone calling the shots. A lot of hacks originate in the US, too, but their targets are much more varied; they’re not coordinated towards a single target like China.
Because this data comes from Norse’s network of honeypots, rather than real targets, it’s hard to say whether real attacks — on the Pentagon, on US universities, on big Silicon Valley companies — follow the same patterns. If Norse knows what it’s doing, it should be possible to make a honeypot server appear to be a US Department of Defense or Google server, though. But without more details from Norse, it’s hard to say.
Just so you have some idea of the global scale of hacking and cyberwarfare, here are some stats. Back in 2012, the US DOD reported that it was the target of 10 million cyber attacks per day; likewise, the National Nuclear Security Administration (which is in charge of the US’s nuclear stockpile), says it saw 10 million attacks per day in 2012. In 2013, BP’s CEO said it sees 50,000 cyber attacks per day. The UK reported around 120,000 attacks per day back in 2011, while the humble state of Utah said it was up to 20 million attacks per day in 2013.
I suspect there’s quite a big variation on what exactly constitutes an “attack,” but still, it’s clear that hacking and cyberwarfare are topics that governments, corporations, and institutions need to pay attention to. The Obama administration, at least, has announced that it won’t sit on its hands while China steps up its attacks — but it’s a fine line between shoring up defenses, and triggering a full-on cyberwar that could cripple both countries.

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Apple Launches $49 Mac Pro Security Lock Adapter in Online Store

Apple today launched a new $49 Mac Pro Security Lock Adapter in its online store, offering users of the new Mac Pro a way to easily secure their machines using existing Kensington locks. Previously, users had to resort to custom building their own locks or ordering more expensive third-party solutions.
Apple's lock adapter is a simple metal bracket that secures the lift-off cover of the Mac Pro to the base of the machine with a security cable, preventing access to the machine's internals. The cable lock can then of course be secured to a bulky object or dedicated security ring found on some desks to make it difficult for thieves to steal the machine. The Mac Pro Security Lock Adapter lets you use a compatible Kensington or similar style third-party lock (sold separately) to keep your Mac Pro secure. The adapter attaches without tools and does not modify or damage the Mac.
With a compatible lock connected, the Mac Pro Lock Adapter secures the housing to the enclosure, preventing access to internal components. Since the Mac Pro's appearance in its retail stores, even Apple has had to use alternate methods to secure the machines, opting for an Ethernet-based alarm system that simply sets off an alarm when the Mac Pro is removed rather than securing it in place.
The Mac Pro Security Lock Adapter is available now in the Apple Online Store for $49. The adapter is not yet being offered for immediate pickup in Apple's retail stores, but will presumably be making its way to the company's stores around the world in the coming days.

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Indian IT companies may lose high-value projects

BANGALORE: For Indian software companies, which are recovering from the global economic slowdown, the next big worry could be customers eating the best portion of their lunch. Increasingly, multinational clients are saying they are okay to outsource bread-and-butter work but not the jam and cream.

What this means is that the country's biggest software firms are facing the threat of losing high-value projects to customers who are setting up inhouse centres in India to ensure they keep tabs on critical work involving the latest technologies.

For example, later this year, Lowe's —the second-biggest US home improvement chain with $53 billion (Rs 3.2 lakh crore) in annual revenue —will shift high-end analytics and ecommerce projects from companies including Cognizant, Wipro and Infosys to a new centre in Bangalore.

Lowe's move, which spends over $1 billion annually on IT, reflects a growing trend of customers shifting their most important work to their own centres, leaving chores such as maintenance to Indian service providers.

"This (the new Lowe's centre) is not going to be a back office," Robert F Hull Jr, the CFO of Lowe's, said in an interview. For Lowe's, the new technology capabilities in Bangalore will mean a competitive edge against rivals such as Home Depot. As more US consumers shift to the web for home improvement solutions, technology has become the new battlefront.

Lowe's, which now gets around 2% of its revenues from online sales, has been closing in on market leader Home Depot. The new centre could potentially hire up to 1,000 engineers, and will focus on data analytics and nextgeneration online commerce projects.

Lowe's also plans to engage with retail software startups in India, and could potentially even invest in some of them. Scores of captives were set up in the 1990s as global corporations looked to take advantage of the lower costs of operating in India without relinquishing control of their information technology systems.

Over 800 captive centres in India
There are more than 800 captive centres in the country and more are being added each year. In 2012, captives employed about 5 lakh people and delivered as much as $15 billion (Rs 90,000 crore) worth of work, according to Nasscom data.

While the over-$100-billion Indian software services industry employs around 3 million staff and is forecast to grow at 13-15%, captives are growing at nearly twice that rate.

While this trend may not be very good news for IT services companies, it will open up new opportunities for employees in the software sector to work on cutting-edge technologies directly with global corporations.

Over the past year, Hull met around 38 companies having captives in India and got some of the myths busted. "We even visited some of the universities and were fully convinced that there's going to be no scarcity of talent in the long term," he said. "We are going to manage and develop key capabilities in-house.

The third-party providers can do maintenance and support work far more effectively; they have tens of thousands of people in place." Lowe's has hired Narayan Ram as managing director for India, reporting directly to Hull. Ram, an IT industry veteran who ran Sony's technology centre, said Target, Tesco and Walmart have already set the bar high for Lowe's India.

"We do expect a war for the right talent," Ram said. Lalit Ahuja, a former Indian Navy commander who helped companies such as Target and several others build their captive centres in India said these centre are also beginning to manage service providers such as TCS and Infosys on behalf of their parent organisations.

"In some ways, the captives have broken the 'value' barrier that Indian IT has been aspiring to address for a long time now," said Ahuja whose company ANSR Source is helping Lowe's and several others establish technology centres in India. "There are incredible opportunities for Indian IT to understand the games captives play to operate at the high end of value chain."

Senior executives at some of India's biggest software firms are watching in envy and even praying that these captives remain mere experiments and hopefully fall short of what one called "lofty adventures". "Don't get me wrong — we have seen these waves of captives being feverishly talked about.

But a lot of them eventually get acquired by a large service provider," said a senior executive at one of the top India-based software firms. He was referring to how the technology captives of banks such as UBS and retailers including Supervalu ended up being acquired by Cognizant and TCS, respectively.

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For fifth year in a row, Google emerges as country’s best company to work for

if you google 'India's best company to work for', the answer you will get is — Google. For the fifth year in a row, Google India has emerged the country's best company to work for followed by Intel, which remains in second place for the second year. Marriott Hotels is in third spot, a sharp improvement from ninth position last year, replacing American Express, which is in fourth place.

 

 The infotech industry has built a reputation for having best-in-class workplace practices, so it doesn't come as a surprise that more than half the companies in the top 10 are from this sector.
Multinational companies, whose human resource practices are handed down from the parent, have tended to dominate the list in the past, and this year is no exception. But two desi companies — Godrej Consumer Products and Ujjivan Financial Services — are in this year's top 10, at seventh and ninth places, respectively.

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