Choosing sides: Google’s new augmented-reality game,
Ingress, makes users pick a faction—Enlightened or Resistance—and run
around town attacking virtual portals in hopes of attaining world
domination
I’m not usually very political, but I recently joined the Resistance,
fighting to protect the world against the encroachment of a strange,
newly discovered form of energy. Just this week, in fact, I spent hours
protecting Resistance territory and attacking the enemy.
Don’t worry, this is just the gloomy sci-fi world depicted in a new smartphone game called Ingress
created by Google. Ingress is far from your normal gaming app,
though—it takes place, to some degree, in the real world; aspects of the
game are revealed only as you reach different real-world locations.
Ingress’s world is one in which the discovery of so-called
“exotic matter” has split the population into two groups: the
Enlightened, who want to learn how to harness the power of this energy,
and the Resistance, who, well, resist this change. Players pick a side,
and then walk around their city, collecting exotic matter to keep
scanners charged and taking control of exotic-matter-exuding portals in
order to capture more land for their team.
I found the game, which
is currently available only to Android smartphone users who have
received an invitation to play, surprisingly addictive—especially
considering my usual apathy for gaming.
What’s most interesting
about Ingress, though, is what it suggests about Google’s future plans,
which seem to revolve around finding new ways to extend its reach from
the browser on your laptop to the devices you carry with you at all
times. The goal makes plenty of sense when you consider that traditional
online advertising—Google’s bread and butter—could eventually be
eclipsed by mobile, location-based advertising.
Ingress was
created by a group within Google called Niantic Labs—the same team
behind another location-based app released recently (see “Should You Go on Google’s Field Trip?”).
Google
is surely gathering a treasure trove of information about where we’re
going and what we’re doing while we play Ingress. It must also see the
game as a way to explore possible applications for Project Glass, the
augmented-reality glasses-based computer that the company will start
sending out to developers next year. Ingress doesn’t require a
head-mounted display; it uses your smartphone’s display to show a map
view rather than a realistic view of your surroundings. Still, it is
addictive, and is likely to get many more folks interested in
location-based augmented reality, or at least in augmented-reality
games.
Despite its futuristic focus, Ingress sports a sort of
pseudo-retro look, with a darkly hued map that dominates the screen and a
simple pulsing blue triangle that indicates your position. I could only
see several blocks in any direction, which meant I had to walk around
and explore in order to advance in the game.
For a while, I didn’t
know what I was doing, and it didn’t help that Ingress doesn’t include
any street names. New users complete a series of training exercises,
learning the basics of the game, which include capturing a portal,
hacking a portal to snag items like resonators (which control said
portals), creating links of exotic matter between portals to build a
triangular control field that enhances the safety of team members in the
area, and firing an XMP (a “non-polarized energy field weapon,”
according to the glossary) at an enemy-controlled portal.
Confused much? I sure was.
But
I forged ahead, though, hoping that if I kept playing it would make
more sense. I started wandering around looking for portals. Portals are
found in public places—in San Francisco, where I was playing, this
includes city landmarks such as museums, statues, and murals. Resistance
portals are blue, Enlightened ones are green, and there are also some
gray ones out there that remain unclaimed.
I found a link to a larger map
of the Ingress world that I could access through my smartphone browser
and made a list of the best-looking nearby targets. Perhaps this much
planning goes against the exploratory spirit of the game, but it made
Ingress a lot less confusing for me (there’s also a website that doles out clues about the game and its mythology).
Once
I had a plan, I set out toward the portals on my list, all of which
were in the Soma and Downtown neighborhoods of San Francisco. I managed
to capture two new portals at Yerba Buena Gardens—one at a statue of
Martin Luther King, Jr. and another at the top of a waterfall—and link
them together.
Across the street, in front of the Contemporary
Jewish Museum, I hacked an Enlightened portal and fired an XMP at it,
weakening its resonators. I was then promptly attacked. I fled, figuring
I wouldn’t be able to take down the portal by myself.
A few hours
later, much of my progress was undone by a member of Enlightened
(Ingress helpfully sends e-mail notifications about such things). I was
surprised by how much this pissed me off—I wanted to get those portals
back for the Resistance, but pouring rain and the late hour stopped me.
Playing
Ingress was a lot more fun than I expected, and from the excited
chatter in the game’s built-in chat room, it was clear I wasn’t the only
one getting into it.
On my way back from a meeting, I couldn’t
help but keep an eye out for portals, ducking into an alley to attack
one near my office. Later, I found myself poring over the larger map on
my office computer, looking at the spread of portals and control fields
around the Bay Area.
As it turns out, my parents live in an area
dominated by the Enlightened. So I guess I’ll be busy attacking enemy
portals in my hometown this weekend.
The iPhone 5 is the latest smartphone to hop on-board the LTE (Long Term Evolution)
bandwagon, and for good reason: The mobile broadband standard is fast,
flexible, and designed for the future. Yet LTE is still a young
technology, full of growing pains. Here’s an overview of where it came
from, where it is now, and where it might go from here.
The evolution of ‘Long Term Evolution’
LTE is a mobile broadband standard developed by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project),
a group that has developed all GSM standards since 1999. (Though GSM
and CDMA—the network Verizon and Sprint use in the United States—were at
one time close competitors, GSM has emerged as the dominant worldwide
mobile standard.)
Cell networks began as analog, circuit-switched systems nearly identical
in function to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), which
placed a finite limit on calls regardless of how many people were
speaking on a line at one time.
The second-generation, GPRS,
added data (at dial-up modem speed). GPRS led to EDGE, and then 3G,
which treated both voice and data as bits passing simultaneously over
the same network (allowing you to surf the web and talk on the phone at
the same time).
GSM-evolved 3G (which brought faster speeds) started with UMTS, and then
accelerated into faster and faster variants of 3G, 3G+, and “4G”
networks (HSPA, HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+, and DC-HSPA).
Until now, the term “evolution” meant that no new standard broke or
failed to work with the older ones. GSM, GPRS, UMTS, and so on all work
simultaneously over the same frequency bands: They’re intercompatible,
which made it easier for carriers to roll them out without losing
customers on older equipment. But these networks were being held back by
compatibility.
That’s where LTE comes in. The “long term” part means: “Hey, it’s time
to make a big, big change that will break things for the better.”
LTE needs its own space, man
LTE has “evolved” beyond 3G networks by incorporating new radio
technology and adopting new spectrum. It allows much higher speeds than
GSM-compatible standards through better encoding and wider channels.
(It’s more “spectrally efficient,” in the jargon.)
LTE is more flexible than earlier GSM-evolved flavors, too: Where GSM’s
3G variants use 5 megahertz (MHz) channels, LTE can use a channel size
from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz; this lets it work in markets where spectrum is
scarce and sliced into tiny pieces, or broadly when there are wide
swaths of unused or reassigned frequencies. In short, the wider the
channel—everything else being equal—the higher the throughput.
Speeds are also boosted through MIMO (multiple input, multiple output),
just as in 802.11n Wi-Fi. Multiple antennas allow two separate
benefits: better reception, and multiple data streams on the same
spectrum.
LTE complications
This map, courtesy Wikipedia,
shows countries in varying states of LTE readiness. Those in red have
commercial service; dark blue countries have LTE networks planned and
deploying; light blue countries are investigating LTE, and grey
countries have no LTE service at all.
Unfortunately, in practice, LTE implementation gets sticky: There are 33 potential bands for LTE, based on a carrier’s local regulatory domain. In contrast, GSM has just 14 bands,
and only five of those are widely used. (In broad usage, a band is two
sets of paired frequencies, one devoted to upstream traffic and the
other committed to downstream. They can be a few MHz apart or hundreds
of MHz apart.)
And while LTE allows voice, no standard has yet been agreed upon;
different carriers could ultimately choose different approaches, leaving
it to handset makers to build multiple methods into a single phone,
though they’re trying to avoid that. In the meantime, in the U.S.,
Verizon and AT&T use the older CDMA and GSM networks for voice
calls, and LTE for data.
LTE in the United States
Of the four major U.S. carriers, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have LTE networks, with T-Mobile set to start supporting LTE
in the next year. But that doesn’t mean they’re set to play nice. We
said earlier that current LTE frequencies are divided up into 33
spectrum bands: With the exception of AT&T and T-Mobile, which share
frequencies in band 4, each of the major U.S. carriers has its own
band. Verizon uses band 13; Sprint has spectrum in band 26; and AT&T
holds band 17 in addition to some crossover in band 4.
In addition, smaller U.S. carriers, like C Spire, U.S. Cellular, and Clearwire, all have their own separate piece of the spectrum pie: C Spire and U.S. Cellular use band 12, while Clearwire uses band 41.
As such, for a manufacturer to support LTE networks in the United States alone,
it would need to build a receiver that could tune into seven different
LTE bands—let alone the various flavors of GSM-evolved or CDMA networks.
With the iPhone, Apple tried to cut through the current Gordian Knot by
releasing two separate models, the A1428 and A1429, which cover a
limited number of different frequencies depending on where they’re
activated. (Apple has kindly released a list of countries
that support its three iPhone 5 models.) Other companies have chosen to
restrict devices to certain frequencies, or to make numerous models of
the same phone.
Banded together
Other solutions are coming. Qualcomm made a regulatory filing in June
regarding a seven-band LTE chip, which could be in shipping devices
before the end of 2012 and could allow a future iPhone to be activated
in different fashions. Within a year or so, we should see
most-of-the-world phones, tablets, and other LTE mobile devices that
work on the majority of large-scale LTE networks.
That will be just in time for the next big thing: LTE-Advanced, the true
fulfillment of what was once called 4G networking, with rates that
could hit 1 Gbps in the best possible cases of wide channels and short
distances. By then, perhaps the chip, handset, and carrier worlds will
have converged to make it all work neatly together.
Interior navigation is only just coming into its own,
but IndoorAtlas has developed a technology that could make it just as
natural as breathing -- or at least, firing up a smartphone's mapping
software. Developed by a team at Finland's University of Oulu,
the method relies on identifying the unique geomagnetic field of every
location on Earth to get positioning through a mobile device. It's not
just accurate, to less than 6.6 feet, but can work without help from wireless signals
and at depths that would scare off mere mortal technologies:
IndoorAtlas has already conducted tests in a mine 4,593 feet deep.
Geomagnetic location-finding is already available through an Android
API, with hints of more platforms in the future. It will still need some
tender loving care from app developers before we're using our
smartphones to navigate through the grocery store as well as IndoorAtlas
does in a video
Of course, Apple didn’t cut the iPad from whole cloth (which probably
would have been linen). It was built upon decades of ideas, tests,
products and more ideas. Before we explore the iPad’s story, it’s
appropriate to consider the tablets and the pen-driven devices that
preceded it.
So Popular So Quickly
Today the iPad is so popular that it’s easy to overlook that it’s
only three years old. Apple has updated it just twice. Here’s a little
perspective to reinforce the iPad’s tender age:
When President Barak Obama was inaugurated as America’s 44th president, there was no iPad.
In 2004 when the Boston Red Sox broke the Curse of the Bambino
and won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, there was no
iPad. Nor did it exist three years later, when they won the championship
again.
Elisha Gray
was an electrical engineer and inventor who lived in Ohio and
Massachusetts between 1835 and 1901. Elisha was a wonderful little geek,
and became interested in electricity while studying at Oberlin College. He collected nearly 70 patents in his lifetime, including that of the Telautograph. [PDF].
The Telautograph let a person use a stylus that was connected to two rheostats,
which managed the current produced by the amount of resistance
generated as the operator wrote with the stylus. That electronic record
was transmitted to a second Telautograph, reproducing the author’s
writing on a scroll of paper. Mostly. Gray noted that, since the scroll
of paper was moving, certain letters were difficult or impossible to
produce. For example, you couldn’t “…dot an i or cross a t or underscore
or erase a word.” Users had to get creative.
Still, the thing was a hit, and was used in hospitals, clinics,
insurance firms, hotels (as communication between the front desk and
housekeeping), banks and train dispatching. Even the US Air Force used the Telautograph to disseminate weather reports.
It’s true that the Telautograph is more akin to a fax machine than a
contemporary tablet, yet it was the first electronic writing device to
receive a patent, which was awarded in 1888.
Of course, ‘ol Elisha is better known for arriving at the US patent
office on Valentine’s Day, 1876, with what he described as an apparatus
“for transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically” just two hours after
Mr. Alexander Graham Bell showed up with a description of a device that
accomplished the same feat. After years of litigation, Bell was legally
declared the inventor of what we now call the telephone, even though
the device described in his original patent application wouldn’t have
worked (Gray’s would have). So Gray/Bell have a Edison/Tesla thing going on.
Back to tablets.
Research Continues
Research continued after the turn of the century. The US Patent Office awarded a patent to Mr. Hyman Eli Goldberg of Chicago in 1918,
for his invention of the Controller. This device concerned the “a
moveable element, a transmitting sheet, a character on said sheet formed
of conductive ink and electrically controlled operating mechanism for
said moveable element.” It’s considered the first patent awarded for a
handwriting recognition user interface with a stylus.
Photo credit: Computer History Museum
Jumping ahead a bit, we find the Styalator (early 1950’s) and the RAND tablet
(1964). Both used a pen and a tablet-like surface for input. The RAND
(above) is more well-known and cost an incredible $18,000. Remember,
that’s 18 grand in 1960?s money. Both bear little resemblance to
contemporary tablet computers, and consisted of a tablet surface and an
electronic pen. Their massive bulk — and price tags ?- made them a
feasible purchase for few.
Alan Kay and the Dynabook
In 1968, things got real. Almost. Computer scientist Alan Kay1
described his concept for a computer meant for children. His “Dynabook”
would be small, thin, lightweight and shaped like a tablet.
In a paper entitled “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages,” [PDF] Kay described his vision for the Dynabook:
”The size should be no larger than a notebook; weigh less
than 4 lbs.; the visual display should be able to present 4,000
printing quality characters with contrast ratios approaching that of a
book; dynamic graphics of reasonable quality should be possible; there
should be removable local file storage of at least one million
characters (about 500 ordinary book pages) traded off against several
hours audio (voice/music) files.”
In the video below, Kay explains his thoughts on the original prototype:
That’s truly amazing vision. Alas, the Dynabook as Kay envisioned it was never produced.
Apple’s First Tablet
The first commercial tablet product from Apple appeared in 1979. The Apple Graphics Tablet was meant to compliment the Apple II and use the “Utopia Graphics System” developed by musician Todd Rundgren. 2
That’s right, Todd Rundgren. The FCC soon found that it caused radio
frequency interference, unfortunately, and forced Apple to discontinue
production.
A revised version was released in the early 1980’s, which Apple described like this:
“The Apple Graphics Tablet turns your Apple II system
into an artist’s canvas. The tablet offers an exciting medium with easy
to use tools and techniques for creating and displaying
pictured/pixelated information. When used with the Utopia Graphics
Tablet System, the number of creative alternatives available to you
multiplies before your eyes.
The Utopia Graphics Tablet System includes a wide array of brush
types for producing original shapes and functions, and provides 94 color
options that can generate 40 unique brush shades. The Utopia Graphics
Tablet provides a very easy way to create intricate designs, brilliant
colors, and animated graphics.”
The GRiDpad
This early touchscreen device cost $2,370 in 1989 and reportedly inspired Jeff Hawkins
to create the first Palm Pilot. Samsung manufactured the GRiDpad
PenMaster, which weighed under 5 lbs., was 11.5“ x 9.3” x 1.48? and ran
on a 386SL 20MHz processor with a 80387SX coprocessor. It had 20 MB RAM
and the internal hard drive was available at 40 MB, 60 MB, 80 MB or 120
MB. DigiBarn has a nice GRiDpad gallery.
The Newton Message Pad
With Steve Jobs out of the picture, Apple launched its second pen-computing product, the Newton Message Pad.
Released in 1993, the Message Pad was saddled with iffy handwriting
recognition and poor marketing efforts. Plus, the size was odd; too big
to fit comfortably in a pocket yet small enough to suggest that’s where
it ought to go.
The Newton platform evolved and improved in the following years, but was axed in 1998 (I still use one, but I’m a crazy nerd).
Knight-Ridder and the Tablet Newspaper
This one is compelling. Back in 1994, media and Internet publishing company Knight-Ridder3
produced a video demonstrating its faith in digital newspaper. Its
predictions are eerily accurate, except for this bold statement:
“Many of the technologists…assume that information is
just a commodity and people really don’t care where that information
comes from as long as it matches their set of personal interests. I
disagree with that view. People recognize the newspapers they subscribe
to…and there is a loyalty attached to those.”
Knight-Ridder got a lot right, but I’m afraid the technologists
quoted above were wrong. Just ask any contemporary newspaper publisher.
The Late Pre-iPad Tablet Market
Many other devices appeared at this time, but what I call the “The
Late Pre-iPad Tablet Market” kicked off when Bill Gates introduced the
Compaq tablet PC in 2001. That year, Gates made a bold prediction at COMDEX:
“‘The PC took computing out of the back office and into
everyone’s office,’ said Gates. ‘The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC
technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I’m
already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It’s a PC that is
virtually without limits – and within five years I predict it will be
the most popular form of PC sold in America.’”
None of these devices, including those I didn’t mention, saw the
success of the iPad. That must be due to in a large part to iOS. While
the design was changing dramatically — flat, touch screen, light weight,
portable — the operating system was stagnant and inappropriate. When
Gates released the Compaq tablet in 2001, it was running Windows XP.
That system was built for a desktop computer and it simply didn’t work
on a touch-based tablet.
Meanwhile, others dreamed of what could be, unhindered by the limitations of hardware and software. Or reality.
Tablets in Pop Culture
The most famous fictional tablet device must be Star Trek’s Personal Access Display Device
or “PADD.” The first PADDs appeared as large, wedge-shaped clipboards
in the original Star Trek series and seemed to operate with a stylus
exclusively. Kirk and other officers were always signing them with a
stylus, as if the yeomen were interstellar UPS drivers and Kirk was
receiving a lot of packages. 4
As new Trek shows were developed, new PADD models appeared. The
devices went multi-touch in The Next Generation, adopting the LCARS
Interface. A stylus was still used from time to time, though there was
less signing. And signing. Aaand signing.
In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowman and
Frank Poole use flat, tablet-like devices to send and receive news from
Earth. In his novel, Arthur C. Clarke described the “Newspad” like
this:
“When he tired of official reports and memoranda and
minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s
information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one
he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the
codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult
the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s
short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly
searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.
Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the
postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the
screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would
flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed
examination.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology
behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications.
Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of
miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of
any newspaper he pleased. (That very word ‘newspaper,’ of course, was an
anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was
updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English
versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing
the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.
It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more
convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to
be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would
have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.”
The iPad was released in 2010, so Clarke missed reality by only nine years. Not bad for a book published in 1968.
Next Time: Apple Rumors Begin
In the next article in this series, I’ll pick things up in the early
2000’s when rumors of an Apple-branded tablet gained momentum. For now,
I’ll leave you with this quote from an adamant Steve Jobs, taken from an AllThingsD conference in 2003:
“Walt Mossberg: A lot of people think given the success
you’ve had with portable devices, you should be making a tablet or a
PDA.
Steve Jobs: There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people
want keyboards. When Apple first started out, people couldn’t type. We
realized: Death would eventually take care of this. We look at the
tablet and we think it’s going to fail. Tablets appeal to rich guys with
plenty of other PCs and devices already. I get a lot of pressure to do a
PDA. What people really seem to want to do with these is get the data
out. We believe cell phones are going to carry this information. We
didn’t think we’d do well in the cell phone business. What we’ve done
instead is we’ve written what we think is some of the best software in
the world to start syncing information between devices. We believe that
mode is what cell phones need to get to. We chose to do the iPod instead
of a PDA.”
We’ll pick it up from there next time. Until then, go and grab your
iPad and give a quiet thanks to Elisha Gray, Hyman Eli Goldberg, Alan
Kay, the Newton team, Charles Landon Knight and Herman Ridder, Bill
Gates and yes, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Roddenberry.
Without them and many others, you might not be holding that wonderful
little device.
More recently known as a co-developer on the the One Laptop Per Child machine. The computer itself was inspired, in part, by Kay’s work on the Dynabook.
I’m really sorry for all the Flash on Todd’s site. It’s awful.
True, as Tom Henderson, principal researcher for ExtremeLabs and a colleague, told me, there’s a “Schwarzschild
radius surrounding Apple. It’s not just a reality distortion field;
it’s a whole new dimension. Inside, time slows and light never escapes–
as time compresses to an amorphous mass.
“Coddled, stroked, and massaged,” Henderson continued, “Apple users
start to sincerely believe the distortions regarding the economic life,
the convenience, and the subtle beauties of their myriad products.
Unknowingly, they sacrifice their time, their money, their privacy, and
soon, their very souls. Comparing Apple with Android, the parallels to
Syria and North Korea come to mind, despot-led personality cults.”
I wouldn’t go that far. While I prefer Android, I can enjoy using iOS
devices as well. Besides, Android fans can be blind to its faults just
as much as the most besotted Apple fan.
For example, it’s true that ICS has all the features that iOS 6 will eventually have, but you can only find ICS on 7.1 percent of all currently running Android devices. Talk to any serious Android user, and you’ll soon hear complaints about how they can’t update their systems.
You name an Android vendor-HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc. -and I can
find you a customer who can’t update their smartphone or tablet to the
latest and greatest version of the operating system. The techie Android
fanboy response to this problem is just “ROOT IT.” It’s not that easy.
First, the vast majority of Android users are as about as able to
root their smartphone as I am to run a marathon. Second, alternative
Android device firmwares don’t always work with every device. Even the
best of them, Cyanogen ICS, can have trouble with some devices.
Another issue is consistency. When you buy an iPhone or an iPad you
know exactly what the interface is going to work and look like. With
Android devices, you never know quite what you’re going to get. We talk
about ICS as if it’s one thing-and it is from a developer’s
viewpoint-but ICS on different phones such as the HTC One X doesn’t look or feel much like say the Samsung Galaxy S III.
A related issue is that the iOS interface is simply cleaner and more
user-friendly than any Android interface I’d yet to see. One of Apple’s
slogans is “It just works.” Well, actually sometimes it doesn’t work.
ITunes, for example, has been annoying me for years now. But, when it
comes to device interfaces, iOS does just work. Android implementations,
far too often, doesn’t.
So, yes, Android does more today than Apple’s iOS promises to do
tomorrow, but that’s only part of the story. The full story includes
that iOS is very polished and very closed, while Android is somewhat
messy and very open. To me, it’s that last bit-that Apple is purely
proprietary while Android is largely open source-based-that insures that
I’m going to continue to use Android devices.
Now, if only Google can get everyone on the same page with updates and the interface, I’ll be perfectly happy!
Last September, during the f8 Developers’ Conference, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said that the company had no plans for a “central app repository” – an app store. Today, Facebook is changing its tune. The social giant has announced App Center,
a section of Facebook dedicated to discovering and deploying
high-quality apps on the company’s platform. The App Center will push
apps to iPhone, Android and the mobile Web, giving Facebook its first
true store for mobile app discovery.
The departure from Facebook’s previous company line
comes as the social platform ramps up its mobile offerings to make money
from its hundreds of millions of mobile users. This is not your
father's app store, though.
Let's start with the requirements. Facebook has announced a strict
set of style and quality guidelines to get apps placed in App
Center. Apps that are considered high-quality, as decided by Facebook’s
Insights analytics platform, will get prominent placement. Quality is
determined by user ratings and app engagement. Apps that receive poor
ratings or do not meet Facebook’s quality guidelines won't be listed.
Whether or not an app is a potential Facebook App Center candidate hinges on several factors. It must
• have a canvas page (a page that sets the app's permissions on Facebook’s platform)
• be built for iOS, Android or the mobile Web
• use a Facebook Login or be a website that uses a Facebook Login.
Facebook is in a tricky spot with App Center. It will house not only
apps that are specifically run through its platform but also iOS and
Android apps. Thus it needs to achieve a balance between competition and
cooperation with some of the most powerful forces in the tech universe.
If an app in App Center requires a download, the download link on the
app’s detail page will bring the user to the appropriate app repository,
either Apple's App Store or Android’s Google Play.
One of the more interesting parts of App Center is that Facebook will
allow paid apps. This is a huge move for Facebook as it provides a
boost to its Credits payment service. One of the benefits of having a
store is that whoever controls the store also controls transactions
arising from the items in it, whether payments per download or in-app
purchases. This will go a long way towards Facebook’s goal of monetizing
its mobile presence without relying on advertising.
Facebook App Center Icon Guidelines
Developers interested in publishing apps to Facebook’s App Center should take a look at both the guidelines and the tutorial
that outlines how to upload the appropriate icons, how to request
permissions, how to use Single Sign On (SSO, a requirement for App
Center) and the app detail page.
This is a good move for Facebook. It will give the company several
avenues to start making money off of mobile but also strengthen its
position as one of the backbones of the Web. For instance, App Center is
both separate from iOS and Android but also a part of it. Through App
Center, Facebook can direct traffic to its apps, monitor who and how
users are downloading applications and keep itself at the center of the
user experience.
Business travelers -- and the enterprises that foot their phone bills -- have been complaining about high roaming fees in Europe for years. Now, some relief is finally in sight.
Indeed, both data roaming and phone calls travelers make while doing business (or taking a vacation) in Europe should be much cheaper this summer
thanks to a deal done in the European Parliament this week.
Members of the European Parliament and the Danish Presidency of the
Council of Ministers agreed to lower price caps on roaming. Parliament
as a whole still needs to approve the deal. But if all runs smoothly the
new rules will take effect July 1.
"I am satisfied that the Council approved Parliament's approach to
tackle very high prices of phone calls, SMS and in particular of data
roaming," said Angelika Niebler of Germany, Parliament's reporter for
the draft legislation. "The proposed price caps ensure a sufficient
margin between wholesale and retail prices to assure a level of
competition that will enable new players to enter the market."
How Low Do They Go?
The agreement increases transparency and consumer protection to prevent
bill shocks, Niebler said. That means European Union consumers no longer
need to worry about accidentally running up huge bills when using their
mobile devices both within and outside the EU. Of course, it's also a boon for consumers from other nations traveling to Europe.
How much savings are we talking about? According to the new rules, a
downloaded megabyte would cost no more than 70 cents. That cost drops
down to 45 cents in 2013 and 20 cents by July 2014. This is a big
improvement, seeing as there is currently no price ceiling for mobile
data services charged to consumers.
On the phone call front, the cost of a one-minute call would not exceed
29 cents under the new rules. That declines to 19 cents as of July 2014.
That's down from 35 cents under the current legislation. Finally, an
SMS would cost no more than 9 cents. That drops to 6 cents as by July
2014 and marks an 11 percent cut from current costs.
Nixing Roaming Altogether
"Mobile roaming charges in the EU are artificially high. Given the fact
that they are trying to treat the entire continent like a single
country, I don't understand why mobile roaming charges are so high
between countries," said Mike Disabato, managing vice president of network and telecom at Gartner.
Practically speaking, the new rules mean that you only need one SIM card
while traveling in Europe. Of course, you can't get a SIM card on an
iPhone unless you buy an unlocked phone for $800. But if you do use a
SIM card you will not have to change phone numbers every time you go to a
different country.
"The new rules will make it a lot cheaper for people who actually have
to do business in Europe. Any time you start reducing these types of
rates it's a good thing," Disabato said. "We got rid of roaming charges a
long time ago. It's about time they go in Europe. It will take until
the EU decides they are going to make it happen."
This
screen capture of a Wireshark session initiated by hacker Rob Graham
shows his iPad 3 exposing the MAC address of his home router. The unique
identifier could be viewed by anyone connected to the Starbucks hotspot
he accessed.
An Ars story from earlier this month reported that iPhones expose the unique identifiers of recently accessed wireless routers,
which generated no shortage of reader outrage. What possible
justification does Apple have for building this leakage capability into
its entire line of wireless products when smartphones, laptops, and
tablets from competitors don't? And how is it that Google, Wigle.net,
and others get away with publishing the MAC addresses of millions of
wireless access devices and their precise geographic location?
Some readers wanted more technical detail about the exposure, which
applies to three access points the devices have most recently connected
to. Some went as far as to challenge the validity of security researcher
Mark Wuergler's findings. "Until I see the code running or at least a
youtube I don't believe this guy has the goods," one Ars commenter wrote.
According to penetration tester Robert Graham, the findings are legit.
In the service of our readers, and to demonstrate to skeptics that
the privacy leak is real, Ars approached Graham and asked him to review
the article for accuracy and independently confirm or debunk Wuergler's
findings.
"I can confirm all the technical details of this 'hack,'" Graham, who
is CEO of Errata Security, told Ars via e-mail. "Apple products do
indeed send out three packets that will reveal your home router MAC
address. I confirmed this with my latest iPad 3."
He provided the image at the top of this post as proof. It shows a
screen from Wireshark, a popular packet-sniffing program, as his iPad
connected to a public hotspot at a Starbucks in Atlanta. Milliseconds
after it connected to an SSID named "attwifi" (as shown in the section
labeled #1), the iPad broadcasted the MAC address of his Linksys home
router (shown in the section labeled #2). In section #3, the iPad sent
the MAC address of this router a second time, and curiously, the
identifier was routed to this access point even though it's not
available on the local network. As is clear in section #4, the iPad also
exposed the local IP address the iPad used when accessing Graham's home
router. All of this information is relatively simple to view by anyone
within radio range.
The image is consistent with one provided by Wuergler below. Just as
Wuergler first claimed, it shows an iPhone disclosing the last three
access points it has connected to.
Mark Wuergler, Immunity Inc.
Graham used Wireshark to monitor the same Starbucks hotspot when he
connected with his Windows 7 laptop and Android-based Kindle Fire.
Neither device exposed any previously connected MAC addresses. He also
reviewed hundreds of other non-Apple devices as they connected to the
network, and none of them exposed previously accessed addresses, either.
As the data makes clear, the MAC addresses were exposed in ARP (address resolution protocol)
packets immediately after Graham's iPad associated with the access
point but prior to it receiving an IP address from the router's DHCP
server. Both Graham and Wuergler speculate that Apple engineers
intentionally built this behavior into their products as a way of
speeding up the process of reconnecting to access points, particularly
those in corporate environments. Rather than waiting for a DHCP server
to issue an IP address, the exposure of the MAC addresses allows the
devices to use the same address it was assigned last time.
"This whole thing is related to DHCP and autoconfiguration (for speed
and less traffic on the wire)," Wuergler told Ars. "The Apple devices
want to determine if they are on a network that they have previously
connected to and they send unicast ARPs out on the network in order to
do this."
Indeed, strikingly similar behavior was described in RFC 4436,
a 2006 technical memo co-written by developers from Apple, Microsoft,
and Sun Microsystems. It discusses a method for detecting network
attachment in IPv4-based systems.
"In this case, the host may determine whether it has re-attached to
the logical link where this address is valid for use, by sending a
unicast ARP Request packet to a router previously known for that link
(or, in the case of a link with more than one router, by sending one or
more unicast ARP Request packets to one or more of those routers)," the
document states at one point. "The ARP Request MUST use the host MAC
address as the source, and the test node MAC address as the
destination," it says elsewhere.
Of course, only Apple engineers can say for sure if the MAC
disclosure is intentional, and representatives with the company have
declined to discuss the issue with Ars. What's more, if RFC 4436 is the
reason for the behavior, it's unclear why there's no evidence of Windows
and Android devices doing the same thing. If detecting previously
connected networks is such a good idea, wouldn't Microsoft and Google
want to design their devices to do it, too?
In contrast to the findings of Graham and Wuergler were those of Ars writer Peter Bright, who observed different behavior when his iPod touch connected to a wireless network.
While the Apple device did expose a MAC address, the unique identifier
belonged to the Ethernet interface of his router rather than the MAC
address of the router's WiFi interface, which is the identifier
cataloged by Google, Skyhook, and similar databases.
Bright speculated that many corporate networks likely behave the same
way. And for Apple devices that connect to access points with such
configurations, exposure of the MAC address may pose less of a threat.
Still, while it's unclear what percentage of wireless routers assign a
different MAC address to wired and wireless interfaces, Graham and
Wuergler's tests show that at least some wireless routers by default
make no such distinction.
Wuergler also debunked a few other misconceptions that some people
had about the wireless behavior of Apple devices. Specifically, he said
claims that iPhones don't broadcast the SSID they are looking for
from Errata Security's Graham are incorrect. Some Ars readers had
invoked the 2010 blog post from Graham to cast doubt on Wuergler's
findings
"The truth is Apple products do probe for known SSIDs (and no, there is no limit as to how many)," Wuergler wrote in a post published on Friday to the Daily Dave mailing list. He included the following screenshot to document his claim.
Mark Wuergler, Immunity Inc.
Connecting the dots
What all of this means is that there's good reason to believe that
iPhones and other Apple products—at least when compared to devices
running Windows or Android—are unique in leaking MAC addresses that can
uniquely identify the locations of networks you've connected to
recently. When combined with other data often exposed by virtually all
wireless devices—specifically the names of wireless networks you've
connected to in the past—an attacker in close proximity of you can
harvest this information and use it in targeted attacks.
Over the past year or so, Google and Skyhook have taken steps to make
it harder for snoops to abuse the GPS information stored in their
databases. Google Location Services, for instance, now requires the submission of two MAC addresses
in close proximity of each other before it will divulge where they are
located. In many cases, this requirement can be satisfied simply by
providing one of the other MAC addresses returned by the Apple device.
If it's within a few blocks of the first one, Google will readily
provide the data. It's also feasible for attackers to use war dialing
techniques to map the MAC addresses of wireless devices in a given
neighborhood or city.
Since Apple engineers are remaining mum, we can only guess why
iDevices behave the way they do. What isn't in dispute is that, unlike
hundreds of competing devices that Wuergler and Graham have examined,
the Apple products leak connection details many users would prefer to
keep private.
A video demonstrating the iPhone's vulnerability to fake access point attacks is here.
On our last day at MWC 2012, TI pulled me aside for a private
demonstration of WiFi Display functionality they had only just recently
finalized working on their OMAP 5 development platform. The demo showed
WiFi Display mirroring working between the development device’s 720p
display and an adjacent notebook which was being used as the WiFi
Display sink.
TI emphasized that what’s different about their WiFi Display
implementation is that it works using the display framebuffer natively
and not a memory copy which would introduce delay and take up space. In
addition, the encoder being used is the IVA-HD accelerator doing the
WiFi Display specification’s mandatory H.264 baseline Level 3.1 encode,
not a software encoder running on the application processor. The demo
was running mirroring the development tablet’s 720p display, but TI says
they could easily do 1080p as well, but would require a 1080p
framebuffer to snoop on the host device. Latency between the development
platform and display sink was just 15ms - essentially one frame at 60
Hz.
The demonstration worked live over the air at TI’s MWC booth and also
used a WiLink 8 series WLAN combo chip. There was some stuttering,
however this is understandable given the fact that this demo was using
TCP (live implementations will use UDP) and of course just how crowded
2.4 and 5 GHz spectrum is at these conferences. In addition, TI
collaborated with Screenovate for their application development and WiFi
Display optimization secret sauce, which I’m guessing has to do with
adaptive bitrate or possibly more.
Enabling higher than 480p software encoded WiFi Display is just one
more obvious piece of the puzzle which will eventually enable
smartphones and tablets to obviate standalone streaming devices.
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Personal Comment:
Kind of obvious and interesting step forward as it is more and more requested by mobile devices users to be able to beam or 'to TV' mobile device's screens... which should lead to transform any (mobile) device in a full-duplex video broadcasting enabled device (user interaction included!) ... and one may then succeed in getting rid of some cables in the same sitting?!
