The beauty of hackers, says
cybersecurity expert Keren Elazari, is that they force us to evolve and
improve. Yes, some hackers are bad guys, but many are working to fight
government corruption and advocate for our rights. By exposing
vulnerabilities, they push the Internet to become stronger and
healthier, wielding their power to create a better world.
Online artists’ community deviantART is hoping to become responsible for the new .art web domains,
and it recently sent a letter to ICANN (the organization responsible
for managing top level domains) laying out its perspective on the stakes
in the decision.
The letter also presents deviantART’s case for why it deserves a “community designation” in the application process, saying:
“We are on the cusp of an extraordinary opportunity with the simple
use of a single word: a virtual place within the Internet for the arts
and a virtual palace to the arts built site-by-site by millions of
artists and art institutions each with an individualized artistic
contribution gathered around the simple namespace of ‘.ART.’”
The letter adds that if the domain is exploited commercially, “it
will only occasionally and haphazardly designate the arts themselves. It
will not be a welcomed location for the arts.”
That may seem like an unusual argument coming from a for-profit
business, but deviantART has created a new subsidiary called Dadotart
(apparently that’s standard procedure when applying to manage a new top
level domain), and it says it would create a policy board of “artists
and art institutions” that would establish the standards for when the
.art designation can be used.
deviantART says ICANN is currently deciding whether it deserves the
community designation, which would give it priority in the application
process. The initial signs may have not been entirely positive, as the
letter states: “We believe preservation of the arts is at risk based
upon the results of the initial community evaluations made by ICANN that
clearly disfavor their approval with a resulting and evident bias
towards commercialization.”
If you aren’t familiar with deviantART, the site showcases digital
art, traditional art, photography — sometimes original and sometimes
inspired by existing media properties — and it says it has 31 million
registered users. (Software company Autodesk became an investor last year.)
e-flux, a network
of art professionals, is also applying for a community designation, and
although the applications can’t be combined, deviantART says the two
groups support each other’s applications and would be involved in policy
issues if either gets awarded the domain.
[Submitted to ICANN May 21, 2014 by deviantART on behalf of its applicant, Dadotart, Inc., for the .ART gTLD]
SAVE DOT ART
ICANN has a choice: it can promote the arts or destroy their common identity.
“.ART “ can become an authentic Internet address for the arts and
represent its community. We are on the cusp of an extraordinary
opportunity with the simple use of a single word: a virtual place within
the Internet for the arts and a virtual palace to the arts built
site-by-site by millions of artists and art institutions each with an
individualized artistic contribution gathered around the simple
namespace of “.ART.” The .ART gTLD can become a touchstone of world
culture and contribute transformative vision across all boundaries.
But left to pure commercial exploitation, .ART will stand as a
complete failure. It will only occasionally and haphazardly designate
the arts themselves. It will not be a welcomed location for the arts.
The impact of the worldwide abuse of a beloved term through disjointed,
disorganized, and random designations – - completely irrelevant to its
meaning and associations – - would be an irretrievable tragedy.
There are two applicants for .ART, which have elected community
designation, DeviantArt and e-flux who mutually support each other’s
applications. Eight other, purely commercial, entities and individuals
have chosen to oppose or stand in the way of that joint effort.
We believe preservation of the arts is at risk based upon the results
of the initial community evaluations made by ICANN that clearly
disfavor their approval with a resulting and evident bias towards
commercialization.
DeviantArt has over 31 million registered members and an audience
exceeding 60 million unique visitors a month all drawn to the arts. It
is one of the top 150 Internet sites in the world measured by traffic.
E-flux is a network of over 100,000 art institutions and professional
artists, curators, and practitioners.
DeviantArt and e-flux are committed. We stand prepared to convene a
Policy Board of the most passionate and essential artists and art
institutions to first debate and then establish standards for the use of
the .ART address. As representatives of the community of the arts, we
are prepared to initiate a gTLD for the arts, by the arts, and with the
arts.
We call upon the ICANN Board to intervene on behalf of the arts. We
ask the Board to recognize the .ART gTLD’s unique and substantial value
as a world cultural monument and to dedicate its management to trusted,
proven organizations that have introduced and guided the arts to the
World Wide Web since its inception.
We call upon ICANN to set aside its unlimited and seemingly
unrestrained commercialization of the Internet name space and embrace
the opportunity that it hardcoded into its guidebook for applicants to
self-identify as a community. ICANN must choose to promote the arts
rather than destroy their common identity.
We call upon the Government Advisory Committee to the ICANN Board to
safeguard the arts as a universal human right in its shared culture. We
call upon the GAC to insist upon the recognition of valid community
interests in the assignment of gTLDs by ICANN’s management in line with
the GAC’s own requests to ICANN at the Singapore meetings held in March
of this year.
And through DeviantART we call upon the world community of the arts
to make itself known and rise to the defense of its own integrity and
good name.
ComputedBy - The idea to share a WiFi access point is far to be a new one (it is obviously as old as the technology of the WiFi access point itself), but previous solutions were not addressing many issues (including the legal ones) that this proposal seems finally to consider seriously. This may really succeed in transforming a ridiculously endless utopia in something tangible!
Now, Internet providers (including mobile networks) may have a word to say about that. Just by changing their terms of service they can just make this practice illegal... as business does not rhyme with effectiveness (yes, I know, that is strange!!...) neither with objectivity. It took some time but geographical boundaries were raised up over the Internet (which is somehow a as impressive as ridiculous achievement when you think about it), so I'm pretty sure 'they' can find a work around to make this idea not possible or put their hands over it.
We’ve often heard security folks explain their belief that one of the
best ways to protect Web privacy and security on one's home turf is to
lock down one's private Wi-Fi network with a strong password. But a
coalition of advocacy organizations is calling such conventional wisdom
into question.
Members of the “Open Wireless Movement,” including the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF), Free Press, Mozilla, and Fight for the Future
are advocating that we open up our Wi-Fi private networks (or at least a
small slice of our available bandwidth) to strangers. They claim that
such a random act of kindness can actually make us safer online while
simultaneously facilitating a better allocation of finite broadband
resources.
The OpenWireless.org website
explains the group’s initiative. “We are aiming to build technologies
that would make it easy for Internet subscribers to portion off their
wireless networks for guests and the public while maintaining security,
protecting privacy, and preserving quality of access," its mission
statement reads. "And we are working to debunk myths (and confront
truths) about open wireless while creating technologies and legal
precedent to ensure it is safe, private, and legal to open your
network.”
One such technology, which EFF plans to unveil at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference
next month, is open-sourced router firmware called Open Wireless
Router. This firmware would enable individuals to share a portion of
their Wi-Fi networks with anyone nearby, password-free, as Adi Kamdar, an EFF activist, told Ars on Friday.
Home network sharing tools are not new,
and the EFF has been touting the benefits of open-sourcing Web
connections for years, but Kamdar believes this new tool marks the
second phase in the open wireless initiative. Unlike previous tools, he
claims, EFF’s software will be free for all, will not require any sort
of registration, and will actually make surfing the Web safer and more
efficient.
Open Wi-Fi initiative members have argued that the act of
providing wireless networks to others is a form of “basic politeness…
like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea” to a neighbor,
as security expert Bruce Schneier described it.
Walled off
Kamdar said that the new firmware utilizes smart technologies that
prioritize the network owner's traffic over others', so good samaritans
won't have to wait for Netflix to load because of strangers using their
home networks. What's more, he said, "every connection is walled off
from all other connections," so as to decrease the risk of unwanted
snooping.
Additionally, EFF hopes that opening one’s Wi-Fi network will, in the
long run, make it more difficult to tie an IP address to an individual.
“From a legal perspective, we have been trying to tackle this idea
that law enforcement and certain bad plaintiffs have been pushing, that
your IP address is tied to your identity. Your identity is not your IP
address. You shouldn't be targeted by a copyright troll just because
they know your IP address," said Kamdar.
This isn’t an abstract problem, either. Consider the case
of the Californian who, after allowing a friend access to his home
Wi-Fi network, found his home turned inside-out by police officers
asking tough questions about child pornography. The man later learned
that his houseguest had downloaded illicit materials, thus subjecting
the homeowner to police interrogation. Should a critical mass begin to
open private networks to strangers, the practice of
correlating individuals with IP addresses would prove increasingly
difficult and therefore might be reduced.
While the EFF firmware will initially be compatible with only one
specific router, the organization would like to eventually make it
compatible with other routers and even, perhaps, develop its own router.
“We noticed that router software, in general, is pretty insecure and
inefficient," Kamdar said. “There are a few major players in the router
space. Even though various flaws have been exposed, there have not been
many fixes.”
Not very often do you read something online that gives you the chills. Today, I read two such things.
The first came from former Gizmodo, Buzzfeed and now Awl writer John Herrman, who wrote about the brutality of the mobile social (or for sake of discussion ‘fourth’) Internet:
“Metafilter came from two or three internets ago, when a
website’s core audience—people showing up there every day or every week,
directly—was its main source of visitors. Google might bless a site
with new visitors or take them away.
Either way, it was still possible for a site’s fundamentals to be
strong, independent of extremely large outside referrers. What’s so
disconcerting now is that the new sources of readership, the apps and
sites people check every day and which lead people to new posts and
stories, make up a majority of readership, and they’re utterly
unpredictable (they’re also bigger, always bigger, every new internet
is.)”
This broke my heart. In 2008, two Internets ago, Metafilter was my favorite site. It was where I went to find out what the next Star Wars Kid would be, or to find precious baby animal videos to show my cool boyfriend or even more intellectual fare. And now it’s as endangered as the sneezing pandas I first discovered there.
National Internet treasures like Metafilter (or TechCrunch
for that matter) should never die. There should be some Internet
Preservation Society filled with individuals like Herrman or Marc
Andreessen or Mark Zuckerberg or Andy Baio whose sole purpose is to keep them alive.
But there isn’t. Herrman makes a very good point; Useful places to
find information, that aren’t some strange Pavlovian manipulation of the
human desire to click or identify, just aren’t good business these
days.
And Herrman should know, he’s worked in every new media outlet under
the web, including the one that AP staffers are now so desperate to join
that they make mistakes like this.
The fourth Internet is scary like Darwinism, brutal enough to remind
me of high school. It’s a game of identity where you either make people
feel like members of some exclusive club, like The Information
does with a pricy subscription model or all niche tech sites do with
their relatively high CPM, or you straight up play up to reader
narcissism like Buzzfeed does, slicing and dicing user identity until
you end up with “21 Problems Only People With Baby Faces Will Understand.”
Which brings me to the thing I read today which truly scared the shit out of me. Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti, though his LinkedIn is completely bereft of it in favor of MIT, was apparently an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz in the late 90s.
Right after graduation in 1996, he wrote a paper
about identity and capitalism in post-modern times, which tl:dr
postulated that neo-capitalism needs to get someone to identify with its
ideals before it could sell its wares.
(Aside: If you think you are immune to capitalistic entreaties, because you read Adbusters and are a Culture Jammer,
you’re not. Think of it this way: What is actually wrong with being
chubby? But how hard do modern ads try to tell you that this — which is
arguably the Western norm — is somehow not okay.)
The thesis Peretti put forth in his paper is basically the blueprint for Buzzfeed, which increasingly has made itself All About You. Whether you’re an Armenian immigrant, or an Iggy Azaelia fan or
a person born in the 2000s, 1990s or 80s, you will identify with
Buzzfeed, because its business model (and the entire fourth Internet’s )
depends on it.
“The way this identification
will happen is through images and video, through ‘visual culture.’
Presumably, in this late capitalist world, someone who creates a website
that can use pictures and GIFs and videos to form hundreds if not
thousands of new identities for people to latch onto will become very
successful!”
More than anything else in the pantheon of modern writing or as the
kids call it, content creation, Buzzfeed aims to be hyper-relatable,
through visuals! It hopes it can define your exact identity, because
only then will you share its URL on Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr as
some sort of badge of your own uniqueness, immortality.
If the first Internet was “Getting information online,” the second
was “Getting the information organized” and the third was “Getting
everyone connected” the fourth is definitely “Get mine.” Which is a
trap.
Which Cog In The Digital Capitalist Machine Are You?
There is no point in kidding ourselves, now, about Who Has the Power. – Hunter S. Thompson, jacket copy, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Internet wasn’t supposed to be so…Machiavellian.
In 1963, Stewart Brand
and his wife set out on a landmark road trip, the goal of which was to
educate and enliven the people they encountered with tools for modern
living. The word “tools” was taken liberally. Brand wrote that “a realm
of intimate, personal power is developing.” Any tool that created or
channeled such power was useful. Tools meant books, maps, professional journals, courses, classes, and more.
In 1968, Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), an underground
magazine of sorts that would scale in a way no road-weary Dodge ever
could. The first issue was 64 pages and cost $5. It opened with the
phrase: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
A year after WEC’s start, on October 29, 1969, the first packet of data was sent from UCLA to SRI International. It was called ARPAnet
at the time, but with it the Internet was born. Brand and others would
come to see the Internet as the essential, defining “tool” of their
generation. Until its final issue in 1994, the WEC’s 32 editions provide
as good a chronicle of the emergence of cyberculture (as it was then
called) as you can find.
Cyberculture. It’s a curious and complicated term in today’s society,
isn’t it? Cyberculture is at once completely outdated and awfully
relevant.
As Fred Turner has argued,
Brand is a key figure in the weaving together of two major cultural
fabrics that have since split — counterculture and cyberculture. Brand
is also immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. And Brand famously assisted researcher Doug Engelbart with the “Mother of all Demos,” the outline of a vision for technology prosthetics that improve human life; it would define computing for decades to come.
The Merry Pranksters, still from the movie Magic Trip
Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy — an elite East Coast high
school, and an institution of traditional power if there ever was one.
He was a parachutist in the U.S. Army. He graduated with a degree in
biology from Stanford, studied design at San Francisco Art Institute and
photography at San Francisco State. He also participated in legal
studies of LSD and its effects with Timothy Leary.
That’s hardly the typical resume of a technologist or an entrepreneur
or an investor. But it should be. The business of making culture has
been for too long now controlled by people who live outside it.
It is my opinion that the Internet of today can and must be
countercultural again, that cyberculture should — needs to be —
countercultural.
That word,countercultural,carries with it
the connotation of liberal idealism and societal marginalia. Yet, the
new countercultures we’re seeing online today are profoundly mainstream,
and drawn along wholly different political lines. The Internet is its
own party. The Internet has its own set of beliefs. Springs have sprung
the world over and this isn’t simply a nerd thing anymore. We all care
passionately about Internet life and Internet liberty and the continual
pursuit of happiness both online and off.
Yet if the Internet is a measure of our culture, our zeitgeist, then
what does it tell us about the spirit of this age? Our zeitgeist
certainly isn’t what’s trending; it’s not another quiz of which TV
character you are; it’s not another listicle. I changed the global power
structure and all I got was this lousy t-shirt. And Facebook. And
Twitter.
What is this generation’s Rolling Stone? What is our Whole Earth
Catalog? It’s an important question because if the Internet is defining
our culture, and our use of it defines our society, then we have a
responsibility to ensure and propel its transformative impact, to
understand the ways cyberculture can and should be the counterculture
driving change rather than just distracting us from it.
There are beacons of hope. I eagerly await Jon Evans’ fantastic column in these pages each weekend for reasons like this.
The Daily Dot, a
publication I co-founded, documents today’s cyberculture through the
lens of online communities — virtual locales in which we arguably
“reside” more deliberately than any geography. You should also be
reading Edge, N+1, and Dangerous Minds. Even Vanity Fair has turned its eye to this theme, successfully I think, with articles like this. Rolling Stone is doing a pretty good job of being Rolling Stone these days, too.
I’m terminally optimistic, and I believe that counter-cyber-culture
is inherently optimistic, as well. Even despite the U.S. government’s
overreaching on privacy and “protecting” us from data about our own
bodies, despite Silicon Valley’s mad rush to cash in on apps rather than
substantial technology, despite most online media’s drastic descent to
the lowest common denominator and even lower standards of journalism, I
remain…optimistic.
We have found a courage in our growing numbers online. People old and
young can be be bold and defining on the Internet, underwritten by the
emotional support of peers everywhere. We’re voting for what we want the
world to be, and how we want it to be. Why do you think Kickstarter
works so well? We fund things that without our help are unlikely to
exist, but ought to nonetheless. Our “likes” and “shares” are ultimately
becoming votes for the kind of future we want to live in, and I’m
optimistic that we will ultimately wield that responsibility with
meaning and thoughtfully.
Tumblr. 4chan. Etsy. YouTube. We have emigrated to these outlying
territories seeking religious freedoms, cultural freedoms, and personal
freedoms alike. We colonized, and are still colonizing, new environs
each day and every week. We claim and reclaim the Internet like so many
tribal boundaries.
We’re winning more often than not, thank goodness. Aaron Swartz heroically beat SOPA and PIPA against all odds. Yahoo won against PRISM. The Internet won against cancer…with pizza. My godmother knows what Tor is.
The virtual reality community rebelled when princely Oculus sold to
Facebook, for the reason that VR is a new superpower and a new
countercultural medium that we’re afraid might have fallen into the
wrong hands (I don’t believe that’s actually the case, but that’s
grounds for another post altogether).
So, yes. A countercultural moment all our own stares us in the face.
Like Brand, I hope we can manage to be politically aware and socially
responsible in a way that technology begs us to be, without giving
ground to the idea that the Internet is anything but ours.
Civil disobedience is a different game when the means of production
and dissemination have been fully democratized. We seek differentiated
high ground from which to defend our values. We build new back channels
to communicate unencumbered. Instead of making catalogues, we make new
categories. We wield technology, perhaps unaware on whose shoulders we
stand, but at the same time free from the anxiety of influence.
We aspire to be more pure in that sense. We want and we give and we need and we will have…pure Internet.
Editor’s note:Josh Jones-Dilworth is a co-founder of the Daily Dot; founder and CEO of Jones-Dilworth, Inc., an early-stage technology marketing consultancy; and co-founder of Totem, a startup changing PR for the better. Follow his blog here.
Featured image by Kundra/Shutterstock; Hunter S. Thompson image by Wikimedia Commons user MDCarchives (own work) under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 license
Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a
research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns
over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system
called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running
continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:
First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.
So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by
reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of
confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,132,551 of these beliefs —
these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is
learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.
Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox are vulnerable to
easy-to-execute techniques that allow unscrupulous websites to construct
detailed histories of sites visitors have previously viewed, an attack
that revives a long-standing privacy threat many people thought was
fixed.
Until a few years ago, history-sniffing attacks were accepted as an
unavoidable consequence of Web surfing, no matter what browser someone
used. By abusing a combination of features in JavaScript and cascading style sheets,
websites could probe a visitor's browser to check if it had visited one
or more sites. In 2010, researchers at the University of California at
San Diego caught YouPorn.com and 45 other sites using the technique to determine if visitors viewed other pornographic sites. Two years later, a widely used advertising network settled federal charges that it illegally exploited the weakness to infer if visitors were pregnant.
Until about four years ago, there was little users could do other
than delete browsing histories from their computers or use features such
as incognito or in-private browsing available in Google Chrome and
Microsoft Internet Explorer respectively. The privacy intrusion was
believed to be gradually foreclosed thanks to changes made in each
browser. To solve the problem, browser developers restricted the styles
that could be applied to visited links and tightened the ways JavaScript
could interact with them. That allowed visited links to show up in
purple and unvisited links to appear in blue without that information
being detectable to websites.
Now, a graduate student at Hasselt University in Belgium
said he has confirmed that Chrome, IE, and Firefox users are once again
susceptible to browsing-history sniffing. Borrowing from a browser-timing attack disclosed last year
by fellow researcher Paul Stone, student Aäron Thijs was able to
develop code that forced all three browsers to divulge browsing history
contents. He said other browsers, including Safari and Opera, may also
be vulnerable, although he has not tested them.
"The attack could be used to check if the victim visited certain
websites," Thijs wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "In my example attack
vectors I only check 'https://www.facebook.com'; however, it could be
modified to check large sets of websites. If the script is embedded into
a website that any browser user visits, it can run silently in the
background and a connection could be set up to report the results back
to the attacker."
The sniffing of his experimental attack code was relatively modest,
checking only the one site when the targeted computer wasn't under heavy
load. By contrast, more established exploits from a few years ago were
capable of checking, depending on the browser, about 20 URLs per second.
Thijs said it's possible that his attack might work less effectively if
the targeted computer was under heavy load. Then again, he said it
might be possible to make his attack more efficient by improving his
URL-checking algorithm.
I know what sites you viewed last summer
The browser timing attack technique Thijs borrowed from fellow researcher Stone abuses a programming interface known as requestAnimationFrame,
which is designed to make animations smoother. It can be used to time
the browser's rendering, which is the time it takes for the browser to
display a given webpage. By measuring variations in the time it takes
links to be displayed, attackers can infer if a particular website has
been visited. In addition to browsing history, earlier attacks that
exploited the JavaScript feature were able to sniff out telephone
numbers and other details designated as private in a Google Plus
profile. Those vulnerabilities have been fixed in Chrome and Firefox,
the two browsers that were susceptible to the attack, Thijs said. Stone unveiled the attack at last year's Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas.
The resurrection of viable sniffing history attacks underscores a key
dynamic in security. When defenders close a hole, attackers will often
find creative ways to reopen it. For the time being, users should assume
that any website they visit is able to obtain at least a partial
snapshot of other sites indexed in their browser history. As mentioned
earlier, privacy-conscious people should regularly flush their history
or use private browsing options to conceal visits to sensitive sites.
Complimentary Wi-Fi is so commonplace that a business advertising its
“hotspot” in the window seems somewhat passé. But a new hotspot
location should impress even the most jaded among us: For the first
time, scientists have demonstrated it’s possible to beam a wireless
Internet signal across the 238,900 miles separating Earth from the moon.
The demonstration, done by researchers at NASA and MIT, means that
future moon explorers could theoretically check in at Mare Imbrium and
post lunar selfies with greater speed than you do from your home
network.
The team will present its findings June 9 at the CLEO laser technology conference in California.
Not Your Starbucks Wi-Fi
In order to bring broadband to the moon, scientists used four
separate telescopes based in New Mexico to send an uplink signal to a
receiver mounted on a satellite orbiting the moon. Each telescope is
about 6 inches in diameter and is fed by a laser transmitter that beams
information in coded pulses of infrared light.
Since our atmosphere bends the signal as it travels to the moon, the
four telescopes transmit the light through different columns of air,
each with different bending effects. This setup increases the chance
that at least one of the laser beams will interact with the receiver,
and establish a connection with the moon.
And if you’re fixing to binge on Netflix on the moon, the connection
isn’t too bad, either. Scientists managed to send data from Earth to the
moon at a rate of 19.44 megabits per second — on par with slower
broadband speeds — and could download information from the moon at a
rate of whopping 622 megabits per second. According to Wired UK, that’s over 4,000 times faster than current radio transmission speeds.
So, in light of all that, there’s really only question that remains… “What’s the password?”
The internet will have nearly 3 billion users, about 40 percent of the world's population, by the end of 2014, according to a new report from the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. Two-thirds of those users will be in developing countries.
Those numbers refer to people who have used the internet in the last three months, not just those who have access to it.
Internet penetration is
reaching saturation in developed countries, while it's growing rapidly
in developing countries. Three out of four people in Europe will be
using the internet by the end of the year, compared to two out of three
in the Americas and one in three in Asia and the Pacific. In Africa,
nearly one in five people will be online by the end of the year.
Mobile phone subscriptions will
reach almost 7 billion. That growth rate is slowing, suggesting that
the number will plateau soon. Mobile internet subscriptions are still
growing rapidly, however, and are expected to reach 2.3 billion by the
end of 2014.
These numbers make it easy to
imagine a future in which every human on Earth is using the internet.
The number of people online will still be dwarfed by the number of
things, however. Cisco estimates the internet already has 10 billion
connected devices and is expected to hit 50 billion by 2020.
Apple has just released the iBeacon specifications for everyone who is a member of the MFi program,
Apple’s program for hardware partners (“Made for iPhone program”,
etc.). You’ll have to sign an NDA to read the specifications. BEEKn
first spotted the news. The company also reiterates that you can’t use
the iBeacon brand without prior consent. You have to register to the MFi
program, submit a request and get approved by Apple. It’s free for now.
As a reminder, iBeacon is an indoor positioning system based on
Bluetooth Low Energy. Many iOS and Android devices now come with
Bluetooth Low Energy, so they are all theoretically compatible with
iBeacon. iBeacon is particularly interesting for retailers. They can buy
a beacon (such as the Estimote pictured above) and use it for proximity interactions.
For instance, merchants can send a push notification to smartphone
users when they get close to a particular product. It can also be used
for payment systems to detect who is in your store. There are countless
of possibilities — it’s just the beginning.
iBeacon is just a particular implementation of Bluetooth Low Energy.
Devices broadcast a Bluetooth LE signal, and iPhones download data when
they are close to a beacon. It also works with Android phones, and Apple
apparently doesn’t want to stop that.
Yet, iBeacon is a registered trademark and Apple can decide what to
do. For now, developers who sign up to the MFi program, request to use
the iBeacon name, and conform to the Apple standard can use the brand
for free. iBeacon devices will mostly be B2B devices for shop owners,
trade show staffs and more.
Think of it like the “Made for iPhone” brand. Dock manufacturers can
build a speaker that works with Android and iOS phones. They put the
little “Made for iPhone” stickers. It means that Apple certifies that it
will work well with iPhones. The iBeacon brand works the same way for
beacons.
