Computed·Blg

Via TechCrunch

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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 Cyberculture is at once completely outdated and awfully relevant.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

 Via Computed·Blg

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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.

Via ars technica

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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.

Thijs told Ars that Mozilla has already acknowledged plans to actively work on a fix. A Microsoft forum where Thijs reported his IE findings over the weekend has since been made private, but at the time of writing, it was still publicly available in this Google cache. Thijs said the issue is also under discussion by Chrome developers.

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.

Via The Verge

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(twitter.com/mattwi1s0n / Flickr)

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.

Via Slash Gear

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Just about every electronic device that we buy today has WiFi hardware embedded inside. Our game consoles like the PS3, PS4, Xbox One, and portable devices all ship with wireless connectivity. Strategy Analytics has issued a new report that shows 68% of all consumer electronics devices sold in the US now include WiFi capability.

When the report is expanded to look at the entire world, 57% of all consumer electronics devices have WiFi embedded. There are 4 billion WiFi enabled devices in use around the world today. Breaking that down, Strategy Analytics says that is about seven WiFi equipped devices for every home.

Looking around my house, I have more devices that that with multiple smartphones, game consoles, tablets, DVRs with WiFi, and more. It’s easy to see how 4 billion WiFi devices can be in use around the world. The research firm predicts that by 2017 there will be over 7 billion WiFi devices in use globally.

The most common WiFi equipped devices on the market are mobile phones and tablets. Those two product categories account for 59% of all WiFi enabled CE devices shipped in 2013. Mobile PCs is the next biggest category accounting for 9% of WiFi devices shipped. The massive difference in percentage between mobile phones and tablets compared to mobile computers makes sense with the computer market on the decline. Key growth areas for WiFi moving forward will be in cameras, wireless audio speakers, smart TVs and DVRs according to Strategy Analytics.

The complete report here

Via Ericson

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• City populations grow by 7,500 people per hour and mobile data traffic is expected to grow ten times by 2019, increasing the need for sustainable lighting and enhanced mobile capacity and coverage in cities
• New connected street lighting model solves two issues simultaneously: offering city officials an innovative way to afford next generation energy efficient LED lighting to meet sustainability goals, and enabling network operators to offer improved city-wide mobile broadband and app coverage
• Called "Zero Site" by Ericsson, connected lighting solution integrates telecom equipment into light poles enabling telecom operators to improve mobile network performance while reducing urban clutter
• Citizens will benefit from improved mobile network coverage for data communications and enhanced safety with brighter, well lit streets

Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) and Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA), the global leader in lighting, have jointly launched an innovative new connected LED street lighting model. The partnership solves two major issues that cities are facing today: providing citizens with improved network performance in dense urban areas as well as high quality, public lighting that is energy efficient.

Philips and Ericsson combine the benefits of mobile connectivity and LED lighting in a ''lighting-as-a-service'' model for cities. It allows city authorities to offer space within their connected lighting poles to network service providers for mobile broadband infrastructure.

Philips will now offer cities LED street lighting that can include mobile telecoms equipment from Ericsson. Mobile operators working with Ericsson for mobile broadband infrastructure will be able to rent space in the poles. In this way, mobile network operators will be able to improve data coverage and capacity for citizens, resulting in enhanced mobile broadband services. The model also accelerates the payback time for city infrastructure, by making the up-front costs of installing and managing these systems more affordable, so reducing the strain on city budgets.

Philips LED street lighting can generate energy savings of 50 to 70 percent, with savings reaching 80 percent when coupled with smart controls - as validated by a study conducted by The Climate Group in 12 of the world's largest cities. The study also showed that citizens prefer the white light of LED lighting, citing a greater sense of safety and improved visibility compared to the orange glow of traditional high pressure sodium systems.

Ericsson President and CEO Hans Vestberg says: "This is a tremendous solution using ICT and partnerships to address the megatrend of urbanization. City populations are increasing at the rate of 7,500 people per hour, but our world is not geographically expanding. Meanwhile, our ConsumerLab research shows that internet connectivity is one of the top five factors for satisfaction in city life. This Zero Site solution is the kind of innovation that offers a way for people to succeed in the Networked Society."

Frans van Houten, President and CEO of Philips, says: "This new connected LED street lighting model is another example of us bringing the Internet of Things to life and demonstrates the capabilities of light beyond illumination. We are offering lighting as a service that scales with a city's needs and enables city officials to offer their citizens a more connected, energy efficient and safer urban environment, while preserving existing budgets and resources to improve the livability of their city."

To meet the demand for coverage and capacity, mobile operators need to improve, densify and add many more radio cell sites in dense areas. The new connected street light pole, designed to house Ericsson's cutting edge suite of small cell products, offers network operators new possibilities to find the right site location. It will also help to scale the deployment of mobile broadband technology beyond traditional sites - a key enabler for evolving heterogeneous networks.

Via The Telegraph

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The Twitter logo displayed on a smart phone Photo: PA

Scientists have developed the ultimate lie detector for social media – a system that can tell whether a tweeter is telling the truth.

The creators of the system called Pheme, named after the Greek mythological figure known for scandalous rumour, say it can judge instantly between truth and fiction in 140 characters or less.

Researchers across Europe are joining forces to analyse the truthfulness of statements that appear on social media in “real time” and hope their system will prevent scurrilous rumours and false statements from taking hold, the Times reported.

The creators believe that the system would have proved useful to the police and authorities during the London Riots of 2011. Tweeters spread false reports that animals had been released from London Zoo and landmarks such as the London Eye and Selfridges had been set on fire, which caused panic and led to police being diverted.

Kalina Bontcheva, from the University of Sheffield’s engineering department, said that the system would be able to test information quickly and trace its origins. This would enable governments, emergency services, health agencies, journalists and companies to respond to falsehoods.

Via The Guardian, Via Samantha Besson

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NSA spying, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, may cause countries to create separate networks and break up the experts, according to experts. Photograph: Alex Milan Tracy/NurPhoto/NurPhoto/Corbis

The vast scale of online surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is leading to the breakup of the internet as countries scramble to protect private or commercially sensitive emails and phone records from UK and US security services, according to experts and academics.

They say moves by countries, such as Brazil and Germany, to encourage regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US are likely to be the first steps in a fundamental shift in the way the internet works. The change could potentially hinder economic growth.

"States may have few other options than to follow in Brazil's path," said Ian Brown, from the Oxford Internet Institute. "This would be expensive, and likely to reduce the rapid rate of innovation that has driven the development of the internet to date … But if states cannot trust that their citizens' personal data – as well as sensitive commercial and government information – will not otherwise be swept up in giant surveillance operations, this may be a price they are willing to pay."

Since the Guardian's revelations about the scale of state surveillance, Brazil's government has published ambitious plans to promote Brazilian networking technology, encourage regional internet traffic to be routed locally, and is moving to set up a secure national email service.

In India, it has been reported that government employees are being advised not to use Gmail and last month, Indian diplomatic staff in London were told to use typewriters rather than computers when writing up sensitive documents.

In Germany, privacy commissioners have called for a review of whether Europe's internet traffic can be kept within the EU – and by implication out of the reach of British and US spies.

Surveillance dominated last week's Internet Governance Forum 2013, held in Bali. The forum is a UN body that brings together more than 1,000 representatives of governments and leading experts from 111 countries to discuss the "sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the internet".

Debates on child protection, education and infrastructure were overshadowed by widespread concerns from delegates who said the public's trust in the internet was being undermined by reports of US and British government surveillance.

Lynn St Amour, the Internet Society's chief executive, condemned government surveillance as "interfering with the privacy of citizens".

Johan Hallenborg, Sweden's foreign ministry representative, proposed that countries introduce a new constitutional framework to protect digital privacy, human rights and to reinforce the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers – which is partly responsible for the infrastructure of the internet – last week voiced "strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance".

Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in Washington, said the Snowden revelations were pushing the internet towards a tipping point with huge ramifications for the way online communications worked.

"We are certainly getting pushed towards this cliff and it is a cliff we do not want to go over because if we go over it, I don't see how we stop. It is like a run on the bank – the system we have now works unless everyone decides it doesn't work then the whole thing collapses."

Castro said that as the scale of the UK and US surveillance operations became apparent, countries around the globe were considering laws that would attempt to keep data in-country, threatening the cloud system – where data stored by US internet firms is accessible from anywhere in the world.

He said this would have huge implications for the way large companies operated.

"What this would mean is that any multinational company suddenly has lots of extra costs. The benefits of cloud computing that have given us flexibility, scaleability and reduced costs – especially for large amounts of data – would suddenly disappear."

Large internet-based firms, such as Facebook and Yahoo, have already raised concerns about the impact of the NSA revelations on their ability to operate around the world. "The government response was, 'Oh don't worry, we're not spying on any Americans'," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. "Oh, wonderful: that's really helpful to companies trying to serve people around the world, and that's really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies."

Castro wrote a report for Itif in August predicting as much as $35bn could be lost from the US cloud computing market by 2016 if foreign clients pull out their businesses. And he said the full economic impact of the potential breakup of the internet was only just beginning to be recognised by the global business community.

"This is changing how companies are thinking about data. It used to be that the US government was the leader in helping make the world more secure but the trust in that leadership has certainly taken a hit … This is hugely problematic for the general trust in the internet and e-commerce and digital transactions."

Brown said that although a localised internet would be unlikely to prevent people in one country accessing information in another area, it may not be as quick and would probably trigger an automatic message telling the user that they were entering a section of the internet that was subject to surveillance by US or UK intelligence.

"They might see warnings when information is about to be sent to servers vulnerable to the exercise of US legal powers – as some of the Made in Germany email services that have sprung up over the summer are."

He said despite the impact on communications and economic development, a localised internet might be the only way to protect privacy even if, as some argue, a set of new international privacy laws could be agreed.

"How could such rules be verified and enforced? Unlike nuclear tests, internet surveillance cannot be detected halfway around the world."

Via Quartz

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Current wireless networks have a problem: The more popular they become, the slower they are. Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be ten times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.

In dense urban areas, the range within which Wi-Fi signals are transmitted is increasingly crowded with noise—mostly, other Wi-Fi signals. What’s more, the physics of electromagnetic waves sets an upper limit to the bandwidth of traditional Wi-Fi. The short version: you can only transmit so much data at a given frequency. The lower the frequency of the wave, the less it can transmit.

Li-Fi doesn’t work in the dark or outdoors, but it only has to be a supplement to existing wireless networks to be valuable.AP Photo/Kin Cheung

But what if you could transmit data using waves of much higher frequencies, and without needing a spectrum license from your country’s telecoms regulator? Light, like radio, is an electromagnetic wave, but it has about 100,000 times the frequency of a Wi-Fi signal, and nobody needs a license to make a light bulb. All you need is a way to make its brightness flicker very rapidly and accurately so it can carry a signal.

The idea sounds daft: Who would want to sit under a flickering bulb? But Li-Fi, a standard proposed just two years ago, is seeing rapid technological progress.

First, data are transmitted to an LED light bulb—it could be the one illuminating the room in which you’re sitting now. Then the lightbulb is flicked on and off very quickly, up to billions of times per second. That flicker is so fast that the human eye cannot perceive it. (For comparison, the average energy-saving compact fluorescent bulb already flickers between 10,000 and 40,000 times per second.) Then a receiver on a computer or mobile device—basically, a little camera that can see visible light—decodes that flickering into data. LED bulbs can be flicked on and off quickly enough to transmit data around ten times as fast the fastest Wi-Fi networks. (If they could be manipulated faster, the bandwidth would be even higher.)

If you’ve ever used a solar-powered calculator, you already know how to connect to Li-Fi.Oledcomm

Li-Fi has one big drawback compared to Wi-Fi: you, or rather your device, need to be within sight of the bulb. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be a special bulb; in principle, overhead lights at work or at home could be wired to the internet. But it would mean that, unlike with Wi-Fi, you couldn’t go into the next room unless there were wired bulbs there too.

However, a new generation of ultrafast Wi-Fi devices that we’re likely to start using soon face a similar limitation. They use a higher range of radio frequencies, which aren’t as crowded with other signals (at least for now), and have a higher bandwidth, but, like visible light, cannot penetrate walls.

Engineers and a handful of startups, like Oledcomm, have been experimenting with Li-Fi technology. The Fudan University team unveiled an experimental Li-Fi network in which four PCs were all connected to the same light bulb. Other researchers are working on transmitting data via different colors of LED lights—imagine, for example, transmitting different signals through each of the the red, green and blue LEDs inside a multi-colored LED light bulb.

Via The Verge

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For years, scientists have struggled to collect accurate real-time data on earthquakes, but a new article published today in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America may have found a better tool for the job, using the same accelerometers found in most modern smartphones. The article finds that the MEMS accelerometers in current smartphones are sensitive enough to detect earthquakes of magnitude five or higher when located near the epicenter. Because the devices are so widely used, scientists speculate future smartphone models could be used to create an "urban seismic network," transmitting real-time geological data to authorities whenever a quake takes place.

The authors pointed to Stanford's Quake-Catcher Network as an inspiration, which connects seismographic equipment to volunteer computers to create a similar network. But using smartphone accelerometers would be cheaper and easier to carry into extreme environments. The sensor will need to become more sensitive before it can be used in the field, but the authors say once technology catches up, a smartphone accelerometer could be the perfect earthquake research tool. As one researcher told The Verge, "right from the start, this technology seemed to have all the requirements for monitoring earthquakes — especially in extreme environments, like volcanoes or underwater sites."