I have to warn you, this topic is gross, anatomically so. Now that I have your attention I have to point out that you should not try this at home, nor will this be in JackAss III if it ever comes out. Be that as it may –

“Can You Hear Me Now?”

Cops: Ohio Peeping Tom hid cell phone camera in his backside

JUNE 23–Meet Jeffrey Barrier. The Ohio man allegedly used a cell phone camera to snap photos of a naked woman at a tanning salon Saturday and then hid the phone in his anus in a bid to thwart police. Standing on a chair, Barrier, 41, took the photos at Cincinnati’s Aloha Tanning, where a 35-year-old woman was “in the nude in a tanning room,” according to a Hamilton County Municipal Court affidavit. When cops later confronted Barrier, “he kept denying any involvement of the incident” and claimed to not have a camera. However, a second search of the suspect turned up the camera. As noted in a Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office report, Barrier “did hide evidence in his anus.” …

The report goes on, but I think you get the picture. Its times like this I almost fear for the health of the Republic. Something is seriously wrong with people who would inflict such pain on themselves to avoid prosecution. As many a judge has said — “Remand to custody and for pain served.”

Still better? — “Hi there big boy! That a ringing bowel movement I hear or you just happy to see me?”

Ick. But that is the world today.

Lnky.

We’ve covered the white space battle from the angle of the medical profession and it devices before. So here is a new wrinkle — RFID emitters causing problems with other electronic devices in the patient area.

Short primer. RFID operates in two modes, passive or active. In passive mode the emitter is an RF transmitter that sends out a coded pulse. The receiver accepts the pulse and uses latent RF from the originator to respond back. In active mode the receiver contains a battery or capicator source for power. Emitter sends the pulse, receiver sends one back. Both systems do use a RF band at low power as the distances envisioned for RFID is only 20 ft or so. JAMA however notices some problems, from the article abstract –

JAMA. 2008;299(24):2884-2890.

Context Health care applications of autoidentification technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), have been proposed to improve patient safety and also the tracking and tracing of medical equipment. However, electromagnetic interference (EMI) by RFID on medical devices has never been reported.

Objective To assess and classify incidents of EMI by RFID on critical care equipment.

Design and Setting Without a patient being connected, EMI by 2 RFID systems (active 125 kHz and passive 868 MHz) was assessed under controlled conditions during May 2006, in the proximity of 41 medical devices (in 17 categories, 22 different manufacturers) at the Academic Medical Centre, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Assessment took place according to an international test protocol. Incidents of EMI were classified according to a critical care adverse events scale as hazardous, significant, or light.

Results In 123 EMI tests (3 per medical device), RFID induced 34 EMI incidents: 22 were classified as hazardous, 2 as significant, and 10 as light. The passive 868-MHz RFID signal induced a higher number of incidents (26 incidents in 41 EMI tests; 63%) compared with the active 125-kHz RFID signal (8 incidents in 41 EMI tests; 20%); difference 44% (95% confidence interval, 27%-53%; P < .001). The passive 868-MHz RFID signal induced EMI in 26 medical devices, including 8 that were also affected by the active 125-kHz RFID signal (26 in 41 devices; 63%). The median distance between the RFID reader and the medical device in all EMI incidents was 30 cm (range, 0.1-600 cm).

Conclusions In a controlled nonclinical setting, RFID induced potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices. Implementation of RFID in the critical care environment should require on-site EMI tests and updates of international standards.

My take. The medical systems industry has a problem. They can’t seem to design systems that work in a EMI field. They have been used to this pristine nonRF environment for years and it is catching up with them. Now I will grant that it would be a pretty serious problem to have a dosage pump suddenly turn off. But the fact is we can’t go around and put hospitals in Faraday cages. Its impractical and unwarranted. Medical systems developers need to start designing in a world with EMI from the beginning.

The other obvious note — the hospitals are creating their own problem by adopting RFID. In the patient environment direct observation is required anyway so optical based barcoding is sufficient and is the norm in most hospitals. If they confined RFID to the nonpatient areas — medical lockers, nurses stations and pharmacies this would probably solve the interference problem.

Linky.

I’m still amazed how many very intelligent people believe we have an unregulated access market in America. The reality is, we have a lightly regulated, government sanctioned duopoly. This duopoly was created and is maintained by the best politicians that the duopoly’s money can buy.

A group that includes many notable innovators and founders of the internet (sans internet creator Al Gore) is calling for a coherent national broadband policy. This is good.Such a policy will probably require an act of Congress. This is bad. That means the same politicians who have propped up the duopoly will craft the new policy. If you think that’s a good idea, look at the poor level of rural telecom and electric service that we continue to subsidize decades after construction was completed. These same rural areas are at the top of the coalition’s list to serve.

They announced InternetforEveryone.org during the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City Tuesday. The group said it would bring together Internet users, content creators, and innovators to make universal, affordable, high-speed access a national priority. 

Some of them, including Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, Columbia professor and author, Timothy Wu, Google VP and Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, and FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, already are on board and attended the launch. The group — announced by Free Press and supported by many of that organization’s members — said that high-speed Internet is a necessity, not a luxury, for education, the economy, free speech, and America’s ability to lead.

Their goal is “to see that every American gets connected to a fast, affordable, and open Internet.” They called it a “basic right” that should be afforded to all Americans. (Information Week)

Should a minimum service level be established as policy? You bet. The FCC should do as much of this as their charter allows. If left to entirely to Congress we’ll likely end up with a Stalinist style central planning bureau with plenty of new taxes that will feed the duopoly monster.

I make no claim to have all of the best solutions, but here are a few.

1) A minimum level of service should be established at a reasonable price. This should require no new subsidies if any subsidy if correctly crafted. Rural Telcos already have access to federal funds for broadband. If you take advantage of a monopoly franchise, you agree to serve all. This means rural telcos will have a lower return on investment for some customers, but they will still essentially have a monopoly. It goes with the territory. You buy the ranch, you get the wolves who live there and it’s your problem to solve.

1) A contest between two players is not a competitive arena, it’s a fixed game. Incumbent carriers should be required to offer local loop sharing and wholesale access to any address that is not served by  at least 5 competing primary access providers (not resellers). With the need for fiber overbuild along with two flavors of wireless, that should be doable even without BPL. Until then, we need to get competition going in the current infrastructure. Telecoms in France, Japan, UK, and Korea are making platy of money wholesaling as well as retailing, so there’s no reason why it won’t work here too. As a last resort, municipalities should be able to build their own fiber loops without duopoly interference.

3) Permanently ban any tax on internet access. This is government putting a little skin in the game of keeping prices low, and will discourage sweetheart subsidies for duopolies.

4) Impose a limit to how much spectrum a single entity can lease, and make new leases for a shorter term with more potential for turnover to new players. Remember that spectrum belongs to the public and the carriers are tenants, not landlords.

5) Create more unlicensed spectrum for broadband use. The current white spaces proposal is an example of one possibility. The NAB does not have exclusive rights to keep unused frequencies empty. See point #4.

6) Encourage new competition and investment with tax abatement and requirements for access to right of ways. A third pipe would be great for competition. Five pipes would be better.

And what about Al Gore?  We’ve heard rumors that he’s hard at work to protect the human race from another threat. You can learn more here.

How about accelerating the seed change that gained momentum during the recent writers union strike? The forces in play today could make that a reality.

It seems the actors union is feeling abused by the big greedy studios. Funny thing, the consumer is also tired of being abused by the big greedy studios and not as many returned to the big media’s realm after the last strike ended. With production grinding to a standstill in Hollywood again less than a year after the last walkout, it could end big media as we know it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Consolidation has built a monolithic Hollywood with few divergent ideas and stunted creativity. Any slowdown in Hollywood at this time will be a huge win for independent producers and non union craftspeople.Look for more from the mainstream to join them.

The contract dispute, this time between the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and their white-collar bosses, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), is causing what industry experts have called a “virtual strike”.

Production deadlines for dozens of major projects have been scrapped amid growing signs that the SAG, which has 120,000 members, will fail to resolve its dispute before a deadline for industrial action on Tuesday next week.(The Independent)

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with coax. It’s a great way to deliver huge amounts of data unless you want world class broadband over a shared cable that has the vast majority of it’s available bandwidth consumed by legacy RF signals.

A new development in optical may finally end the reign of coax. RFoG or radio frequency over glass promises tons of dedicated RF bandwidth combined with virtually unlimited digital bandwidth capability.

On Monday, Hitachi introduced two “Node+Zero” modules that are compatible with RFoG, a new cable industry initiative that enables cable operators to install FTTP systems that are capable of communicating with the MSO’s existing headend and traditional cable modems and digital set-tops. The SCTE kicked off an RFoG standards-setting project earlier this year. (See Fog Lifting on RFOG.) Several cable operators, including Cox Communications Inc. and WideOpenWest Holdings LLC (WOW) , are taking a more formal look at FTTP technologies, including RFoG, for residential greenfields and in support of business service deployments, (See Cox Flirts With Fiber and WOW! Does GPON.)

The product from Hitachi most closely associated with RFoG is the Node+Zero H-112, a standalone device that handles the optical-to-electrical conversion at the customer premises and passes through traditional RF-based cable services, including Docsis. The vendor’s Node+Zero H-103 model also passes through RF services but works in conjunction with a GPON optical network terminal (ONT) should operators decide to “future-proof” the system with an extra PON wavelength. (See Hitachi Rolls RFOG Gear .)  (Cable Digital News)

Initially, expect to see the ever reluctant to invest infrastructure cable guys deploying FTTH peace meal and sparsely. However, since RFoG enables them to intermix FTTH with their tired old head ends, it’s likely to become mainstream.

The Inquirer has a dilly of a piece on the move by Nokia to take the Symbian handheld OS Open Source. Link here. As the lede intones, I think there are a few hurdles. –
 
 
 

Is this a good move? Well if the Foundation is open to all AND they move eventually to a GPL based licensing I would say yes. Is it a Android killer? Time will tell. Android has not hit the market yet in a physical manifestation. Till we see a head to head comparison in the marketplace all bets are off. But I would offer the following — if Android is even close to Symbian in capability, the advantage is to Google. They have a nest of free development providers and Google Widgets to support warp speed deployment cycles.

But there is one thing I agree with in the Inquirer article — MicroSoft’s Mobile Phone platform is in trouble. No developer is going to pay when they can use a competing tool for free.

Lest you Dear Reader as the last hold out as a NYT reader, changes are coming to the media industry. We mentioned here how bad it is getting in the revenue phase. But as Ed Driscoll points out, when they erect a museum to your profession, your job is about over.

Ed Driscoll is of course a blogger. He has thoughtfully produced two pieces that summarize what we are observing in the shift from pulp to electronic information media. Highly recommend you watch both pieces that appear at the bottom of the article, located here.

Enjoy.

The FCC demurs on the request by the MPAA to extend the comments period. We have till July 30 for further comment. For the MPAA this is a a crucial step for being prepared to bypass the channel providers. Eliminating the SOC provisions permit them to offer services to direct. Request here.

Wonder how many takers they will have that in the same period the MPAA is trying to strip the viewers of their rights. Linky. Personally I would not spend a dime if the MPAA attempts that in the courts.

In a continuing decline the newspapers latest numbers look the worst seen in years. Some papers are reporting -15% declines in revenue. The SF Chronicle is losing $1m a WEEK.

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

We continue to cover this trend as the loss of the pulp industry translates to switch to electronic media. That shift also telegraphs a move to portable wireless mediums as we generally like to read our news as we need it.

I do make one observation. There is going to be a market for buying up the archives of some major papers morgues and digitizing them. I wonder who will be smart enough to recognize the opportunity?

Linky.

Right now US auto sales are flagging with the high cost of fuel. Chrysler is not immune to the effect though they are probably not as impacted as Ford or GM as SUVs, even Jeep, is not a huge segment of their sales. Even so, Chrysler is offering UConnect in future cars.

The concept of UConnect is to provide a ‘wireless’ car which assumes WiFi and Bluetooth enabled assets in the cabin. There are auto uptrippers that do this today installing anything from car pcs to Wifi and 1000w amps.

Washington, June 23 : American automobile manufacturer Chrysler has plans to equip its cars with a system that will enable people to surf the Internet while driving.

The UConnect Web system is what the company says can bring wireless Internet access to cars’ dashboards.

Frank Klegon, the company’s vice-president, says that they wants to gain a reputation for high-tech cars.

“In today’s market, Chrysler’s mission is to bring innovation to market more quickly,” Wired News quoted Klegon as saying.

Here’s an assessment –

Boon

• If there was ever a reason to implement WiMax this is it. Wifi is ok but the ranges are too short in most cases. One ends up with a lot of dead spots or deploys hundreds of AP’s. WiMax with its longer reach reduces both problems.
• Real Time traffic reporting. Done right this could be a fuel saver. If the developers work with the Garmins and TomTom’s of the world alternate routing would help alleviate the effects of traffic. No it won’t eliminate it.
• Knee drivers disappear. You know this type, cell phone in one hand, cup of coffee in the other. Last I heard we haven’t sprouted a third hand so they have to be using their knees.
• This stuff will be cheap. Volume is the name of the game in electronics. A million units spreads R&D. Not only that but what a hacker dream. “Dear I am going to the electronics store…”, which just happens to be Bill’s Wrecker and Salvage.
• Death of “Are we there yet” disease. What better distraction for the kiddies than a live internet connection?
• The third party marketing opportunities I expect to be viewed as endless.

Bane

• Just what we need, another distraction for the driver.
• The automobile as living room experience I have never quite understood. I take a very euro view to driving. Its to get you there, not lull you to sleep.
• First introduction cost will probably be high. Not only that with high fuel costs can one get a full utilization out of the entertainment value of the system.

As usual this development is a two edged sword. With a little common sense applied it can be a great tool to improve fuel efficiency, improve driver performance in strange locations, etc. If it is going to be treated as a gimmick well, that’s a waste.

HT: Big News Network