Local governments and agencies are waking up with a start — could it happen here? If first responders cannot communicate with each other in the first 72 hours — how do they do their job?

The New Orleans tragedy manifested the worst communication nightmares imaginable — underground communication lines were disabled due to flooding, cell towers were blown over, backup generators ran out of fuel — or filled up with water. Radios of police, firefighters, ER couldn’t talk to each other. In some cases first responders were simply walking over to each other to talk!

Ad hoc networks boast of working in especially such situations … after more than 10 years and millions of $$ in research … where is the first deployed/working ad hoc network?

Baltimore Sun:

No sooner had a 46-truck convoy of Baltimore first-responders and equipment left for Louisiana on Sunday than it received an education in emergency communications: Even state-of-the-art systems can fail.

Grand Rapids Press:

“The lessons we can learn from the Katrina disaster is what happens to those with mobility and transportation issues. If there is a need for a mass evacuation, how would we get those without transportation?” 1st Ward Commissioner James Jendrasiak asked.

Eyewitness News:

The Nevada Homeland Security Department is taking up the issue of disaster response. From their own experience and what they’ve seen with Hurricane Katrina relief, they’ve determined the channels of communication are broken.

The Economist has a good article on industry’s vision of a “digital home”.

“Technology firms are pushing a futuristic vision of home entertainment not because consumers are desperate for it but because they themselves are.”

The article points out the gap between industry’s ideas (some of which are like Clippy on steroids) and what people actually say the want (less configuration and help with the basics like printer sharing). It also identifies a key problem in the lack of interoperability standards and the prisoner’s dilemma situation that has resulted.

The prospect of every licensed vehicle being required to have an active RFID tag raises lots of privacy issues, although in many ways ways we have them already with visual tags and modern image processing. It also opens the door to many new opportunities.

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Brit License Plates Get Chipped, Mark Beard, Wired News, 9 august 2005

The British government is preparing to test new high-tech license plates containing microchips capable of transmitting unique vehicle identification numbers and other data to readers more than 300 feet away.
…
Proponents argue that making such RFID tags mandatory and ubiquitous is a logical move to counter the threat of terrorists using the roadways, and that it will scoop up insurance and registration scofflaws in the process.
…
The U.K. Department for Transport gave the official go-ahead for the microchipped number plates (as they are called in the United Kingdom) last week, and the trial is expected to begin later this year. The government has been tight-lipped about the details. One of the vendors bidding to participate in the trial said it would start with smartplates added to some police cars.

The point of the test is to see whether microchips will make number plates harder to tamper with and clone, said U.K. Department for Transport spokesman Ian Weller-Skitt. Many commuters use counterfeit plates to avoid the London congestion charge, a fee imposed on passenger vehicles entering central London during busy hours.

MORE (via Bruce Schneier)

UK Thieves are using Bluetooth phones to scan for and detect Bluetooth enabled laptops left in the trunks of cars. Detective Sargent Al Funge, from Cambridge’s crime investigation unit, said:

“There have been a number of instances of this new technology being used to identify cars which have valuable electronics, including laptops, inside. The thieves are taking advantage of a relatively new technology, and people need to be aware that this is going on. ”

MORE (via Schneier on Security).

This new automatic door from Japan creates a minimal opening for an object to pass through. The door is composed of a series of strips which open when activated by the infrared sensors on their edges. It’s said that the door also can identify people (RFID?) for security. Such doors can help manage energy loss in a a room, garage or freezer and protect a space from unwanted dust, pollen, bugs, and germs. Plus, they are cooler than the doors on Star Trek. See this video.

Here’s a marketing tip: get the door to occasionally say “Gee, you’ve lost weight, haven’t you?” and it will sell like hotcakes.

The South Korean government is investng US$800 million into RFID research and development. Link

Daeje Chin, the Korean Minister of Information and Communication, said after several pilot projects the government believes RFID to be as important as the mobile phone business.

Chin said: “This will be very important for us in the next 10 years. The handset business is very big but RFID will be as important. We are trying to procure a number of goals with RFID and the application of new technology brings benefits in all social systems including the individual family.”

South Korea is also pushing ubiquitous computing (“anytime, anywhere, and on any device”) as a way to keep it’s mobile IT business expanding. Korea is a country with 47M people and 35M mobile subscribers. Link

Pirelli announced that their X-Pressure AcousticBlue tire pressure monitoring system will be able to send low-pressure warnings to your Bluetooth mobile phone. The the X-Pressuxre AcousticBlue is said to be available in September 2005. (spotted on Gizmodo) I’d guess that this will require explicit pairing with your phone. Maybe this is a good application for the use of RDF and a simple automated publish-subscribe protocol. I’d subscribe to messages tagged as warnings from devices owned by me, a member of my family or University lab. Helpful service stations would subscribe to public warnings from devices that are part of a vehicle. Also required would be a simple security and privacy mechanisms, perhaps driven by RDF-grounded policies used by both the sender and receiver. I might use such a policy to delegate access to securityWarnings from my office computer to our department sysadmin. and he would configure his policy to accept such delegations from current department members. Rounding out the picture would be a reasonable approach to the GUI, lest we reinvent Clippy. I might want to configure my phone to show only urgentWarnings immediately and log the rest for viewing on demand.

So the major players have joined in the WiMax game. This report from the Washington Post describes Intel coming to DC area to release their new WiMax chipset.

Hitachi has said it can fit 230 gigabits of data per square inch on a disk using “perpendicular recording”

The storage industry currently makes hard drives using longitudinal recording, which is reaching its limit.

eWeek has a reasonable article summarizing the weaknesses in TI’s RFID systems.

After uncovering a security weakness in a radio-frequency identification tag from Texas Instruments Inc., researchers from RSA Security Inc.’s RSA Laboratories and The Johns Hopkins University are now eyeing future exploits against other RFID products in the interests of better security, one of the researchers said this week.
     Meanwhile, TI will keep making the compromised RFID tag in order to meet the needs of applications more sensitive to speed and pricing than to privacy, according to a TI official. …

IBM Zurich comes out with miniature data storage with data storage density of 1 TB per square inch –

“Given the rapidly increasing data volumes that are downloaded onto mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs, there is a growing demand for suitable storage media with more and more capacity. At CeBIT, IBM for the first time shows the prototype of the MEMS*- assembly of a nanomechanical storage system known internally as the “millipede” project. Using revolutionary nanotechnology, scientists at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland, have made it to the millionths of a millimeter range, achieving data storage densities of more than one terabit (1000 gigabit) per square inch, equivalent to storing the content of 25 DVDs on an area the size of a postage stamp.”

The Cabir bluetooth virus has been reported found in the wild in the United States. Cabir originated in the Philippines and infects bluethooth enabled mobile phones and (maybe) other device running the Symbian operating system. F-Secure offers this description:

Cabir is a bluetooth using worm that runs in Symbian mobile phones that support Series 60 platform. Cabir replicates over bluetooth connections and arrives to phone messaging inbox as caribe.sis file what contains the worm. When user clicks the caribe.sis and chooses to install the Caribe.sis file the worm activates and starts looking for new devices to infect over bluetooth. When Cabir worm finds another bluetooth device it willstart sending infected SIS files to it, and lock to that phone so that it won’t look other phones even when the target moves out of range.