How Remote Places Can Get Cellular Coverage by Doing It Themselves

With Swedish telephone numbers and a tree-bound base station, a remote Indonesian village runs its own telecommunications company.

• By David Talbot on December 11, 2013

Canopy network: In the highlands of Papua, Indonesia, men use ropes to haul a base station high into the boughs of a cemara tree.

A four-hour drive from the nearest cellular coverage in the remote highlands of Papua, Indonesia, a new kind of guerilla telecom network is operating, albeit outside the law, using a cheap base station roped into a treetop.
The technology could provide a new model for self-managed “last mile” mobile coverage in the world’s hardest-to-reach areas, where traditional top-down telecommunications business models don’t work.
The project was set up by a team from the University of California, Berkeley. The resulting network is now operated by a tiny stand-alone telecommunications company run by a local NGO, with a laptop for local billing and a satellite connection to the rest of the world. The network relies on Swedish phone numbers because no local telecommunications company would provide them.
“It’s a telco-in-a-box that we put in a tree,” says Kurtis Heimerl, a developer at Range Networks and grad student at UC Berkeley who led the project. “It’s a demonstration that these populations can profitably and sustainably manage their own networks. We don’t need telcos to do this; these communities can do this by themselves.”
The village where the network is situated sits in the tropical highlands of Papua—a region where indigenous people avoided contact with westerners until scientists stumbled upon them in 1938.
The project was built partly with existing infrastructure: a small hydro-power generator and a satellite dish that provided Internet connectivity to a local school. To this the Berkeley group added a base station for local cellular connectivity, a battery for nighttime usage, a Wi-Fi router for a local Internet hot spot, and a billing system.
The project started operating this year with an initial $10,000 investment. It has 187 cellular subscribers and an average of $830 per month in revenue (including $368 in profits). That company provides several jobs,

Hypersonic jet Waverider fails Mach 6 test

The Waverider's engine was supposed to have ignited four seconds after it was released

The US Air Force has said an attempt to fly its hypersonic jet Waverider at Mach 6 (3,600mph; 5795km/h) failed.

The unmanned aircraft had been designed to fly at six times the speed of sound after being dropped from a B-52 bomber.
But officials said that a faulty control fin prevented it from starting its supersonic-combustion ramjet engine,

Skype makes chats and user data more available to police

By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima, Published: July 25

Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes.
Surveillance of the audio and video feeds remains impractical — even when courts issue warrants, say industry officials with direct knowledge of the matter. But that barrier could eventually vanish as Skype becomes one of the world’s most popular forms of telecommunication.

The changes to online chats, which are written messages conveyed almost instantaneously between users, result in part from technical upgrades to Skype that were instituted to address outages and other stability issues since Microsoft bought the company last year. Officials of the United States and other countries have long pushed to expand their access to newer forms of communications to resolve an issue that the FBI calls the “going dark” problem.
Microsoft has approached the issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of what the

Ποιος ελέγχει το ηλεκτρονικό μας αποτύπωμα στο διαδίκτυο;

Μέσα στα χρόνια που χρησιμοποιούμε το διαδίκτυο, έχουμε κάνει διάφορα προφίλ στα κοινωνικά δίκτυα, έχουμε αφήσει σχόλια, έχουμε γράψει σε blogs ή ακόμα ακόμα, έχουμε δηλώσει τις προτιμήσεις μας σε κάποιο θέμα.
 Πόσο συχνά όμως, ελέγχουμε το ηλεκτρονικό αποτύπωμα που έχουμε αφήσει στο διαδίκτυο, μέσα σε αυτά τα χρόνια; Οι περισσότεροι άνθρωποι δεν το κάνουν συχνά αυτό. Με αποτέλεσμα, κάποια στιγμή, να το κάνει κάποιος άλλος γι αυτούς και να διαπιστώσει ενδεχομένως πράγματα που... δεν τον κάνουν τόσο χαρούμενο, ή είναι βλαβερά για την κοινωνική ή την επαγγελματική του εικόνα.