Wireless Networking

Regardless of how this turns out, at least they nailed the name. Google is launching about 30 superpressure balloons that will beam Internet access back to the ground. With equal parts brevity and self-deprecation, the effort has been dubbed "Project Loon." Taking flight from New Zealand, the balloo...

Despite cries from the Left, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is still up and running. The same, however, can't be said for Guantanamo's WiFi. The United States military turned off wireless Internet service at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base amid threats from the hacker collective Anonymous. Official...

Francois Hollande, France's president, is mulling a potential tax on smartphones, laptops and tablets in order to fund the nation's cherished cultural exception. The revenue generated from such a tax would be earmarked for the cultural exception, which supports French music, film and visual art. Fra...

Samsung announced Monday that it has made a breakthrough in developing technology for a fifth-generation mobile network. It has found a way to use higher frequency millimeter-wave Ka bands, allowing massive amounts of data to be transmitted at faster speeds. Samsung has developed the world's first a...

As more airlines begin to offer WiFi, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is proposing to increase the bandwidth available for inflight wireless broadband. The FCC is essentially basing its proposal on Qualcomm's submission to the government from July 2011. This raises the question of whether...

TECH TREK

India to Get a Smartphone for the Blind

A company in India has developed a smartphone for the blind. The device, three years in the making, will be equipped to read text messages and emails, and it will then convert the text to Braille. It will utilize shape memory alloy technology, which exploits a metal's ability to "remember" its origi...

Disaster communications tech has become a hot topic, spurred in part by last fall's Hurricane Sandy, where major swaths of New York City were rendered without some business-level communications such as those provided by cell networks. Images of civilians roaming ravaged streets looking for a socket ...

Taiwan authorities have launched a probe into charges that Samsung hired students to post disparaging comments about HTC online. If the false advertising accusations are upheld, Samsung and its local advertising agent could be on the hook for about $835,000. The complaints sprouted earlier this mont...

Following Monday's tragic terror attack at the Boston Marathon, it was reported that cellular phone service was intentionally shut off to prevent any possible remote activation of other explosive devices via mobile phones. As details emerged, it became clear that no shutdown was actually ordered. Al...

TECH TREK

Mali Kicks Off Internet Domain Giveaway

It was time to try something new. The western Africa nation of Mali, whose .ml domain current has fewer than 50 active websites, will let people around the world register .ml sites for free. Less than half of Mali has mobile phone coverage, and just 4 percent of the population is online. Nevertheles...

North Korea's Internet liberation has hit a snag -- it's still North Korea. One month after announcing that it would grant tourists and visitors 3G Internet access, North Korea appears to have revoked its 3G services. Tourists reportedly no longer have 3G access. There is a chance that the 3G servic...

TECH TREK

Beyond the Grave, Onto the Smartphone

A cemetery in Shenyang, the capital of China's Liaoning Province, will become, for lack of a better term, interactive. With mobile devices, people will be able to scan a quick response code on graves of people whose relatives have requested the feature. Scanning this code will allow visitors to lear...

I Want My M-WiFi

Looking for an Internet connection when out and about may soon become a lot easier. There's been an uptick in public WiFi availability. Recent public WiFi launches include Google's free WiFi project in New York City, starting with parts of Chelsea. London's tube network went hot in 2012 with 92 und...

Having established its credentials as a key player in the consumer smartphone world, Samsung is bolstering security to take a stab at business users, a demographic traditionally dominated by BlackBerry. For the past year, Samsung has been beefing up the Android software that powers its smartphones t...

There's a little-known electronic gadget -- one that's generally not available alongside the colorful big-screen TVs and bass-pounding sound systems in seductive, sparkly urban consumer-electronics mega-stores -- that can be a life-changing device, nonetheless. For some people, it's much more import...

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