New satellites could bring 1 terabit of internet bandwidth to remote regions

Delivering internet access to remote areas is challenging, as the traditional method of running lines from connected regions is extremely expensive. There are a few approaches to doing this wirelessly — for example, Google’s Project Loon balloons. However, a company called ViaSat is teaming up with Boeing to provide super-fast internet access to remote areas from space. The just-announced ViaSat-3 satellite will have a terabit of available bandwidth. Yes, a terabit per second.

ViaSat has made this announcement a little early, though. It has yet to announce its second-generation satellite, the ViaSat-2 (below). That platform is supposed to head into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a few months. While the ViaSat-2 is no slouch, it will only have one-third of the available bandwidth of the planned ViaSat-3. Once its new generation of satellites is in orbit, ViaSat claims its platform could double the network capacity of the roughly 400 commercial communications satellites already circling the globe.

The 1Tbps satellites will provide fast connections, but those on the ground obviously won’t be able to suck down the full 1Tb of bandwidth. ViaSat plans to offer residential connections of about 100Mbps, which is still faster than many people in US cities can get. When you consider many of the regions ViaSat expects to serve have no broadband service at all, I don’t think anyone will complain about “only” getting 100Mbps. Users will still have to contend with the limitations of satellite internet, including line-of-sight requirements and higher latency than terrestrial wired connections. Any real-time applications like video chat will probably be unworkable despite the incredible speeds.

Residential service is only one part of what ViaSat wants to do with its space-based connections. A more robust version of the service will be made available to corporate installations that are in remote areas (like oil and gas platforms) that can reach speeds of up to 1Gbps. Commercial jets might also be able to use ViaSat’s connections as a faster version of the internet service they already offer.

The company says that work is already underway on two ViaSat-3 satellites, and Boeing expects them to be ready for launch by the end of 2019. That would put ViaSat a few years ahead of Elon Musk’s tentative plan to get thousands of micro-satellites into orbit in order to deliver high-speed internet to the globe. Whoever makes it work is immaterial to people who lack sufficient bandwidth, but help is on the way.

Under the Sea: Microsoft testing underwater data centers

Microsoft is evaluating the long-term prospects of underwater data centers, in a bid to cut latencies, improve service, and take advantage of some of the ocean’s unique characteristics. Saltwater and electronics aren’t historically considered to be great friends, but Microsoft’s prototypes are performing impressively well.

There are several hypothetical advantages to dropping data centers in the deep (relatively speaking). Air conditioning and cooling costs eat a sizable percentage of a data center’s budget. Water is far more effective at removing heat than forced-air cooling; deploying servers in the ocean would eliminate cooling overhead. Microsoft is reportedly considering deploying the servers with their own surface turbines or tidal energy systems to generate power on-site. While this would make the system less likely to be affected by land-based blackouts, it also increases the complexity and overhead of operation.

Microsoft is touting other advantages of this effort, codenamed Project Natick. Because half the world’s population lives within 50km of an ocean, deploying water-based servers would allow companies to offer guaranteed low-latency connections to large groups of people. The data centers themselves would be deployed quickly, possibly within three months. That’s far less time than it normally takes to build or scale out a data center, and the new systems could be integrated with existing land-based servers.

Microsoft recently built and tested a prototype system, which operated for 105 days underwater and experienced no problems. The system worked so well, in fact, that the engineers extended its operating time and used it to run some commercial workloads from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. The company is now working on an underwater system 3x larger than the first prototype and will partner with an unchosen developer of alternative-energy systems that utilize ocean / wave power.

There have been some concerns about using the oceans as waste heat disepnsers for data centers. While a few local units would make no difference, it’s easy to imagine that a large data center cluster could have a significant impact on a local marine ecosystem — these computers generate tremendous amounts of heat.

Microsoft has stated that its end goal is to create data centers that are recyclable and do not impact the local environment. In theory, this should be possible, depending on how much waste heat each chassis produces. Closed-loop coolers would still allow for heat exchange between the server pod and the water without pumping seawater in and out of the system (and dealing with the associated corrosion and filtering issues).

Will companies adopt this sort of solution? It’s still too early to tell. Microsoft is far from the first company to propose an underwater server concept, but to date, manufacturers keep opting to plunk them down on land.

Researchers index dark web, find most of it contains illegal material

The Internet is less of a wild west than it once was, but there are still corners of it that are hidden from view and quite shady. For instance, Tor hidden services have included numerous criminal enterprises like The Silk Road. Two researchers from King’s College London set out to discover just how much of Tor was devoted to illegal content. The result? Most of it.

Tor (which originally stood for The Onion Router) is a network composed of layers of encrypted relays through which data is passed. Each node in the network only knows where a packet just was and where it’s going next. After a few hops, the source of a packet is (almost) impossible to discern. Most people use Tor to reach sites on the open Internet anonymously, but there are also sites that are hosted entirely within Tor, called hidden services. The Silk Road was a hidden service, but there are innumerable others. It is these sites Daniel Moore and Thomas Rid sought to quantify.

It’s no easy task to find all the hidden services on Tor, let alone get a look at the data they’re hosting. Hidden services are ephemeral, often switching addresses and server locations without notice. To top it off, Tor addresses are just long strings of characters with a .onion domain at the end. In order to get a proper sample of all the hidden services lurking out there, the pair built a Python script that crawled the dark web, starting with the popular Tor search engines Onion City and Ahmia.

The bot’s job was to scrape the content from each page and upload it for analysis. When the bot found a link to another hidden service (the main way you find things on the dark web), it would hop to that one and scrape it too. The pair used an algorithm to process all the content collected and sort it into categories like drugs, social, pornography, and financial. The sorting was spot checked and found to be very accurate overall.

After the script had run its course, 5,205 live websites were indexed; a total of 2,723 pages were classified by content. Pages with fewer than 50 words and those with no content were dropped in the “none” category. According to the analysis, 57% of the sites hosted illicit content like drugs and child pornography. The Tor project estimates there are about 35,000 total hidden services active, so this is far from a full survey, but enough to be a representative sample.

Moore and Rid say their goal with this project was to establish a more moderate perspective on the role of encryption. Politicians are currently demanding unworkable backdoors to encryption, but Moore and Rid say that privacy activists fail to fully acknowledge the potential for abuse. They don’t have a solution in mind — they’re just making the data available.

Facebook Is Introduces 3D Touch To Your Timeline

Facebook is bringing 3D Touch to its Timeline, the company said – meaning that users of Apple’s latest devices, the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, will be able to press on links, profiles and more, in order to preview content without  navigating away from their current spot. This previewing feature, dubbed “peek and pop,” was introduced last fall on Apple’s new smartphones, where it was touted as a way to add another dimension to the iPhone’s multi-touch interface.

Instead of just tapping, swiping and pinching, 3D Touch takes advantage of the new hardware’s pressure-sensitive screen to allow users to hard-press on items to preview content and then optionally act on it.

For example, today you can “peek” at emails from your inbox with a light press, then press a little harder to “pop” into them.

To date, a number of app developers have introduced support for 3D Touch as a function that can be accessed via their app icons. That is, when you hard-press on the icon on your homescreen you’re offered a variety of shortcuts for that app in a pop-up window that appears. In Facebook’s case, it added 3D Touch support to its iOS application back in October, offering users the ability to take or upload photos and videos, or write a status update, via this menu of shortcuts.

Arguably, 3D Touch is more useful within apps than on the app icon. Though studies on 3D Touch user adoption have yet to surface, it seems likely that many people forget that these app icon shortcuts exist, and continue to use their apps as they would normally. However, when you’re actually within an application and tapping on content, it’s easier to remember that 3D Touch is an option. I find myself using it a lot more within email but almost never remember to hard-press on my app icons.

To some extent, 3D Touch still suffers today because not all iOS developers have rolled out support for 3D Touch for their applications, so you’re not always sure if the feature will work. Without universal support across the entirety of your homescreen, it can be difficult to adjust your ingrained behaviors.

That’s why implementing 3D Touch within Facebook’s Timeline sounds a lot more practical, I believe.

Says Facebook, you’ll soon be able to lightly press on a Facebook story or profile to view a preview, then hard-press to “pop” to see the full story or profile.

This feature will work with web links, profiles, Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Facebook Events, photos, profile pictures, and cover photos. Effectively, that’s the majority of the content that users on Facebook will care about, and such broad support on the world’s most-used app could help push user adoption of the 3D Touch feature forward.

“We are excited to start rolling out support for 3D Touch in our iOS app so people can quickly and easily peek into a preview of anything they are interested in on Facebook, and pop into that content to see more,” a Facebook spokesperson said, confirming the addition.

Note that you might not have 3D Touch just yet, however. Facebook says it’s just beginning to roll out 3D Touch on the Timeline to a “small group” of people, and will later expand the roll out more broadly in the “coming months.”