Federal communications regulators said Wednesday that they were considering whether wireless devices should be subject to different Internet traffic rules than telephone and cable lines, in a potential victory for carriers.

At issue is net neutrality, a term that means high-speed Internet providers should not block or slow information, or make Web sites pay to reach users more quickly.

» via The New York Times

The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing them to malfunction.

Earlier in the year, researchers from the University of Washington and University of California San Diego showed that the ECUs could be hacked, giving attackers the ability to be both annoying, by enabling wipers or honking the horn, and dangerous, by disabling the brakes or jamming the accelerator.

» via ars technica

The White House has thrown its weight behind the Federal Communications Commission’s efforts to free up 500MHz of broadband for wireless spectrum. President Obama has signed a Presidential Memorandum committing the government to a “sustained effort” to find the licenses and re-purpose them over the next ten years. The National Economic Council’s Lawrence Summers is outlining the government’s ideas today at the New America Foundation.

The call comes with the requisite “looming spectrum crisis” prose, citing estimates that over the next five years wireless data flow will jump to between 20 and 45 times the total bandwidth used in 2009. 

“As the revolution in mobile broadband and related technologies unfolds, the demand for spectrum will continue to increase - leading to increasing fears of a ‘spectrum crunch’,” the statement says.

» via ars technica

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

» via The Official Google Blog

The industry group that supports Wi-Fi is adopting a new technology that should boost data speeds more than 10 times at short distances, which could replace video cables in the home entertainment center.

The Wi-Fi Alliance said it is joining up with the Wireless Gigabit Alliance, or WiGig, which has been developing ways to exploit the 60 gigahertz frequency band for extremely high data speeds between devices in the same room.

The technology will probably take two years to show up in products, said Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director Kelly Davis-Felner. The first ones might be Blu-ray players that can send their high-definition video signal wirelessly to compatible TV sets. Later, portable devices such as video cameras could get the ability to send video wirelessly.

» via Yahoo! News

The group developing a standard for wireless charging expects to complete its first specification within six months, opening the door for makers of cell phones, digital cameras and other devices to bring compatible products to market.

Wireless charging lets consumers place gadgets on a mat that plugs into a wall outlet, and have the devices recharge automatically without needing to plug in each one. Apart from the gee-whiz factor, it’s supposed to make life more convenient by letting people walk into their home or office, toss their gadgets onto a mat to recharge and forget about them.

There are still questions about when standardized products will come to market and how they’ll be received, but the Wireless Power Consortium aims to finish its first standard before the middle of the year, said Menno Treffers, a Philips executive who is chairman of the consortium. If it’s not ready by then, “I will eat my hat,” he told a group of vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Friday.

» via NetworkWorld

McDonald’s has confirmed it will eliminate the current $2.95 fee customers must pay for two hours of internet service when they visit a local restaurant. The fee will be waived starting sometime next month, with 11,000 McDonald’s restaurants currently offering Wi-Fi supported by AT&T.

The restaurant has 14,000 domestic restaurants, and is the largest Wi-Fi network among restaurants in the U.S.

» via DailyTech

In a couple of years, crossing the 1Gbps threshold with a WiFi access point will be routine. That access point will likely have two radios, one for each major spectrum band, and support a host of older flavors for compatibility. Eventually, WiFi will approach the robustness and speed needed to make it a completely viable replacement for Ethernet for most users.

In today’s pipeline are optional enhancements to 802.11n that have been in the works since the standard stabilized at the IEEE engineering group nearly three years ago. These enhancements will increase range and performance by up to a couple orders of magnitude, offering raw data rates of 450 Mbps and 600 Mbps.

The slated improvements will also correct for black holes, where current 802.11n gear’s signals don’t reach unless an excessive amount of overlapping devices are installed at relatively high expense. Even better, the boosts to 802.11n are just the start. A new IEEE committee is working on fast WiFi that will hit a raw encoding rate of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps).

» via ars technica

Manufacturers have started adding wireless capabilities to many implantable medical devices, including pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators. This allows doctors to access vital information and send commands to these devices quickly, but security researchers have raised concerns that it could also make them vulnerable to attack.

Seen at Technology Review

The Wi-Fi Alliance today issued a new standard to augment Wi-Fi, called Wi-Fi Direct, that turns a Wi-Fi chip into a mini access point. The technology allows your Wi-Fi gadgets to talk to one another without having to get on a network, and enables anything containing a Wi-Fi chip to combine with other WiFi-chip-containing gadgets to create a wireless hotspot. Using it, you couldn’t connect to the web without some form of backhaul connection to the Internet, but you could send files and share data between devices.

Wi-Fi Direct will be available as a software upgrade for existing Wi-Fi devices and incorporated into new ones after the standard is set sometime in the middle of next year. Even if there’s no wireline or 3G connection to get on the web, there are plenty of situations where this will be useful, such as delivering content around the home. Instead of streaming something from my PC to the router, then to my television, with Wi-Fi Direct I could stream something directly from my PC to my TV.

Seen at GigaOM