Today’s smartphones provide a level of social connection far beyond what we imagined just a few years ago. But when you go beyond the reach of the grid, your smartphone needs the help of SPOT Connect to keep you in touch with friends, family, and emergency personnel. Simply pair your smartphone with SPOT Connect, and get connected to a global satellite network that lets you send messages and GPS coordinates from virtually anywhere on the planet. Update Twitter and Facebook. Send email and text messages. Request non-emergency help from professional service providers. And in the case of a critical emergency, send an SOS message requesting emergency assistance.
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WARNING NOTICE: This $169 device does NOT include the subscription fees associated with SATCOM. There are some “relatively” low cost options, and a small crowd-sourcing effort to buy a satellite that will provide free SATCOM access to Africa, but the pieces are not there yet. See Autonomous Internet for a larger discussion of the possibilities.
Interesting, and if the point about Garmin is true, what is the relationship between them and the Air Force? The Air Force has gotten into a lot of areas that include tracking to the individual level (RFI) under the guise of tracking logistics….
Following a navigation system's instructions without driving into a ravine is hard enough as it is — can you even imagine how hard it'd be if you kept losing GPS reception every time you drove within range of an LTE tower? There have been a few anecdotal concerns raised over the last several weeks that LightSquared's proposed LTE network — which would repurpose L-band spectrum formerly used for satellite — is too close to the spectrum used by the Global Positioning System, leading to unintentional jamming when the towers overpower the much weaker GPS signals. Things have gotten a little more interesting, though, now that the US Air Force Space Command has officially piped in. General William Shelton has gone on record saying that “a leading GPS receiver manufacturer just … has concluded that within 3 to 5 miles on the ground and within about 12 miles in the air GPS is jammed by those towers,” calling the situation “unbelievable” and saying he's “hopeful the FCC does the right thing.”
Phi Beta Iota: Electromagnetic conflicts have been a known issue since the 1980's. The Soviets had emission control standards ten times tougher than the US, which had (and continues to have) virtually no standards at all. This is one reason why US forces in Afghanistan are so severely hampered, with drones, aircraft, radars, and various other “systems” all interfering with one another. Elsewhere, notably in England, modern cars come to a complete stop within a couple of kilometers of certain Royal Air Force emitting stations. All of this can be attributed to at least four root problems:
1. An acquisition archipelago (nothing sytematic about it) so stupid and out of control as to defy belief. No standards, no brains, no integrity.
2. Service-centric and mission-centric “preferred contractor” and “proprietary single point solutions” standard operating processes that are deliberately not orchestrated with other services, civilian elements of the government, or other nations.
3. A lack of integrity among senior officers who should know better.
4. A lack of integrity in Congress, where the focus is on collecting the 5% kick-back from delivered programs, not on actually serving the public interest by insuring affordability, interoperability, sustainability, and utility.
Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.
This is what happened in Egypt Jan. 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government cut off approximately 88 percent of the country's internet access. What do you do without internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.
This is a specialization of our general Technology section, focusing more explicitely on the ‘true internet' or distributed P2P infrastructures. It is being updated over the next week or so.
On the overall perspective of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do, a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world
Programmatic Statement for the creation of a world-wide user-controlled network based on a distributed architecture, by Raffael Kéménczy
Projects we find worthty of support:
We Rebuild is a cluster of net activists who have joined forces to collaborate on issues concerning access to a free internet without intrusive surveillance
High Priority Free Software Projects: “The FSF high-priority projects list serves to foster the development of projects that are important for increasing the adoption and use of free software and free software operating systems.”
Summary: State still loves dictators, has no idea what is going on with the young and the restless. Intelligence is no where to be found. Bottom line is that the President, who appears to have had the right instincts, is being undermined by a government that can only be considered to be uninformed and incoherent.
Phi Beta Iota: From David Abshire to Jim Locher to Tony Zinni and Robert Steele, we have long known of the strategic vacuum surrounding the President. You cannot be an effective President (theatrics aside) without getting a grip on reality, having a Strategic Analytic Model, and demanding Whole of Government harmonization deeply rooted in 360 degree multi-cultural intelligence. None of that exists today within the US Government.
On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintonspoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.
Eben Moglen
The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”
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Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.
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Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”
Some conservatives call the president the political equivalent of a suicide bomber: so consumed with hatred that he's willing to blow himself up in order to inflict casualties on a society he loathes.
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In short, the White House record of more than 200 years shows plenty of bad decisions but no bad men. For all their foibles, every president attempted to rise to the challenges of leadership and never displayed disloyal or treasonous intent.
Phi Beta Iota: Both the extreme right and the extreme left persist in demonizing individuals while remaining oblivious to the fact that it is the two-party “system” (remember, there are 65 parties in America, 63 of them disenfranchised) that has with malice and deliberation “sold out” the US public. The fact is that top-down governance is impossible anyway, it is pathologically dangerous when done by corrupt uninformed parties. The ONLY thing that can get America back on track is Electoral Reform–yet to our astonishment, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Cynthia Mckinney, all others who would seem to have everything to gain by coming together and demanding Electoral Reform in time for 2012, remain silent. Could they be part of the theater? The ONLY agile governance in the age of complexity is collective self-governance rich in clarity, diversity, and integrity. Electoral Reform is the only way to get there.
