geekosystem

The Xbox One's Kinect may be watching and listening at all times, but it's still just mostly staring straight ahead at your couch. But motion controls have taken a step forward, as a team of researchers at the University of Washington have developed a system dubbed WiSee (pronounced "We See") that uses Wi-Fi radio waves to detect human movement and gestures. While motion controls are nothing new, utilizing Wi-Fi makes it possible to pick up motions without motion sensors pointed at the user, anywhere within range.

In spite of being dead, Nikola Tesla is having a pretty good year. His New York lab was just purchased by a group of admirers looking to turn it into a museum, he could be getting his own cartoon, and now there will be a statue built in his honor in Silicon Valley. And not just any statue -- this one will double as a Wi-Fi hotspot, triple as a time capsule, and it could even be going to Mars in 2043.

Google Glass is going to do a lot of interesting things. Wearers will be able to get turn-by-turn directions, instantly share videos and pictures with the world, carry on video calls, and get information about the world while still looking at the world... as long as you have your cell phone or there's a Wi-Fi connection. It would be great if Glass was a completely standalone device, but it would need its own cellular connection for that. There is not, and won't be a cellular connection in Google Glass, but there's good reasons for that -- like FCC regulations, and people's irrational fear of cancer.

Yesterday, I wrote about a story in The Washington Post that said there was an FCC plan to offer free "Super Wi-Fi." This morning Techdirt is saying that The Washington Post -- and by extension everyone else -- is wrong, and tried to clear things up. It turns out the story is a combined misunderstanding of a few things going on in the world of the FCC and the broadcast spectrum.

As sure as day passes into night, it seems that the rich get...well, not richer, exactly, but in New York today, plenty of them got word that they would be able to drop at least one bill. That's because the city's Chelsea neighborhood -- home to some of the cities highest-end shopping and most expensive apartments -- is about to get free Wi-Fi courtesy of Google, whose New York headquarters are in the neighborhood. With this move, Google has raised getting public relations credit for doing what amounts to absolutely nothing to an art form.

Wi-Fi on airplanes is great as an idea, but the sad reality is that W-Fi on airplanes is actually terrible. Anyone who tries to connect their device to an in-flight Wi-Fi connection is in for a spotty, frustratingly slow experience, and as more people start using Wi-Fi enabled devices, it's only going to get worse. Boeing wants to improve in-flight Wi-Fi, so they've begun a new process for testing signal strength using sacks of potatoes as stand-ins for humans. Makes sense. As far as most airlines are concerned, we're all just sacks of potatoes anyway.

Having access to wi-fi in places like coffee shops is wonderful, unless those places get crowded with other people using the same wi-fi connection. That's when speeds drop and problems begin. It's almost enough to make you want to carry around your own hotspot, but thankfully researchers from North Carolina State University have a new way to increase wi-fi speeds up to 700% on crowded networks.

You may be reading this while you're slowly updating a Steam game or watching a buffering Netflix show on your PS3 even though you pay for a fairly speedy Internet. Regardless of how far we've come regarding Internet speed, and how our phones can watch television shows while we wait in line at the bank, there's always something left to be desired when it comes to Internet speed. The maximum speed provided by an Ethernet cable is often preferred to the ease, but slower maximum available speed of a wireless signal, but with the addition of a bit of algebra to clear of network clogging, Wi-Fi signals may become much faster without the addition of any new hardware.

JetBlue wants to give you free Wi-Fi service during your flight starting next year. Well, it'll be free until the new service is installed on 30 JetBlue planes, which seems like a weird benchmark. Maybe that's why we're not running a major airline. Perhaps even more important than being free, JetBlue has set one very clear goal for the service, due to start in the first couple months of 2013: It must not suck. That would certainly set it apart from current in-flight Wi-Fi offerings, the bar for which is set so low that it is functionally a ditch.

The problem inherent in a number of ongoing copyright infringement lawsuits is that they rely on the spurious reasoning that an IP address can be directly connected to a person. In reality, an IP address is just a label given to a device accessing the Internet. By this logic, when someone doesn't secure their Wi-Fi connection, and piracy occurs through it, the whole illegal matter will trace back to the subscriber. A judge in California has now ruled that subscribers have no legal duty to secure these connections, meaning they're not liable for said piracy.

At Israeli theme park Kfar Kedem, you can get a realistic taste of what it was like to live in biblical times. This was a simpler era, when there were no antibiotics, being stoned to death was a very real possibility, and livestock just strutted around city streets like they owned the place. Yes, living in biblical times sucked. The managers of Kfar Kedem seem to have acknowledged the problems inherent in building a theme park around the idea of visiting a time when everything was just measurably worse than the world we actually live in, and have begun adding some modern amenities to the experience. Now, when you visit Kfar Kedem, the donkey you are riding around the park will also be a convenient Wi-Fi hotspot. Just like in the Bible!

Of all the detritus remaining from the pre-cellular age, payphones are among the most visible. However, a new plan launched in New York City might give these once useful call kiosks a new lease on life by converting them into free Wi-Fi hotspots.

Who doesn't want faster Wi-Fi? No one, that's who. Researchers in Japan are working on a new kind of Wi-Fi that might be able to help you out in the speed department. Terahertz range, or "t-ray" wireless transmission has reached speeds up to 20 times faster than conventional radio Wi-Fi. It also lies in a currently unregulated area of the spectrum, meaning it could be fair game for Wi-Fi use someday.

Sure, you can password protect your Wi-Fi router, but you can't exactly keep your precious Internet from seeping out of your house or apartment and over to your neighbors. Or can you? Thanks to some new-fangled wallpaper due to go on sale by the Finnish company Alhstrom in 2013, you can make your residence Internet-tight, keeping all your Internet in and everyone else's Internet out. After all, you've got to be conservative with your limited supply of Internets, right?

Lasers make everything better. Lasers can make random numbers that are perfect for encryption. Lasers can blow up an iPad. Lasers might eventually allow us to use nuclear fusion as a power source. That's already impressive, but is it possible that they could actually make our wireless networks faster, and all around better? In certain very specific cases, yes.