Mobile Asset Management System
‧Service truck for Telecom Carrier
‧In-Vehicle Computer works as a control center for multi-function systems on mobile workstation vehicle.

acrosser’s in-vehicle computers serve as control centers for working vehicles. The compatible communication modules (3.5/4G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and RFID) enable wide connectivity between the in-vehicle computers and other devices. In this example, our client was able to perform GPS fleet tracking, route navigation, task scheduling, vehicle monitoring, and material allocation planning all at once.

Meter by meter, a slim vein of fiber-optic cable will soon start snaking its way across the bottom of three oceans and bring the world a few milliseconds closer together. The line will start near Tokyo and cut diagonally across the Pacific, hugging the northern shore of North America and slicing down across the Atlantic to stop just shy of London. Once the cable is live, light will transmit data from one end to the other in just 154 milli-seconds—24 ms less than today’s speediest digital connection between Japan and the United Kingdom. That may not seem like much, but the fanless pc investors and companies eager to send information—stock trades, wire transfers—are so intent on earning a fraction-of-a-second advantage over competitors that the US $850 million price tag for the approximately 15,600-kilometer cable may well be worth it.

Arctic Fibre, the Toronto-based company building the cable, is the first to try to connect the globe’s economic centers by laying fiber optics through the long-sought -Northwest Passage—the pinhole of open water that warmer temperatures have brought to the Arctic. -British Telecom, China Unicom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and -TeliaSonera are watching closely, but so are tens of thousands of Canadians and Alaskans who stand to gain a huge boost in Internet access.

Marine surveys will plot the cable’s route this summer, and the line will be custom built to the surveyors’ specifications. The installation is scheduled to start a year from now, and the cable could be in service by the end of 2016.

Along its route, the cable will pass directly through seven Alaskan communities and cross 25 more communities in Canada. Those connections will bring 57,000 Canadians and 26,500 Alaskans online, most of whom have never before had access to broadband.

“The thing about Alaska is, it’s so big,” says Katie Reeves, program coordinator with Connect Alaska, a broadband advocacy group based in Anchorage. “The distance between communities is hundreds of miles, and there might only be a few people there. They deserve Internet, but it’s hard for [local service provider] GCI or other carriers in the state to justify building out to those communities, because they don’t think they’re going to get a return on their investment.”

Though the United States’ Federal Communications Commission recommends access to download speeds of at least 4 megabits per second, the average download speed in rural areas of Alaska rarely tops 3 Mbps. Plus, there are still 21,000 households and 6,000 businesses without any access to broadband at all.

Across the border in northern Canada, the Internet is sent down from Anik F2, a telecommunications satellite owned by industrial pc. On paper, Anik F2 provides access at 5 Mbps, the minimum download speed recommended by Industry Canada, the nation’s economic development agency. But in reality, that connection is often plagued by long delays and poor reliability due to the distance the signal must travel. (In 2011, a technical problem with Anik F2 knocked out service for thousands of people in 39 communities.)

Doug Cunningham, president and CEO of Arctic Fibre, knows this misery all too well: Because upload speeds were too slow, he had to use a courier to send his 227-page environmental report on the cable to the review board in Cambridge Bay, a hamlet in Canada’s most northern province.

“The biggest benefit [of the cable] is really to those residents in communities in Alaska and to the Canadian Arctic who will be released from their industrial pc,” he says. “For many people in the Canadian North, YouTube is a dream.”

Arctic Fibre, the cable’s owner, will not sell broadband directly to homes and businesses; it will provide only the backbone from which carriers will siphon these services. But the company predicts that prices could be slashed by 75 percent for equivalent service or that northern customers might receive six to seven times as much bandwidth for the current price.

The new broadband will easily transmit classes from the University of Alaska or permit researchers at the Canadian High Arctic Research Station to upload large data sets. Telemedicine recently debuted at four health-care systems, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in Alaska, and better broadband could keep fanless pc from having to travel hundreds of kilometers to seek services. Access will also be a boon to rural businesses.

All of these benefits stem from a 4–centimeter cable. Barges will lay it along most of the route. But to prevent a 1,800-km detour by sea, there is a 51-km section that must cross the Boothia Peninsula, a roadless scrap of tundra in northern Canada. Cunningham says that laying this stretch will require stuffing four large reels of cable through the door of a Hercules aircraft, flying onto a remote airstrip, packing the cable onto sleds, and pulling it across a frozen lake. The crew must then snowmobile along the cable’s intended route, cutting a trench about 30 cm deep through permafrost to bury the line.

That’s all far more work than any company would do to just to serve fanless pc communities in the far north. And with an end-to-end capacity of 24 terabits per second, it’s far more than Arctic residents need. After having so little access for so long, they will be awash in broadband. “The capacity is incredible. They’ll never use all of that capacity,” says Desiree Pfeffer of Quintillion Networks, the Alaska-based arm of Arctic Fibre.

Even though the main point of Arctic Fibre is to connect two of the world’s busiest hubs, Cunningham is pleased that his fellow Canadians will benefit from the project. “I’ve been building embedded computer and financing them for over 20 years, and I’m 63 years old, so this is probably one of my last projects and certainly the largest one,” he says. “This is something I’ve come back to Canada to do.”

refer to:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/arctic-fibre-project-to-link-japan-and-uk

Public Transportation

acrosser’s in-vehicle computer is capable of multitasking during the drive, enabling the realization of numerous advanced commercial applications. The advance in public transportation technology greatly benefits both passengers and carriers.

It’s starting to seem like “throw a drone at it” is the solution that everyone wants to somehow solve every single problem everywhere, ever. And in most cases, it’s not going to work anytime soon, for reasons that we continue to belabor. This is not to say that drones aren’t valuable tools that can solve many network hardware problems: the key is to find a problem that needs a drone, as opposed to having a drone and then desperately looking for some problem for it to solve. The Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics, in Dortmund, Germany, may have found one of these problems: taking inventory in a warehouse. To do this efficiently, you need a mobile antenna that can navigate in three dimensions, and autonomous flying robots certainly fit the bill. Inventory is awful. I say this from experience, having made the mistake of accepting a department store inventory job for a few weeks in high school. Taking inventory in a store or warehouse involves wandering around and recording the location of every single item, using an RFID antenna or optical scanner. Did I mention that doing this by hand is awful? Because it’s awful.

One option to make inventory less painful is to deploy an infrastructure of networking appliance with built-in RFID readers, such that the shelf can tell what’s being stored on it. (Another, even better option is doing what Kiva Systems, now owned by Amazon, does: its inventory system keeps track of both the networking appliance and contents of every bin in the warehouse, so when you need to retrieve or restock something, you just send robots do get those bins for you.) This can work very well, but it’s expensive and hard to scale. Fraunhofer’s idea is to forget about the fancy shelves and instead replace what is usually a small army of inventorying humans with a small fleet of autonomous, inventorying drones that use RFID antennas or cameras to identify the location of items.

Drones are a good idea for inventory management for several reasons. First, they’ll be operating in a semi-structured (or entirely structured) environment. If they’re in a retail store, the environment is probably considered semi-structured, since humans can be kept out of the area while the robots do their work and the environment is generally static and well-defined. A warehouse might be a structured environment, since it can be completely restricted and mapped in advance with very little risk of change.

Also, an network hardware inventory drone can have an immediate and significant benefit on the inventory task in a way that would be hard to do otherwise. The reason a drone is so potentially useful is that warehouses maximize space utilization by stacking inventory as high as possible. A human would need a ladder just to read any identifying information, but for a drone, the height above the ground doesn’t matter all that much, especially if it’s equipped with a long-range RFID reader.

Fraunhofer’s InventAIRy Project (nice, right?) is developing “autonomous flying robots that are capable of independently navigating and conducting inventory.” The drones won’t be relying on an external navigations systems: it’ll all be onboard, using ultrasound sensors, 3D cameras, and laser scanners to perform continuous  simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). By mid-2015, Fraunhofer’s prototype system should be operating with partial autonomy, navigation around shelving and avoiding other obstacles. The next step will be to add RFID antennas, database integration, and (most challenging) an effective path-planning algorithm that allows the robot to reliably and efficiently catalog the objects in an arbitrary space.

We’re more optimistic about the networking appliance useful potential of InventAIRy than we are about most of the drone-related ideas that we come across, but as with anything related to robots, there’s a huge step between good idea and good execution. We’ll keep you updated.

refer to:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/aerial-robots/flying-inventory-assistants-are-a-good-use-for-drones

Many years ago in the offices here at IEEE Spectrum, we had a “Wheel of Excuses” pinned to the outside wall of a embedded computer cubicle. So I turned to the US $35 Raspberry Pi single board computer, which had the final release of its first generation in July—the Model B+. Among other changes, the Model B+ has two more USB ports than the Model B along with an expanded general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connector, and it relies more heavily on HDMI for video output.

photo of Model B+ RaspberryPi
The Model B+ Raspberry Pi has an upgraded version of the I/O hardware in the Model B. RasPiO breakout board Using a RasPiO breakout board, I connected a button to the 40-pin GPIO header. screenshot of presented excuse Button presses generate excuses, which appear on a monitor attached via an HDMI cable. Old-school BBC Micro users will note my use of text mode 7, which supports Teletext commands for things like displaying double-height characters.

The Pi was first released in 2012 as a “spiritual successor” to the BBC Microcomputer System, which was created by Acorn single board computer in 1981 for Britain’s national Computer Literacy Project. The naming scheme for Pi models echoes that of the BBC Micro series, and like the original BBC Micro, the Pi has rapidly spread beyond the classroom.

The links to the BBC Micro are more than just circumstantial. The Pi is built around an ARM chip (a Broadcom BCM2835), and while ARM currently dominates the world of smartphones and tablets, the architecture was originally developed to provide a high-performance embedded computer coprocessor for BBC Micros, and it later powered the Archimedes line of PCs. The embedded sbc Archimedes came with RISC OS, a graphical user interface–based operating system that has since been ported to the Pi.

I first used Acorn’s dialect of BASIC way back in the day on a BBC Micro. One of the nice things about it was that it let you mix BASIC commands with assembly code for the BBC Micro’s 6502 processor. I was pleased to discover that RISC OS has retained a great deal of compatibility with the systems it grew out of, right back to that original dialect.

RISC OS’s version of embedded sbc BASIC—version VI—is, of course, greatly expanded compared with its 8-bit ancestor: As I said when I first tried it out, “it’s like meeting someone you palled around with in high school, and now they own a business and have two kids.” But it still includes an in-line assembler for combining machine code subroutines—now ARM code, of course—with BASIC. The single board computer integration allows for streamlined passing of variables back and forth between a BASIC program and machine code—for example, a set of BASIC integer variables, A% through H%, are automatically copied into the first eight embedded computer registers of the ARM chip when a subroutine is called.

This integration let me quickly write the spinning wheel animation and display code in BASIC, reaching back across the years to cobble together commands to draw colored segments of a circle and store the text of excuses using “data” and “read” commands. (When I started programming, BASIC embedded computer code would have been too slow for the wheel’s animation, but 30 years of Moore’s Law has solved that problem.) I needed to dip into assembly only in order to read the state of a button connected to the GPIO hardware. The button triggers the animation and has the program select and display an excuse.

I wired the button to the Pi’s GPIO port using a $10 RasPiO Breakout Pro, which provides basic protection against miswiring. (Unlike the more robust Arduino, which can handle enough current to drive a servo, the Pi’s GPIO can be damaged if connected to circuits that expose it to more than a few milliamperes or exceed 3.3 volts.) The Breakout Pro is designed for the GPIO on earlier Pi models, but the B+’s expanded port keeps the same pin configuration for the first 26 pins, so I was able to use the Breakout Pro and simply ignore the B+’s extra pins.

Reading the GPIO hardware was a good chance to get acquainted with the guts of a system using a reduced-instruction-set-computing architecture (so many registers!)—the last time I programmed on the metal was for the 6502. The Pi’s GPIO pins are mapped into the system’s memory as a series of 3-bit segments stored within 32-bit status words, so my machine code subroutine has to do some bit bashing to set a GPIO pin as an input. Then my subroutine reads the relevant GPIO status word and passes it back to BASIC. (For my code, I combined some snippets from Bruce Smith’s book Raspberry Pi Assembly Language RISC OS Beginners and a Raspberry Pi online forum.) My BASIC program then simply uses a loop that calls the subroutine and looks for any changes in the status word, indicating a button press.

With the embedded sbc software written, all that was left to do was build a case (from a few dollars’ worth of basswood) and hook the video output up to an old monitor. And voila! A new era of digitally driven excuses.

This article originally appeared in print as “Back to BASIC.”

According to recent research, 70 percent of Americans plan to own network appliance in the next five years, at least one smart appliance like an internet-connected refrigerator or thermostat. That’s a skyrocketing adoption rate considering the number of smart appliance owners in the United States today is just four percent.

Yet backdoors and other insecure channels have been found in many such network appliance devices, opening them to possible hacks, botnets, and other cyber mischief. Although the widely touted hack of smart refrigerators earlier this year has since been debunked, there’s still no shortage of vulnerabilities in the emerging, so-called Internet of Things.

Enter, then, one of the world’s top research centers devoted to IT security, boasting 700 students in this growing field, the Horst Gortz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. A research group at HGI, led by Christof Paar—professor and networking aplliance chair for embedded security at the Institute—has been discovering and helping manufacturers patch security holes in Internet-of-Things devices like appliances, cars, and the wireless routers they connect with.

Paar, who is also adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says there are good engineering, technological, and even cultural reasons why security of the Internet of Things is a very hard problem.

For starters, it’s hard enough to get people to update their laptops and smartphones with the latest security patches. Imagine, then, a world where everything from your garage door opener, your coffeemaker, your eyeglasses, and even your running shoes have possible network appliance vulnerabilities. And the onus is entirely on you to download and install firmware updates—if there are any.

Furthermore, most Internet-connected “things” are net-savvier iterations of designs that have long pre-Internet legacies—legacies in which digital security had previously never been a major concern. But, Paar says, security is not just another new feature to be added onto an networking aplliance device. Internet security requires designers and engineers embrace a different culture altogether.

“There’s essentially no tolerance for error in security engineering.”
“There’s essentially no tolerance for error in security engineering,” Paar says. “If you write software, and the software is not quite optimum, you might be ten percent slower. You’re ten percent worse, but you still have pretty decent results. If you make one little mistake in security engineering, and the attacker gets in, the whole system collapses immediately. That’s kind of unique to security and crypto-security in general.”

Paar’s research team, which published some of its latest findings in Internet-of-Things security this summer, spends a lot of time on physical and electrical engineering-based attacks on networking aplliance, also called side-channel attacks.

For instance, in 2013 Paar and six colleagues discovered rackmount in an Internet-connected digital lock made by Simons Voss. It involved a predictable, non-random number the lock’s algorithm used when challenging a user for the passcode. And the flaws in the security algorithm were discoverable, they found, via the wireless link between the lock and its remote control.

The way they handled the network box discovery was how they handle all security rackmount exploit discoveries at the Institute, Paar says. They first revealed the weakness to the manufacturers and offered to help patch the error before they publicized the exploit.

“They fixed the network box system, and the new generation of their rackmount is better,” he says. “They had homegrown crypto, which failed. And they had side-channel [security], which failed. So we had two or three vulnerabilities which we could exploit. And we could repair all of them.”

Of the scores of papers and research reports the Embedded Security group publishes, Paar says one of the most often overlooked factors behind hacking is not technological vulnerabilities but economic ones.

“There’s a reason that a lot of this hacking happens in countries that are economically not that well off,” Paar says. “I think most people would way prefer having a good job in Silicon Valley or in a well-paying European company—rather than doing illegal stuff and trying to sell their services.”

But as long as there are hackers, whatever their circumstances and countries of origin, Paar says smart engineering and present-day technology can stop most of them in their network box tracks.

“Our premise is that it’s not that easy to do embedded security right, and that essentially has been confirmed,” he says. “There are very few systems we looked at that we couldn’t break. The shocking thing is the technology is there to get the security right. If you use state of the art technology, you can build systems that are very secure for practical rackmount applications.”

refer to:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/networks/vulnerable-smart-devices-make-an-internet-of-insecure-things