Argos – Security?

Argos does sound great.  How does WIFI traffic interfere with eachother?  How does a city-based wifi web work?  Where does it fail? These are all questions I wish Argos will answer.

How can Argos make money? Marketing partners.  It can sell its information to target demographics in certain areas.

Where is it even more helpful? It can show a way to create a wifi city in the most optimum way (where are most people using wifi already? Where is it struggling?…).

All these great things come from Argos, but it still scares me.  I’m terrified of security and protection of Argos.  Yes, Argos will show where WiFi networks are unencrypted and easy to break into.  It’s able to notify users and owners how to create a more secure network and how to keep leachers and hackers out.  However, it also records data from each user.  Does this mean it will record when I access my bank account?  Will it access my information I securely add in there?  It’s terrifying.

It will be great to see what is Wifi used for (Netflix) and how to optimize it.  It would be wonderful to see this information recommend a system for a city to create access points and basically rule out the need to have personal modems (a system I see much more affordable for the user).  This will also create a better way to keep mobile users off the networks, keeping it more open for emergency calls.  It will also allow the user to have a faster connection.

Micro-Blog SkyNet

Micro-Blog: Sharing and Querying Content Through Mobile Phones and Social Participation

Abstract: When plugged into the

Internet, the collaborative inputs from phones may enable a

high resolution view of the world.

Wow this is a really cool idea.  With the advancements in mobile technology and decreasing cost of owning a smartphone an idea like this is more possible than ever.  It would be very cool to use a map and see what was going on all over the country. It reminds me a little of my app this summer Happytrack. The only difference is that Micro-blog is also incorporating sensors in the device. Example (accelerometer maybe a thermostat etc.) I think this is very smart but at the same time could be very scary. What if  certain apps secretly transmitted this information back random times. After designing apps this is very possible! This only thing that pops into my mind is SKYNET! Ahh.

Some of the challenges it Micro-blog would have to overcome would be short battery life with sensors on (gps etc) I feel with the advancements in mobile technology it wont be long until we can overcome the physical challenges of the devices. I think a tool like micr-blog could be very cool but would also scare me at the same time. The amount of data one company would have would be tremendous.

Mapping Urban Wireless Landscape With Argos

Mapping Urban Wireless Landscape With Argos

Argos = First urban scare wireless sensor network designed explicitly to support measurement of ambient Wifi traffic across an entire city

Goal -The goal of Argos is to enable urban-scale monitoring

of wireless networks, permitting multiple users to execute

queries against the captured traffic.

To be perfectly honest I don’t really see the point. Ok it would be cool to have a way to monitor everyone’s activity but it just seems already obsolete. With the move toward mobile devices and wireless being shared through cell towers I think wireless home networks will be decreasing. Argos sounds like a lot of upkeep planning hardware placement etc. the “edge” networks or cell towers can already monitor web access and data usage.  I think its a lot of work for not a very large reward.

Security. I don’t understand how it can bypass wireless security. I know its just monitoring packets but does argos have access to wireless packets without network passwords? I also feel its an invasion of privacy. I’ll bet a lot of people will be offended with this idea of “passive Monitoring”

Mist (Not to be confused with the Pokemon Trainer)

Mist

Mobile Internet Service Technology

Goal- is to measure and characterize cellular network performance on devices.

 

After reading this article all I have to say is GO MIST. I think mist is really important because there must be some way to measure network performance.  Our society today is completely run on mobile technology. As time passed its only going to become more and more reliant on it. To start the lightweight mist apps that run on java make it easy to run and collect data on a wide variety of devices.  I think java is also a very reliable language that will be around for a while so it’s a safe investment. Mist is really important for app developers so they can plan the amount of bandwidth that is appropriate for their apps.

I found the relationship between the app Developer and the network carrier to be very interesting. The App Developer needs the carrier in order to get to its customers and audience.  The carriers benefit from the app developers because it encourages users to download more information (ie more bandwidth more money).  It’s a symbiotic relationship. Anyway moving on. Mist is important to the app developer because they can tune their apps based on the networks they are on. If an app developer knows that they are on a slow network they may have a longer buffing time for a video app. or make the app stay connected to servers longer so it could continuously download information.  This information is crucial to creating successful apps.  With the Large expansion of mobile technology I’m all for the measurement of mobile internet service technology. I think it will be a crucial step in the future.

 

Fun fact = I learned that CDMA stands for (Code Division Multiple Access) and GSM stands for (Global Systems Mobile)

misty

WHoops i accidentally posted this last week to a different blog of ours…anyways here it is in the right spot.

Number one, I like to see people trying to improve cell phone connectivity. Its one of the most obnoxious problems that ive experienced in owning a smart phone. After taking the jbs and learning all about how apps connect and disconnect and send their servers my info, ive taken a keen notice to all the little flashing images and notifications my phone displays. But all i know is that some apps are doing random checks and data transfers with my phone whenever they feel like it. I can imagine that theres a rhyme and reason to it all, but to me it seems like chaos. And in actuallity, it is. I have serious problems with connectivity. Sometimes its strong and fast, and sometimes its absent altogether. I cannot depend on it and therefore i rarely ever use my phone for internet related services.

Ok, back to the paper. I appreciate that people are creating services to help mobile developers make better and more reliable products. Clearly i think they need lots of work. I like that their code is based in java. I like java myself and enjoyed using it during the jbs for my mobile app. I found the three tests, latency, throughput, and timeout to be out of my range of knowledge so i liked learning about them.

Keep up the good work mist!

mist

I won’t lie, I’m still a little confused about what mist actually does.  I know it attaches to the server to collect information on how different cellphones with different carriers are retieving data from.p the server.  However, I really don’t see how useful this is.  The article, does however raise some interesting points on developing for mobile markets.

I want to start a little tongue in cheek on the article.  I really enjoyed how they stated that soon all data plans would be moving to unlimited during the section on how the phones they had to test on were not capable to use their application.  This is quite the opposite.  Unlimited data plans are actually harming the networks.  The more people who stream Netflix on their devices over data plans, the more likely emergency telephone calls could be knocked off their connection with the networks.  I’m not an expert on how this works, but it was a recent conversation I had with my dad, an engineer at alcatel Lucent, a credible source in my book.  A little more evidence: Verizon got rid of their unlimited data plan.  I’m not sure the technology is supportive yet of all this data usage.

Furthermore, they seemed to be so against the restrictions mobile plays on a lot of normal web based activity, however seemed to forget mobile iis an entity all of its own.  Sure its throughput isnt the greatest with most services, however mobile doesn’t need connectivity often, it needs some things natively and some things queued up on the server ready for the next optimum connection.

I guess I stayed a little too focused on small aspects of this article…but I’m mobile now, on a train, on a tablet, doing the best I can.