Tech Brief
Today on Tech Brief: the Australians who don't want broadband, a Wikileaks mystery and why voice calls deserve to die.
• Keys, wallet, phone, change. There's only so much you can keep in your pockets. Now, , the two largest US mobile carriers are planning a venture to merge at least two of those: wallets and smartphones. Verizon and AT&T are planning a service that will allow people to pay for goods with a wave of their phone.
"The trial would be the carriers' biggest effort to spur mobile payments in the US and supplant more than 1 billion plastic cards in American wallets. Smartphones have encroached on tasks ranging from Web browsing to street navigation and now may help the phone companies compete with San Francisco-based Visa and MasterCard, the world's biggest payments networks."
• If you were offered a free, high-speed fibre-optic internet connection to your home would you take it, .
"Not if you live in Tasmania, where the Australian government's ambitious new National Broadband Network is getting underway with its first fibre deployments. The government-created NBN Co. has the right to dig up streets and trench along rights-of-way, but to install that 'last-mile' connection to a home or apartment it needs permission - and Tasmanians have been slow to offer it."
• Ever since the whistle-blowing website leaked more than 70,000 classified military records, news sites have been awash with news on Wikileaks. Over the weekend, about a "mysterious file" that has appeared on the site:
"Cryptome, a separate secret-spilling site, has speculated that the new file added days later may have been posted as insurance in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization's founder, Julian Assange. In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it."
• Separately, - noted for his work with the Tor online security project - at Newark International Airport:
"Appelbaum's interviewers demanded that he decrypt his laptop and other computer equipment, the source said. After his refusal to do so, they confiscated it, including three cellphones. The laptop was returned, apparently because it contained no storage drive that investigators could examine."
• It seems the site is also looking for ways to fund its operations. that the site has signed up for Flattr - the "online tip jar" created by one of the founders of infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay:
"In case it's passed you by to date, Flattr allows users to top their accounts up with an amount of money every month. Whenever they see a Flattr button on a website they like, they can click it. On the first day of every month, each user's payment is divided up between all the sites they 'Flattr-ed' over the past four weeks."
• It seems the art of conversation is dead, at least , who says that with the increase in social networks and texting, phone calls are becoming more and more of a rarity:
"This generation doesn't make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don't just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It deserves to die."
• And finally, it seems Facebook has been having a bit of fun at the expense of net pranksters. Last week, the social network launched its Questions service. For people like . So, the self-styled internet guy from LA, typed his favourite tried and tested poser: "How is babby formed?" But, it seems, Facebook was one step ahead:
"For internet troublemakers like myself this question is a great way to test any new Q&A service. I was the first user to pose such a question on Quora and when Facebook introduced its own questions product I did the same."
And for those of you wondering what the video shows, here's .
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