Wireless

JAPANESE BOFFINS have demonstrated 3Gbit/s WiFi data transmission at 542GHz, part of what is called the Terahertz band.

Researchers have said the so-called Terahertz band, which ranges from 300GHz to just under 3THz, will eventually allow for transfers up to 100Gbit/s, a figure that is significantly higher than the interconnects used in supercomputer clusters. However Tokyo Institute of Technology researchers showed a slightly more modest 3Gbit/s transfer rate at 542GHz, though that was still enough to set a new record in the Terahertz frequency band.

Texas-based networking company Buffalo announced its first 802.11ac wireless router and wireless media bridge are available today for retail purchase. The two networking products are backwards compatible with 802.11n devices, but also feature the latest ac wireless standard. 

Earlier this year, Buffalo promised the arrival of this next-generation router in the summer, but last month Netgear announced its similar router would be arriving in May. Today, it looks like Buffalo hustled enough to be able to call "first."

A Google engineer who wrote a computer program capable of collecting personal data from people's home wireless networks, told at least two other Google employees about it, although the company asserted it did not know, a US government report shows.

The fact was revealed in a Federal Communications Commission's investigation, but had been redacted out by the FCC when it released its report two weeks ago. Google released the report itself over the weekend, with only names and telephone numbers blacked out.

It should come as no surprise that Apple has removed the wonderful Bluetooth OnOff app from the App Store.

The wonderful, single-purpose $0.99 app allowed you to turn Bluetooth on and off with one touch, something users have been clamoring for since the iPhone came out in 2007. I hope that you grabbed it while you could!

A zero day exploit has been discovered in popular wireless Linux manager WICD that allows an attacker to spawn a root shell on a target machine.

The privileged escalation exploit affects the latest versions of WICD (pronounced wicked) and was successfully tested on a handful of Linux distributions including the latest release of the penetration testing operating system BackTrack. It was not yet tested for remote exploitation vectors.

Darren Kitchen spent this weekend walking around the SXSW festival with an unobtrusive but relatively evil red box attached to his backpack: it impersonated Wi-Fi networks in hopes of convincing laptops, phones and other wireless devices to connect to it.

Faster WiFi is on a lot of wish lists, and today Qualcomm announced a line of chips for all sorts of consumer electronics that the company claims will achieve 1.3 Gigabit-per-second speeds over wireless. Qualcomm's plans for mobile, desktop, and router gigabit-speed wireless chips will most likely be compliant with the brand-new 802.11ac wireless standards to be ratified by the IEEE this year.

During the GNSS Vulnerability 2012 event at the UK's National Physical Laboratory on Wednesday, experts discussed the threat posed by a growing number of GPS jamming and spoofing devices. The increasing popularity of the jammers is troubling, according to conference organizer Bob Cockshott, because even low-power GPS jammers pose a significant threat to cell phone systems, parts of the electrical grid, and the safety of drivers.

Researchers at Intel have come up with a way to make WiFi faster and more energy efficient. It’s a chip called Rosepoint, and although it’s just a research project today, it could show up in mobile phones and laptop computers by the middle of the decade.

Drivers can talk with each other via Bluetooth phone connections, ask their cars for directions and dial up satellite radio. The same cars use electronic components to signal the gas pedal to accelerate and control stability.

What increasingly worries scientists is that entertainment computers could be manipulated to tell the safety computers what to do.