Rumours of an Apple "iWatch" surfaced in February when Bruce Tognazzini, one of its earliest employees, blogged about the idea – breaking a long silence. Tracking our every twitch, step and move, fitness trackers and wearable sensors proliferated in 2013, but smartwatches generally failed to live up to the hype. The makers of smart cities are just grappling with the challenges ahead.
Equally, if you plan too early you can lock yourself into redundant technologies. Smart cities, however, need planning on a big scale to get them right: you don't want to decide after your roads are built that you need embedded sensors at every crossing. More broadly, you can also look at the Chinese government's perhaps reluctant decision to make air quality data available as a step towards smarter cities in the Three Kingdoms – try the China Air Quality Index app ( iPhone or Android). Seoul, South Korea, is in the lead here, in trying to capture real-time traffic information. Getting sensors and intelligence embedded into the way that huge conurbations work is becoming imperative as we have more, and newer, super-cities. Smart citiesĭown these smart streets a man (or woman) must go. The closing of Silk Road didn't make much difference: replacements, including one called Black Market Reloaded, sprang up almost overnight. Until, that is, the FBI shut it down and replaced its front page with a sign saying "THIS HIDDEN SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED" – raising the obvious question of how the site could really be hidden if you were looking at it, and quite what "seized" means in the context of a virtual object. Accessible through the anonymous Tor network and trading in virtual bitcoin currency, Silk Road became a byword for all things stealthy and outside the ambit of the authorities. What's a bitcoin useful for? Often, it seemed, buying online drugs and illegal goods/services (including, if the affidavits around some of the arrests are to be believed, assassinations) at the marketplace hidden in the depths of the dark web. The trouble with filters, of course, is that they aren't perfect - particularly computer-based ones. He also pressured Google, Bing and Yahoo to block searches for illegal sites online - something with which Google finally complied in November. Never let it be said that Australian politicians can't change their mind.)īy July, Cameron had the bit between his teeth and announced that by the end of 2014 ISPs would present all internet users with an "unavoidable choice" on whether to use filters. (In Australia, it was going to be opt-out, and then it suddenly wasn't. It's an idea that has been pushed since at least 2011, when ISPs agreed to make them " opt in". Under pressure from campaigners, the UK prime minister declared that Something Must Be Done About Porn, where "porn" seemed to be hazily defined.
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