The Roundup: Week of February 13

17th February, 2012 - Posted by admin - No Comments

The action is up in the clouds this week, from smartphones to airplanes – with a detour to Tennessee for potential cyber disruption of state government:

Acer cloud-based smartphone wins award
Now you can really have your head in the clouds! The Taipei Times reported that Acer’s first cloud computing-based smartphone won the International Forum (iF) design award in Munich, Germany. The CloudMobile smartphone will be introduced at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona at the end of this month. Details on price are not available, but the handset will be ultra-slim (less than 1 cm thick), include Dolby sound, a 4.3-inch display and run on Google’s Android 4.0 OS; it will be available for purchase in the third quarter of this year.

State legislators targeted by Anonymous
Closer to home, The Tennessean reported that the General Assembly and staff have been warned that Anonymous is planning cyber attacks against them because of legislation to evict Occupy Nashville protesters from the grounds of the state capitol.

Airplanes, air traffic control to swap data
We know texting while driving is a problem…but what about texting while flying? Avionics Intelligence reported that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved a new air traffic management communications technology, the Future Air Navigation System (FANS) 1/A over the global High Frequency Data Link (HFDL) network. This will enable pilots and air traffic controllers to exchange text and other data at long ranges by using high-frequency radio signals rather than VHF radio or satellite-based communications. ARINC Inc. of Annapolis, Md. is administering the HFDL network.