Cloud as a check and balance for on-premises systems

A chat with open source pioneers about disruption and the value of on-premises computing.

Is open source technology a disruptive innovation force in the Clayton Christensen sense of the term -- meaning it starts out serving the underserved or unserved, and works its way up to eventually chase the market leaders upstream?

Photo: Joe McKendrick

It certainly meets that definition, in that it has made powerful solutions available to the smallest and budget-tight players, and, yes, many open source solutions have pushed their way up the food chain to eventually challenge well-funded commercial competitors. We see Linux in many Fortune 500s, and Apache Hadoop is no stranger in these places, either.

The database market is another example of open source solutions pushing their way from the bottom to the top. I recently had the opportunity to chat with two of the leading protagonists in this space, Monty Widenius, creator and co-founder of MySQL (now part of Oracle) and currently CTO of MariaDB, and Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB, to talk in detail about open source and cloud. MariaDB is an open-source database company that picks up where MySQL left off.I was invited to their first user conference in New York,

The following is a mashup of my Q&A with Widenius and Howard:

Q: What's your relationship with MySQL?

Widenius: The project started in 1981. I created a database that was useful for doing applications. MySQL was started in 1996. Maria is more MySQL than MySQL. We were acquired by Sun, then in middle of the process, Oracle announced they will buy Sun. So most of the technical people left and joined me.We are the same people who created MySQL. We are the new M in LAMP. .

With MariaDB, I'm still coding, and wrote many of the new features. I always believed it was easier to find good managers than good coders. I'm a lucky man -- I spend 60% of my time coding.

Q: Do you see open source solutions -- such as MariaDB -- as a disruptive force?

Howard: Yes and no. There is some open source componentry, which is just more of the same. The notion of cannibalization or disruption is more nuanced. you take something like Oracle which owns a bunch of databases, and they will prioritize based on margins or profit, which is what a company should do. So lower-end products wont get the same features as higher-end products, such as data warehousing or analytical features. So that puts them in a difficult situation if someone comes in with a very cheap data warehousing vehicle.

I think we have taken it one step further in the case of disruption. In the case of analytics, we're making it a feature in our database. So in the entire $18 billion market, we just featurized analytics. Even though Amazon is incredibly efficient, incredibly automated, they can't keep up with the innovation they're in.

Q: What's your view of the cloud model? Do you see it as an effective delivery mechanism?

Widenius: We are in all the cloud. Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, and lots of big vendors are making a lot of money. But after you start a company, some times its eventually cheaper to run things in house. I don't believe cloud is the solution. There lots of vendors who don't trust the cloud for security reasons. Its hard to not be in control. The cloud vendors are really not open source friendly either -- they're users, and sometimes misusers. Private clouds are the future. I believe for mission-critical things that have to be secure, you need private cloud.

Howard: Some of these cloud vendors -- such as Amazon and Alibaba -- are among the most valuable companies in the world. They're seeing incredible profits, incredible hegemony, and incredible reach. You can't just put them in a box in the corner, and not see what they're doing. They make you work a little bit harder, and you have to really be ahead of them.

I do believe, however, there is tremendous growth and tremendous opportunity in on-prem, and that will even be fortified as time goes on. As.storage technology network and compute vendors take advantage of technologies that's faster and at price points that will make Amazon look expensive. Those technologies are here today, they're just not, in my book, packaged appropriately. Cloud is here to stay; it's a wonderful check and balance for on-prem vendors in ways of thinking about deploying applications.

Q: Do you see more functionality going to small-footprint mobile devices?

Howard: We have some people putting our database on a tablet. But the way you normally do something like that is to have your Salesforce icon, or some kind of, the veneer of your application is on your iPhone. Then you run your bigger loads on your server. For the end user application, why not? But if you're developing, that may not be the best form factor to do that.

Q: We're rushing headlong into machine learning. Can we trust the data?

Howard: You need to be concerned how solid the data is. Yet you hear about the automation bias of the machine learning. Theyre all black boxes. You can't go into the system of the algorithms and understand how did it actually come up with that answer. They don't know the why. Everyone is talking about AI, yet they cant understand how the statistical models behave. There's no mandate on the data going into the models. They're back testing, announcing 70 to 80% reliability of whatever, who knows what that is? We need a Moody's of data, but not 2008 style. That's why the database has to take that role -- because it's extremely objective, and it doesn't have a back box.

Homeland Security warns of 'BrickerBot' malware that destroys unsecured internet-connected devices

Reminiscent of the Mirai botnet that brought down large swathes of the US internet last year, this new malware targets poorly secured Internet of Things devices and renders them useless.

A new kind of attack is targeting unsecured Internet of Things devices by scrambling their code and rendering them useless.

Security firm Radware first spotted the newly found "BrickerBot" malware last month after it started hitting its own honeypots, logging hundreds of infection attempts over a few days. When the malware connects to a device with their default usernames and passwords -- often easily found on the internet -- the malware corrupts the device's storage, leading to a state of permanent denial-of-service (PDoS) attack, also known as "bricking."

In other words, this attack "damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware," said Radware.

It's a novel take on an ongoing security problem with Internet of Things devices: Botnets controlled by hackers, like the Mirai malware, typically infect unsecured devices that are enlisted as part of wider bandwidth-stealing attacks to bring down websites and services by overwhelming them with internet traffic.

Like the Mirai botnet, most famous for bringing down wide swathes of the US internet last year in a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, the BrickerBot also uses "the same exploit vector" by brute-forcing telnet accounts with lists of available usernames and passwords.

Radware doesn't have a list of internet-connected devices, like webcams, toys, and even smart bulbs, at risk of being attacked, but it pointed to several kinds of Linux-based devices that run the BusyBox toolkit that have their telnet port open and are exposed publicly on the internet.

The researchers said that the attackers also have an affinity for targeting devices on Ubiquiti networks, which have been targeted by attackers before.

Once inside, the malware runs a sequence of commands, which "try to remove the default gateway, wipe the device through rm -rf /* and disable TCP timestamps as well as limiting the max number of kernel threads to one," which would scramble the device's memory.

The researchers also said that the malware adds extra commands "to flush all iptables firewall and NAT rules and add a rule to drop all outgoing packets," effectively wiping any trace of its infection.

"Unfortunately, even after performing the factory reset, the camera was not recovered and hence it was effectively bricked," said Radware.

(Image: Radware)

And, because the device-bricking bot conceals its location through the Tor anonymity network, there's no way to know where the attack came from, the researchers said.

The emergence of BrickerBot has prompted Homeland Security's Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) to issue an updated warning, noting that "no information is available at this time about the type and number of devices used in performing these attacks."

"Control systems often have Internet accessible devices installed without the owner's knowledge, putting those systems at increased risk of attack," said the advisory.

The researchers said that a device search could point to at least 21 million devices at risk, but the motivations for this new attack aren't known.

Homeland Security suggests changing a device's default credentials and disabling telnet.

Employees will hand over work passwords to hackers for money

Microsoft launches 'IoT-as-a-service' offering for enterprises

Microsoft has launched a fully managed software-as-a-service offering for enterprises looking to deploy IoT solutions.

Microsoft has launched IoT Central, a fully managed "IoT-as-a-service" offering to assist enterprises with the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications without the need for in-house expertise.

IoT Central aims to lower the barrier of entry to deploying IoT solutions in the enterprise, with a spokesperson from Microsoft telling ZDNet that the company "has a history of simplifying complicated technologies and bringing [them] to the masses", and that it is looking to do so again with IoT.

The Microsoft spokesperson added that the new offering will help IoT product manufacturers "that value time to market with technical stack prescribed and managed for them".

"It is designed to enable the rapid innovation, design, configuration, and integration of smart products with enterprise-grade systems and applications to reduce product manufacturers' go-to-market cycle and increase the speed at which they can innovate so they can stay ahead of their competition and deliver smart products that delight their customers," the spokesperson told ZDNet.

IoT Central is vertically and horizontally agnostic, though the spokesperson said its early adopters happen to operate in the manufacturing and engineering industries such as ThyssenKrupp Elevator, Sandvik Coromant, and Rolls-Royce.

IoT Central will be available alongside Azure Suite IoT, a platform-as-a-service offering that enables customisation and control when developing the back end for IoT applications, and Azure IoT Hub, which offers the messaging infrastructure for distributed devices to communicate to each other via Azure over widely used IoT protocols such as MQTT, HTTPS, and AMPQPS, as well as device authentication.

In addition to IoT Central, Microsoft is adding a handful of new technologies and programs to its IoT portfolio. For example, it is bringing Azure Stream Analytics to edge devices, allowing the devices to run real-time analytics locally without having to send the data to Azure first.

The company is also introducing Azure Time Series Insights, a new analytics, storage, and virtualisation service that is based on the technology Microsoft uses to log billions of events on Azure daily. The service, currently only available in preview, will allow enterprises to interactively visualise and analyse events for trends and anomalies in "near real time".

Microsoft said on its blog that it will be rolling out Microsoft IoT Central more publicly over the coming months.

A watch running Windows 10 is coming from Microsoft partner Trekstor

Microsoft may not have managed to get Windows 10 IoT Core into one of its fitness bands, but OEM partner Trekstor has done so, for a coming business-focused wearable.

Microsoft may have decided that Windows 10 IoT Core didn't really work for its Band fitness device, but at least one of its partners plans to use it inside a coming wearable.

Credit: Microsoft

Trekstor GmbH is building a Windows 10 IoT Core-based "B2B commercial-grade wearable" for business. The 1.54-inch device, which is both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled, is aimed specifically at industries like retail, hospitality, manufacturing, healthcare, and more. Because it's running Windows 10 IoT, the coming watch will be able to run Universal Windows Platform applications.

The watch -- more information about which will be available "in the coming months," according to Microsoft's April 24 blog post mentioning the device -- will include storage space, processing power, and battery life to perform line-of-business functions. The device will incorporate Gorilla Glass 3 and a soft casing. It will allow users to message "silently in real time or verbally via voice messages."

Microsoft late last year shelved plans to introduce a Band 3 fitness device. My sources said the company had been looking into making the Band 3 run Windows 10 IoT rather than firmware, but hadn't found a good solution. Microsoft officials have said Redmond still plans to remain involved in the wearables market, but hasn't shared plans beyond maintaining services like Microsoft Health, Azure, and Cognitive Services.

It's interesting that, like the case with HoloLens, Microsoft's current focus and successes seem to be in the business and not the consumer space. And as it's doing with its Connected vehicle platform, Microsoft is counting on its services as the main attraction in IoT scenarios these days.

See also:

• Windows 10's Cortana on Raspberry Pi: Creators Update turns the Pi into voice-controlled assistant (TechRepublic)

Smartwatches less than one-third of all wearables in US: Kantar:

Cisco's Jasper unit aims to extend from IoT management to smartphones, tablets

With the move, Cisco is looking to enter the enterprise mobility management space, but it will do it by selling directly to the carriers, which will then use the platform to deliver services via their own portals.

Cisco's Jasper unit, best known for managing Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is extending its approach to smartphones and tablets.

Jasper launched its Control Center for Mobile Enterprise, and the move could put some heat on traditional enterprise mobility management players. Why? Jasper is selling its platform to carriers, who are already using the company for IoT connectivity management. As a result, enterprises may manage their devices via a telecom portal instead of using standalone software packages.

Control Center for Mobile Enterprise is integrated with carrier networks and systems to automate cost control and offer self-service access. Pallavi Vanacharla, head of product marketing for Cisco's enterprise mobility, IoT, and cloud unit, said Jasper is looking at enterprise mobility management from "a connectivity point of view."

"The number of IoT devices and connected cars outpaces business mobile phones, but there's still a big pain point there," said Vanacharla.

The argument from Cisco and Jasper is that managing mobile devices has largely been a reactive and manual affair. As a result, support costs can be higher. These slides illustrate where Jasper's platform, which would be used by carriers, would sit.

Jasper's mobile device management platform does the following:

• Offers visibility into usage and charges in real-time. This visibility can enable an enterprise to act before employees blast through data usage limits.
• Automated control for costs and services. Cisco's Jasper unit can create and enforce roaming policies, upgrade employees automatically, and add travel plans.
• Self-serve management for things like adding features, changing SIM cards and upgrades.

Control Center for Mobile Enterprise is launching in Canada via a partnership with TELUS and then will hit new carriers from there.

Hacked IoT devices turned a university's network against itself

Although smart cities rely on IoT, security confusion still reigns

Cities all over the world have started to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to manage their urban infrastructure more efficiently, a concept known as 'smart cities.' But IT teams are still confused about cloud security, with many adopting conflicting strategies toward cloud security and IoT.

Shanghai, one of 50 smart cities planned by China

Steven Yu

There are many different smart cities applications that make our lives more easy and efficient: Waiting for a bus and watching the countdown to when the bus will arrive; using clever recycling bins that monitor how much you are recycling; and installing apps that let you know where there are free parking spaces in the centre of town.

Yet many cities are not yet smart at all.

Sanjay Sarma, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT says: "Cities today are rather dumb: A significant portion of traffic is just drivers 'cruising' while they look for parking, street lights are often on when they are not needed, water systems lose upwards of 50 percent of the total supply to leaks and the electric grid is incapable of truly responding to new technologies such as electric vehicles and solar panels. Smart parking meters, connected street lights, instrumented water supplies, and smart grids will reduce traffic, save energy, save water, and make the grid more friendly to renewables."

Some cities, including London and Shanghai, are becoming smarter.

The e-book "Making Sense of IoT" by Kevin Ashton in collaboration with Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, says Shanghai is a leader in smart city infrastructure. The book talks about its RFID mass transit card:

Shanghai, the world's most populous city, is a good example. It has twenty-four times more people than it did in 1900 but occupies only seven times more land.

Shanghai started using the Internet of Things to both manage and sustain its growth in 1999, when the municipal government introduced the Shanghai Public Transportation Card, an electronic ticket based on radio-frequency identification technology, or RFID, for its mass transit system.

The card can be used to pay for rides on buses, metro trains, ferries, and even in taxis; it can be reloaded with more money as necessary; and, because it is radio-based, it does not need to be swiped, inserted or inspected, which makes it easier for large numbers of people to pass quickly through turnstiles and other mass transit chokepoints.'

Smart cities like Shanghai are also using the Internet of Things to manage electricity. Generating enough electricity to keep up with an ever growing population is difficult, but that's not the only challenge--adding the power lines, substations, and other equipment needed to transmit electricity reliably from generator to consumer is also hard in a landscape that is already crowded with buildings.

In 2015, Shanghai launched China's first pilot of 'demand response'--an energy management method that notifies commercial electricity users when energy demand is peaking, and rewards them if they temporarily reduce their consumption.

London too uses smart city technology in its London Underground ticketing system -- the Oyster Card. Ashton goes on to say:

Managing increasing passenger volumes is essential for city transportation services, and smart tickets, which effectively sense whether a passenger is permitted to ride as they enter a station or vehicle, are the best way of doing it.

The number of passengers on the London Underground had been increasing rapidly since the 1980s, and Oyster Card enabled London's administrative body, the Greater London Authority, to reduce congestion at transit entrances and exits. Passenger journeys have increased by more than 40 percent since it was introduced.

The challenge is that with smart cities, security monitoring can often feel "complex and chaotic." Cloud security is perceived to be a thorn in the side of security professionals; many struggle to monitor the environment effectively.

A recent study by San Mateo, California-based security management company AlienVault showed that while 62 percent indicated they are worried about IoT devices in their environment, 45 percent believe that the benefits of IoT outweigh the risks.

Another report, IoT Disruption and Opportunity in the US Insurance Industry, by NTT Data shows that over 80 percent of carriers believe leveraging smart home and IoT tech will attract new customers and improve relationships. However, 55 percent believe the expenses required to purchase and install devices will remain a major hurdle to moving forward with IoT.

With this major disconnect between beliefs and actions global smart city adoption will take time. The driving force behind cloud and IoT is the availability and analysis of information, but they must be managed and monitored in the right way.

Many IoT devices utilize cloud functionality in their back end.

Ashton says that Shanghai is one of many hundreds of smart cities emerging worldwide. Juniper Research namedSingapore, London, Oslo, Barcelona, and San Francisco as five of the smartest cities.

The industrial IoT market in China is huge. By 2020 there will be 200 billion IoT connected devices globally, 95 percent of which will be manufactured in China.

Ashton adds that China aims to have more than 50 smart cities, in addition to Shanghai, while India is aiming to develop 109 smart cities under a program launched by its Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015.

The UN predicts that two-thirds of the world's population will be living in cities by 2050. Cities will need to get smarter. Cloud vendors will need to address the perception gap that exists when it comes to policy protection, security, price and IoT.

Until organisations can accurately improve their visibility in the cloud to ensure that this point of intersection does not become a blind spot that could be exploited by malware operators, smart cities will fail to succeed.

Major US cities are plagued by millions of exposed IoT devices

Samsung's smart home slog

The smartphone giant is gaining little in the smart home race from its broad home product portfolio.

(Image: Jason Ogulnik/dpa/Corbis)

Samsung's rollout out of the Galaxy S8 provided an opportunity for the electronics leviathan to remind the world its interests extend far beyond the sloped edges of its phone's Infinity Display. The company followed the precedent set by Google last fall by announcing a mesh Wi-Fi router at the premiere of its flagship phone. But it went beyond that by reviving its broader cross-device integration messaging. Getting all of its devices to play together more smoothly has long been one of Samsung's quests, one that it sought to accelerate by purchasing SmartThings in 2014.

The S8 and Samsung router form an always-present control point and always-on automation hub akin to what Apple has created with the iPhone and Apple TV. Apple, of course, has worked to bridge its (disparate platforms) via its Continuity architecture. Beyond that, though, it has acted as a pure-play platform provider for the slowly democratizing smart home with HomeKit, soliciting support from established brands and startups rounding out an ever-increasing variety of products including smart blinds, video doorbells, and ceiling fans.

Beyond the smartphone, Samsung has another key smart device in many homes: The TV. Apple never entered that now-struggling category despite earnest predictions to the contrary. For a platform company, TVs create a lot of upgrade drag. Both Samsung and Sony have tried to overcome that with a modular approach that allowed consumers to upgrade the smarts of their TV separate from its display, but that approach fared about as well as modular phones have, not offering much advantage over purchasing an inexpensive HDMI-based peripheral from Apple or Roku. Indeed, recently liberated Vizio may have cracked the upgrade nut by offloading virtually all the intelligence to an external device with its SmartCast-compatible TVs, but that won't do anything to accelerate the upgrade cycle.

Things may be even worse for other products in Samsung's extensive home product portfolio that largely features appliances such as refrigerators, ovens, washing machines, and a Roomba-like robot vacuum. None of these tend to draw big crowds for an annual upgrade cycle. In fact, most consumers use them until they break down. And the chances that a consumer would buy Samsung for all of these home mainstays is rather small -- although there may be opportunities to work with home builders for pre-populating new homes.

Samsung has a better shot than many to become the strongest influence in the smart home, particularly given the phone's important role in controlling it both within and beyond the domicile. Apple, for example, relies on cross-technology bridges to control devices that don't support HomeKit directly; many products support both HomeKit and other automation options. But the smart home is developed by consumers taking chances on isolated use cases often tied to security and lighting. Samsung also makes products here, but through a commercial group that has even more tenuous ties to its mobile division.

The bottom line is that Samsung will find it tough for the foreseeable future to derive marketing or strategic value to integration with most of its own smart home devices, expected as it may be be. Those who love the idea of a connected vacuum may find the prospect of a long-term marriage between it and a Samsung phone compelling. But such ties won't do much to sweep up most consumers.

Manage all your Samsung home appliances with one app

Nokia eyes APAC opportunities in IoT, 5G

Sans smartphones, Nokia looks to build out its Asia-Pacific footprint in key verticals such as healthcare, transportation, and financial services, with the aim to move towards "everything-as-a-service" model.

Eager to move past its days as a handset maker, Nokia wants to build its footprint in Asia-Pacific as a provider of next-generation networks and focus on key verticals such as healthcare and transportation.

Home to 60 percent of the world's population, including Asean where the population was largely familiar with mobility, cloud, and social media, the Asia-Pacific region was undergoing various stages of digital transformation. This offered opportunities in which Nokia could expand its technology footprint in areas such as 4G and 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, and digital health, said Sandeep Girotra, Nokia's senior vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan.

Asked if it could prove challenging to shake off public perception that Nokia was primarily a phone maker, rather than a provider of enterprise networking services, Girotra said it was "proud of the heritage" and acknowledged that its "iconic phones" left "a strong mark".

With HMD Global now the exclusive licensee of Nokia-branded phones, he told ZDNet that Nokia was focused on "driving digital transformation and building next-generation networks" for communications services providers in Asia-Pacific.

He said the 2015 acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent had boosted its portfolio of 5G, IoT, software, and cloud offerings. Last September, it also signed a deal with Singapore operator M1 to deploy a nationwide NB-IoT (narrowband IoT) network, which was slated to be commercially ready by first-half 2017. Its partnership with M1 had included the rollout of the national heterogeneous network (HetNet), which tapped Nokia's small cells and Wi-Fi equipment and was touted to enable devices to switch seamlessly between various types of wireless networks.

In Asia-Pacific including Japan, Nokia was focused on several key verticals including automotive, financial services, healthcare, energy, transportation, and the public sector. In terms of IoT services, for instance, the company had identified transportation and healthcare as key focus areas in which to develop use cases for smart city deployments. The vendor currently was working on models in Japan and Korea that its service provider partners could tap to offer IoT services.

The digital era, though, had brought about disruptions in the telecommunications sector and forced traditional service providers into "a state of transition" amid declines in their traditional revenue streams, Girotra said. He added that Nokia was keen to help facilitate their transformation with networks that supported various connectivity modes.

"Our goal is to connect not only millions of users, but interconnect billions of things to create a global nervous system," he said, noting that the company had built up capabilities in mobile, IP and optical, fixed access, and analytics. All of these, he said, were supported by research efforts led by Nokia Bell Labs and Nokia Technologies, the latter of which was the vendor's patents arm.

Pointing to the company's global strategy to "rebalance for growth", Girotra said Nokia's priorities for the region would be aligned with this vision. It also was focused on software and moving towards an "everything-as-a-service" model, he said.

He further highlighted plans to establish a "sustainable" licensing business through Nokia Technologies, expanding into new areas such as digital health and digital media.

Nokia President and CEO Rajeev Suri last November laid out a new global strategy built on its Alcatel-Lucent acquisition and centred on four key areas, including its ambition to build "a standalone software business with the margin profile of large software companies".

In this aspect, Nokia in February 2017 unveiled plans to acquire Comptel to boost its software portfolio and offerings to service providers. The deal was worth 347 million euros (US$368.39 million).

iRobot adds Wi-Fi connectivity to more home robots

An Alexa skill is also available as vendors step up their smart home networking efforts.

Home robot company iRobot said it will connect more of its vacuuming robots together and connect them to Amazon's Alexa.

The connections between the iRobot devices and Amazon's Alexa highlight how cloud computing is becoming a linchpin of the smart home. If iRobot's plan plays out, its robots will be able to coordinate and communicate on cleaning tasks.

iRobot adds Alexa integration, analytics to smart home

Specifically, iRobot is connecting its Roomba 800 and 600 series robots via Wi-Fi. The Alexa skill is immediately available.

For the smart home to really play out well for consumers, technology vendors are going to have to better network their devices. The problem is that many vendors are trying to dominate the smart home snack and that'll only create silos and headaches for the homeowner.

iRobot recently launched its Roomba 900 Series vacuuming robot with Wi-Fi connectivity and scheduling via an app on Android and iOS. The Roomba 900 also maps the home to gain efficiency and navigate around clutter.

In addition, iRobot is launching successors for its lower priced vacuum robots that'll be able to connect with higher end. The Roomba 690 is available online today at $375 with the 890 available in the late second quarter.

iRobot finds your dirtiest floors, offers Alexa voice commands

IoT for startups: Telenor unveils free pilot to spur big data, AI development

Starting next week, startups and researchers will be able to test out their ideas for new Internet of Things apps on a free pilot service in Norway.

Norway's Telenor is encouraging young companies, students, and researchers to play around with the Internet of Things.

Image: Telenor

Telenor has unveiled an experimental pilot service called Telenor Start IoT, for researchers and young companies wanting to explore the Internet of Things (IoT) in Norway.

The Norwegian telecom operator is setting up a physical low-power wide-area (LPWA) experimental network and a backend system and will be giving development kits to startups, students, and developers. This offering will be free for testing and experimentation for five years.

The Telenor Start IoT pilot network offering will initially be based on LoRaWAN technology (LoRa) but other network technologies may also be included, such as the 2G/3G/4G, NB-IoT and eMTC standards, the company said. Telenor will offer such networks commercially in 2018, hence the start of exploring the opportunities now.

In addition to the transmission network, Telenor will provide a developer portal and access to backend services on its Telenor Connexions Cloud Connect product. This platform is built on Amazon Web Services IoT (AWS IoT), and will be made available independently of the underlying transmission technology.

The pilot network is aimed at stimulating LPWA innovation in Norway and will initially be rolled out in the Norwegian cities Trondheim, Tromsø, and Oslo from May 1. All three cities have a good selection of education and research institutions.

"This is part of a broad initiative from Telenor to drive growth in the use of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, and big data in Norway," Telenor Group president and CEO Sigve Brekke said in a statement.

The offering is one of several examples of Telenor's strategy of stimulating and supporting startup companies. The company has accelerator programs in place in eight of its markets and says it supported 70 startups in 2016 alone.

Read more about the Internet of Things

• Is 'admin' password leaving your IoT device vulnerable to cyberattacks?
• Although smart cities rely on IoT, security confusion still reigns
• Microsoft launches 'IoT-as-a-service' offering for enterprises

Open-source EdgeX Foundry seeks to standardize Internet of Things

Fifty companies have joined up to unify Internet of Things edge-computing programming.

Security is the Internet of Things' (IoT) Achilles heel. One reason that's so is there is a lack of common IoT development standards. The Linux Foundation, along with 50 companies, is addressing this by building a common open-framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosystem of interoperable components under a new open-source consortium: The EdgeX Foundry.

EdgeX is seeking a common open-source framework for the IoT.

The new initiative has a common goal: The simplification and standardization of Industrial IoT edge computing, while still allowing room for vendors to add their own value-add features.

True, IoT is already booming as a business, but widespread fragmentation and the lack of a common IoT solution framework are hindering its broad adoption and stalling market growth. In addition, crooks are already breaking into IoT devices with cracking tools such as the Metasploit hacking kit.

This complexity and IoT's wide variety of components is creating paralysis. EdgeX will attempt to solve this by making it easy to quickly create IoT edge solutions that have the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs.

The EdgeX Foundry will try to unify the marketplace around a common open framework and building an ecosystem of companies offering interoperable plug-and-play components. These will be designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments. With flexibility, EdgeX will also help deliver interoperability between connected devices, applications, and services across a wide range of use cases. A certification program will ensure interoperability between community-developed programs.

That's easier said than done, but the initial work is already in place. Dell is seeding EdgeX Foundry with its early stage FUSE source code base under Apache 2.0. FUSE forms a layer that will sit between the many different messaging protocols used by today's sensor networks and the cloud and server layers.

The contribution comprises more than a dozen microservices and over 125,000 lines of code. It's designed to to facilitate interoperability between existing connectivity standards and commercial value-add such as edge analytics, security, system management, and services. Other EdgeX members are already adding code.

They're doing this because, Philip DesAutels, The Linux Foundation's Senior Director of IoT, explained, "Businesses currently have to invest a lot of time and energy into developing their own edge computing solutions, before they can even deploy IoT solutions to address business challenges. EdgeX will foster an ecosystem of interoperable components from a variety of vendors, so that resources can be spent on driving business value instead of combining and integrating IoT components."

This may sound to you a bit like AllJoyn. It's not. AllJoyn is a open-source protocol of device-to-device communications. EdgeX is a framework for building IoT edge software and firmware that connects via the internet to the cloud.

The EdgeX members are adopting an open-source edge software platform because it will help everyone in the IoT business world.

• End customers can deploy IoT edge solutions quickly and easily with the flexibility to dynamically adapt to changing business needs.
• Hardware Manufacturers can scale faster with an interoperable partner ecosystem and more robust security and system management.
• Independent Software Vendors can enjoy interoperability with third-party applications and hardware without reinventing connectivity.
• Sensor/Device Makers can write an application-level device driver with a selected protocol once using the SDK and get pull from all solution providers.
• System Integrators can get to market faster with plug-and-play ingredients combined with their own proprietary inventions.

EdgeX's membership includes numerous IoT movers and shakers. Founding members include: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Bayshore Networks, Canonical, Dell, Linaro, NetFoundry, and VMware. Industry affiliate members include: Cloud Foundry Foundation, EnOcean Alliance, Mainflux, Object Management Group, Project Haystack and ULE Alliance.

I hope it's successful. The current mis-mash of incompatible, one-off technologies is a recipe for incompatibility and insecurity. An interoperable, open-source based IoT world will be far safer and better for both vendors and consumers.

Related Stories:

• Internet of Things security: What happens when every device is smart and you don't even know it?
• IoT in 2017: Why usage is going to grow, despite the security risks
• History repeating: How the IoT is failing to learn the security lessons of the past

What Verizon's data breach tells us about IoT security

Verizon's wireless business shows strain in Q1, but unlimited plan stems defections

Verizon lost postpaid retail customers in the first quarter, but the damage could have been worse without the launch of Verizon Unlimited. Verizon aims to diversify.

Verizon had a net decline of 307,000 postpaid connections in the first quarter and the losses could have been worse, but the company's unlimited data plan mitigated the damage.

The wireless giant's first quarter highlighted the fierce competition with T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T. In the first quarter, Verizon reported non-GAAP earnings of 95 cents a share, a penny short of Wall Street estimates. Revenue for Verizon came in at $29.81 billion compared to estimates of $30.4 billion with net income of $3.6 billion, or 84 cents a share.

Wireless revenue fell 5 percent in the first quarter to $20.9 billion.

The one bright spot for Verizon's wireless business is that the launch of its Verizon Unlimited plan seemed to stem the bleeding in the first quarter. Retail postpaid churn for Verizon Wireless was 1.15 percent in the first quarter, up 19 basis points from a year ago due to tablet churn. See: Verizon joins the unlimited wireless plan fray as growth slows

On a conference call with analysts, Verizon CFO Matthew Ellis said unlimited plans made the US wireless market more competitive in 2016 and at first the carrier chose to compete with equipment promotions. By the start of 2017, "competitive intensity escalated" and Verizon launched its unlimited data plan. Ellis added that Verizon Unlimited showed promise.

"We are confident in our network capability to efficiently manage the expected usage growth from unlimited because we have invested in technology, architecture and densification. Our early network performance is consistent with our high quality of service expectations and within the current network plan. The customer response to the launch was favorable as evidenced by an immediate improvement in subscriber activity in the second half of the quarter. In the quarter in which we added 49,000 smartphones, our phone net adds had two distinct trajectories. Prior to unlimited launch, we had retail postpaid phone net losses of 398,000 customers. After the launch, we added 109,000 retail postpaid phone customers, which gives us momentum entering the second quarter. Overall, in the first quarter, we lost 307,000 postpaid customers consisting of phone losses of 289,000 and tablet losses of 255,000, offset by other connected devices. We introduced the unlimited offering primarily to protect our high-quality base, and we achieved the desired impact."

Other key items:

• 72 percent of postpaid phone customers were on a non-subsidized service plan.
• Fios revenue for the first quarter was $2.9 billion, up 4.7 percent from year ago. Verizon added 35,000 Fios Internet net connections and lost 13,000 video connections.
• Telematics revenue in the first quarter was $214 million.

Your original iPhone won't work on AT&T's network anymore

Is 'admin' password leaving your IoT device vulnerable to cyberattacks?

Internet-connected devices in your home or office will be vulnerable to botnets and other attacks, if you don't change the original login credentials.

Your IoT security camera is more likely to be compromised if it has a weak password.

Image: iStock

'Admin', 'root', '124356', 'password'. No wonder there has been an endemic of cyberattackers hijacking Internet of Things (IoT) devices when default passwords are this poor and users aren't bothering to change them -- or worse, don't have the option to.

The number of internet-connected devices has risen as the IoT has become a greater presence in homes and workplaces. However, in the rush to get involved in the trend, some device manufacturers have released products with poor security, which in turn have been breached for malicious purposes including espionage and DDoS attacks.

Arguably it was the rise of the Mirai botnet -- which was comprised of IoT devices such as routers and security cameras -- that finally brought this security threat to public attention. The botnet was involved in a series of DDoS attacks that knocked some of the biggest internet services offline, including Netflix, the PlayStation Network, and Twitter.

Embarrassingly bad security

Now cybersecurity researchers at Symantec have revealed the most common passwords used on IoT devices are often weak, and thus susceptible to hackers. Researchers set up an IoT honeypot -- which appears on searches as an open router -- to observe attacks against IoT devices. The most common passwords used by attackers to gain brute-force access show that many systems lack even rudimentary security.

The top ten passwords used to access the honeypot are detailed in Syamtec's Internet Security Threat Report for 2017. The most common is simply 'admin', accounting for 36.5 percent of all logins, while 'root' is used for a further 16 percent.

Next, '1234', '12345', and '123456' account for about a quarter of attacks on the honeypot, while 'password' also ranks amongst the most commonly used passwords to access devices.

The default password for the Ubiquiti brand of routers, 'ubnt' features in the top ten, likely because routers were targeted following the revelation that an old vulnerability hadn't been patched.

Other weak passwords used to breach IoT devices include 'test', 'admin123', and 'abc123'.

Why do so many devices have such poor passwords?

First, users might not have any idea how to change them, Symantec suggests. And second, vendors are hard-coding usernames and passwords into devices without giving users the ability to change them.

"There are so many devices with poor security of default credentials, it just makes it so easy to launch massive scanning efforts and automatically add vulnerable devices to your botnet and use that as DDoS service for hire," Symantec researcher Dick O'Brien told ZDNet.

"You can't have hard-coded credentials in devices like that; you need to be able to make it apparent that the end user has to change the password on it," he said. "Hopefully greater awareness is going to seep into the market in the coming year."

Attacks on the increase

Greater security of IoT devices is going to be needed as more and more device enter the market, providing even more targets for cybercriminals.

Cyberattacks on Symantec's honeypot almost doubled from January to December last year. An average of 4.6 unique IP addresses hit the honeypot every hour in January, rising to 8.8 in December, with an attack taking place every two minutes during peak times, such as when Mirai was expanding.

The threat of insecure IoT devices is a global problem too, with infected devices targeting the honeypot from across the globe. China accounted for over a quarter of IoT-based attacks, followed by the United States, Russia, and Europe.

China and the United States were the leading locations for IoT attacks.

Image: Symantec

These metrics measure the countries in which the IP address of the attacking device was based. However, that doesn't necessarily mean the attackers themselves were based in these countries.

With billions more devices set to be connected to the internet by 2020, more must be done to ensure the security of IoT. "Currently, the poor security on IoT devices is just making life easier for cyber criminals," Symantec warns.

READ MORE ON CYBERCRIME

• Hackers in the house: Why your IoT devices may have already joined a botnet
• How to prevent your security camera from being hacked [CNET]
• History repeating: How the IoT is failing to learn the security lessons of the past
• Internet of Things security: What happens when every device is smart and you don't even know it?
• Enterprise IoT adoption to hit critical mass by 2019, but security remains a top concern [TechRepublic]

How big data from pipeline pigs can root out gas maintenance risks

Not all gas pipelines can be serviced by maintenance pigs, but the sensor data from ones that can are providing mountains of vital information.

Only a minority of the world's pipelines can be cleaned with pigs like this one.

Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Around one-third of the world's gas pipelines can be inspected using 'pipeline pigs'. These cylindrical devices have figured in three James Bond movies, in one case being modified to secretly transport a person across borders.

Back in the real world, the problem is that the other two-thirds of the world's gas pipelines can't be inspected using pigs, so their maintenance has to be based on the theoretical, computed lifespan of the pipe's components.

Originally, pigs carried simple steel brushes for cleaning the inside of pipelines. But these days they can also be crammed with sensors to measure the state and condition of the pipeline. Among other things, they can measure the thickness of the pipe wall, to control when the pipeline needs maintenance due to corrosion.

Without those sensors, pipeline operators have to make very conservative calculations to keep the structures safe and operational. This approach results in unnecessarily frequent maintenance and hence unnecessary high costs for the operator.

A better way may be to use predictive maintenance programs using machine learning and big data gathered from the pipelines that can be measured with pipeline pigs. That's the view of specialists at Norwegian firm DNV GL Software, the software business unit that emerged from the Det Norske Veritas-Germanischer Lloyd merger in 2013.

A pipeline pig with instruments can generate vast amounts of data. "The pigs that measure pipeline wall thickness comes in two varieties: one creeps through the pipe and uses ultrasound to measure at regular intervals, the other is based on magnetism, and measures more continuously. This generates large amounts of data. We're talking terabytes here," Jo Øvstaas, head of design and engineering at DNV GL Software, tells ZDNet.

To model corrosion, the wall thickness of the pipeline itself is a crucial data point, but there are also several other relevant data sources.

"We're combining the data from the pigs with soil data, among other things, the pH values where the pipeline is lying on the ground, because this is relevant for corrosion. We've got data from weather stations nearby, and other information we know is tied to corrosion in some way," Øvstaas says.

The specialists at DNV GL Software saw the potential in their available pipeline data, and started a study on how to make practical use of them. Predictive maintenance based on machine learning soon became an attractive opportunity, according to Øvstaas.

"Just a few years ago, machine learning put very high demands on data analysis competence and dedicated hardware, as well as requiring deep knowledge of statistics and probability calculations. Today, the technologies have matured, and you use a specialized tool for this. We use tools like Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Azure ML Cheat Sheet for this," he says.

DNV GL did a five-day hackathon with these tools and data, and was surprised how good the available software has become. "We've come this far because we have a very good algorithm that hits true, measured data very well. It has a high hit rate," Øvstaas says.

Work remains to commercialize this technology. DNV GL has focused on the technology side. The true business value, such as the cost savings for pipeline operators, for instance, hasn't been calculated yet. However, the company has no doubts of the potential of this technology.

DNV GL director of digital transformation Tormod Svensen says the firm is already working with certain customers on the new product. "We'll commercialize this technology before the end of this year," he says.

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Melbourne startup Bugdojo launches bot-powered QA tool

A startup based out of Melbourne has announced the launch of a bot-powered QA tool, which provides development teams access to software testers on-demand.

A lot of startups and mid-size development teams skip through quality assurance (QA) and software testing in favour of shipping new features and releases as quickly as possible, according to Australian startup Bugdojo.

This is because QA and software testing is seen as time-consuming and expensive, the startup said.

Founded by Melbourne entrepreneur Ash Conway, Bugdojo wanted to address these inconveniences by creating a QA tool that provides development teams access to software testers on-demand by using bot commands as they're building code.

Conway told ZDNet that while it's possible for companies to hire offshore testers cost-effectively, the testing is "far from constant".

"Traditionally, QA resources are most needed towards the end of a release cycle, and are often a bottleneck in the process, requiring a huge backlog of testing to be cleared before release," Conway said.

"Bugdojo solves this problem by making professional QA and testing resources available to development teams on demand. When it comes time to test and QA a release, developers can use Bugdojo's army of testers to continually test throughout the development process, or to clear a backlog in minutes or hours, instead of days or weeks."

Developers interact with a bot inside issue tickets in GitHub or Bitbucket using commands such as "@bugdojo test" or "@bugdojo reject" to start and manage testing. Bugdojo replies to the GitHub or Bitbucket issue with the result of the test, comments made by the tester, and a screen capture video of the testing process.

Conway said the advantage of having a bot interface is that it integrates "seamlessly" into existing software development workflows.

"We believe that tools like Bugdojo should enable teams to get more done within their existing workflow, without adding additional layers of complexity. Every time a developer has to switch context to a new app or log in to a new tool, that's a distraction from their workflow," Conway added.

Conway said that while other QA-as-a-Service platforms use "crowdsourced" workers from online task marketplaces such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, software testers that apply to be part of Bugdojo are graded against its existing pool of testers through machine learning technology before they have access to clients' tests.

Conway, who also founded Bugwolf, a user acceptance testing platform that applies gamification techniques, said machine learning technology eliminates the expense of managing false positives or the need for a third-party to assess the applicant's skills.

Bugdojo charges $500 per 25 tests, compared with hiring a full-time QA engineer that can cost a company between $80,000 and $150,000 per year.

The testers, of which there are "several thousands", are paid based on the number of pass and failed tests accepted by clients, Bugdojo said.

Bugdojo currently supports testing of websites and web-based applications, but will be moving into mobile apps in the future.

Updated 9.15am AEST 21 April 2017: Quote attribution corrected.

IoT for startups: Telenor unveils free pilot to spur big data, AI development

Starting next week, startups and researchers will be able to test out their ideas for new Internet of Things apps on a free pilot service in Norway.

Telenor has unveiled an experimental pilot service called Telenor Start IoT, for researchers and young companies wanting to explore the Internet of Things (IoT) in Norway.

The Norwegian telecom operator is setting up a physical low-power wide-area (LPWA) experimental network and a backend system and will be giving development kits to startups, students, and developers. This offering will be free for testing and experimentation for five years.

The Telenor Start IoT pilot network offering will initially be based on LoRaWAN technology (LoRa) but other network technologies may also be included, such as the 2G/3G/4G, NB-IoT and eMTC standards, the company said. Telenor will offer such networks commercially in 2018, hence the start of exploring the opportunities now.

In addition to the transmission network, Telenor will provide a developer portal and access to backend services on its Telenor Connexions Cloud Connect product. This platform is built on Amazon Web Services IoT (AWS IoT), and will be made available independently of the underlying transmission technology.

The pilot network is aimed at stimulating LPWA innovation in Norway and will initially be rolled out in the Norwegian cities Trondheim, Tromsø, and Oslo from May 1. All three cities have a good selection of education and research institutions.

"This is part of a broad initiative from Telenor to drive growth in the use of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, and big data in Norway," Telenor Group president and CEO Sigve Brekke said in a statement.

The offering is one of several examples of Telenor's strategy of stimulating and supporting startup companies. The company has accelerator programs in place in eight of its markets and says it supported 70 startups in 2016 alone.

Spotify acquires blockchain startup Mediachain to improve music attribution

Spotify has acquired Mediachain in an effort to create a fairer, more transparent, and more rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners using blockchain technology.

VIDEO: Spotify buys blockchain startup for copyright defense

Brooklyn-based startup Mediachain Labs announced on Wednesday that it has been acquired by digital music service Spotify.

At a time when content is widely distributed across the web, often without any recognition of the creator, and when signatures don't survive re-coding, Mediachain's mission has been to inextricably link content to the identity of the creator, offering a channel for attribution, analytics, and payment.

The three-year-old startup, founded by Denis Nazarov and Jesse Walden, has created a number of technologies including a decentralised, open media library built on top of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), which allows content creators to make statements about their creative works that are cryptographically signed, timestamped in the Bitcoin blockchain, and stored in the IPFS.

Mediachain also launched an attribution engine in October last year that is built on top of its open media library and helps users search for properly attributed images, while allowing creators to secure the rights of their digital content.

Additionally, the startup prototyped its own cryptocurrency, CCCoin, to reward content creators for their contributions.

"From inception, the mission of Mediachain Labs has been to build a more connected world for creators," said the Mediachain Labs team in a blog post. "Inspired by the disruptive technology behind Bitcoin, we set out to explore how the next generation of blockchains and open, peer-to-peer protocols would empower creators to better reach their audiences and earn a living."

Mediachain's team will be joining Spotify in its offices in New York, while it turns over its technologies to the open source software community -- keeping all source code and documentation open source and openly licensed.

Moving forward, the companies will work together to create "a more fair, transparent, and rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners".

A challenge for Spotify and other music streaming services has been getting all the data required to properly license music and pay its creators. For example, The New York Times reported in March last year that Spotify had agreed to pay up to $25 million in royalties to music publishers, as well as a $5 million penalty, to settle a licensing dispute with the National Music Publishers Association.

Instead of creating a centralised database with music rights information, it is expected Spotify, with the help of its newly acquired Mediachain talent, will build a decentralised one that connects artists and other music rights holders with the tracks featured on Spotify.

As Mediachain explained in a blog post, its vision for the problem with attribution is a shared data layer, which it said "is key to solving attribution, empowering creators and rights owners, and enabling a more efficient and sustainable model for creativity online".

"The opportunity to join an organisation that shares this vision comes at a crucial time, when the relatively nascent blockchain community has few bridges to mainstream consumers, creators, or the platforms they use to interact," said Mediachain.

Mediachain has previously raised $1.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square.

The financial terms of the Mediachain-Spotify deal were undisclosed.

​Can Masayoshi Son and Uber-rival Ola jumpstart an electric revolution in India?

With only some 22,000 electric vehicles sold in India last year, the country has a long way to go to rival its neighbour China's efforts. Yet, private companies like Ola with wealthy visionary-benefactors like Masayoshi Son can help speed things up.

If any one country desperately needed cleaner air immediately it would be India, home to a staggering 10 out of the top 20 of the world's most polluted cities. Nearly half of the children in its capital city of Delhi have severe lung problems.

There are several contributors to the noxious air in India, especially in the north where the problem is the most severe. Farmers burn the stubble of their crops to prepare them for the next harvest. Free-wheeling industrial smokestacks often operate unchecked. Trash, which includes plastic, rubber, and metal, is frequently burnt in public. However, the most consistent polluter is the tens of millions of vehicles, old and new, that are an emblem of India's rising prosperity and its environmental decay.

So, when Masayoshi Son, uber Japanese VC and founder of SoftBank, announced several months ago while on a trip to India that he would personally inject India with "a million electric cars", it should have sent waves of joy and relief through any Indian who read about the news. Yet, there must have been a certain amount of circumspection. After all, this was exactly the kind of vague and expansive statement that only one of the world's wealthiest people could make without any immediate intent behind it.

And yet, a few weeks ago, Ola Cabs, chief rival to Uber in India and a major investment of Son's SoftBank, announced that it would roll out a thousand or so electric vehicles in a pilot program. As we speak, the first lot of electric vehicles, which Reuters reports includes two-wheelers, rickshaws, and cars, will make their way on to the streets of the southern state of Telangana and Nagpur city in central India. "The economics are still not there so we're taking a bit of a risk," said Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of Ola regarding his company's pilot. Clearly, Son's comment had more teeth behind it than expected.

Ola plans to do more to make its pilot successful -- setting up charging stations for the immediate future (which will include battery swapping for some vehicles and quick charges for others) as well as exploring and forging pacts with power and fuel companies.

This is all pretty exciting stuff, but the reality of jumpstarting a "revolution" in electric vehicles, that too in India, can appear quite grim and would take considerable doing. India witnessed the sale of a paltry 22,000 electric vehicles (only 10 percent of which being 4-wheelers) in 2016 compared to 20 million running on some kind of fossil fuel.

By contrast, 351,861 electric car sales were sold in China in 2016, making up roughly 46 percent of the entire universe of plug-ins sold worldwide and an 83 percent increase over the previous year. Chinese car makers were also responsible for 43 percent of all EV production in 2016. By contrast, the US sold just 160,000 and Europe 207,000. Click here to see China's top five models and a breakdown of their sales courtesy of Cleantechnica. (US sales were 160,000 units while Europe's was 207,000.)

Clearly, it doesn't make sense to compare India and China in this department. Looking ahead, champions of EV in India will know that there are a number of existing hurdles. First off, the economic proposition for electric versus gas isn't all that clear and batteries must be replaced every three or four years, which is not going to excite the cost-conscious Indian consumer. There isn't a decent charging infrastructure in the country and therefore range-anxiety, even if it isn't a rational fear for many owners based on their useage, is deep-seated. Tack on frequent power outages in many areas and a shortage of places where you can dispose of batteries in eco-friendly ways and you have a pretty inhospitable terrain for jumpstarting an electric revolution.

However, in order to gauge the reality of the Indian dream for electric glory, it nevertheless is instructive to look at what it took for China to achieve their impressive gains and what India may have to do to transform this goal to within the realm of achievable. One thing is for sure -- it didn't happen overnight.

China has long had a love affair with electric vehicles. The electric-powered bicycle has been the preferred mode of transport for millions of Chinese -- sales of these e-bikes just crossed 200 million units within the last 10 years at the rate of around 20 million e-bikes a year.

These e-bikes, which travel between 20 to 30mph and also allow you to pedal them, cost anywhere between $500 and $1,000. They first started to sell in the 1990s in China but really took off in the early 2000s. One of the biggest catalysts for increased sales occurred when the Chinese government officially stamped these e-bikes as "bicycles", allowing their use in the inner core of many cities while banning the use of petrol-powered scooters and motorcycles. If you think that many Chinese cities are heavily polluted today, imagine what they would be without these directives.

Then there is the not inconsiderable issue of the heart of any electric vehicle: batteries. For cars, the battery is at least 50 percent of the cost of the vehicle and the good news is that lithium ion ones -- predominantly in use globally -- has, in quasi-Moore's law fashion, declined by 73 percent over the last six years and will do so further.

The bad news is that India has no deposits of lithium or cobalt, which it would need for the country to indigenously manufacture them. This means no chance of domestically driving the price of batteries downwards. China on the other hand does, but those are far less than the top lithium producers in the world, who are Australia, Chile, and Argentina.

To make up for this, Chinese companies, many of them state-owned, have been snapping up stakes in lithium and cobalt mines in Argentina and Chile to drive costs lower. Other companies such as Ningde CATL have filed more than 2,000 battery-related patents that are apparently soon to match global leaders in quality. Today, as FT reports, China's battery companies are outpacing the old guard in the battery world, namely South Korea and Japan (whose Panasonic makes batteries for Tesla), and have begun dominating the industry.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the life-giving succor that the state machinery in China is famous for giving its companies. That is how everything from semiconductors to toy manufacturing was jumpstarted, and the e-vehicle revolution is no different. Billions have been pumped into local electric car makers such as Shenzhen-based BYD -- Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has a 10 percent stake -- which is the world's largest electric car and bus maker with a market capitalisation of $18.7 billion.

All of these factors translate to 1 million electric vehicles plying the roads today, and an estimated 5 million by 2020. Not an easy act to follow by any measure, even for a developed country, let alone India.

All of this makes India's desired entrance into the world of electric vehicles, enshrined by the official governmental goal of selling 6 million such vehicles by 2020, all the more delusional. Still, some optimism here is not unwarranted.

Just look at the scale and speed at which the country has adopted solar power -- in well under a decade, India has rapidly become one of the world's leading solar markets with plans to go from the 9GW in installed capacity currently to 100GW by 2022. The unit price of power from several projects has now officially become cheaper than coal power (from 14 rupees to 3 rupees in just six years) and India currently fields the largest solar farm in the world in Kamuthi, Tamil Nadu, with a capacity of 648 MW covering an area of 10 square kilometres.

If it can accomplish this, there's no reason why urgent gains in the electric vehicle department cannot be made. For its part, the government has launched the Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric vehicles (FAME) scheme, with around $18 million in subsidies for the purchase of more than 111,000 electric and hybrid vehicles. This may not seem like much when you look at China's efforts, but it is a pretty decent start. It is also looking at a scheme where commercial EVs may be exempt from permits.

Finally the biggest development: For the first time in its short history, India crossed the threshold from being a power-starved to power-surplus nation, a huge bonus for any nation looking to launch an EV revolution. Auto makers are also beginning to wake up -- Nissan is on the verge of bringing the Leaf to the country, while Suzuki Motor Corp, the parent of India's largest car maker Maruti Suzuki India, recently said that it would join hands with Japan's Denso Corp and Toshiba Corp to churn out lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles in India.

Local EV players such as Lithium Urban Tech are also getting energized and launching electric limousine services catering to the corporate market in a far more comprehensive and focused manner than Ola or anyone else.

Of course, you may ask whether EVs in India are really green and clean. After all, how green your car is depends on the juice that it is fed. In India the bulk of power generation, solar gains aside, is undertaken with some of the dirtiest varietals of coal that exist, meaning more particulate matter (PM), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and hydrocarbons (HC) spewed into the air.

According to this website, electric cars in coal-heavy India, China, Australia, and South Africa are pretty much equivalent to petrol vehicles and in the 25-30 miles per US gallon (MPGUS) range. They are followed by the UK, Germany, Japan, and Italy (45-50 MPGUS range) and finally France, Brazil, Switzerland, and Norway who are leagues above with a 100 MPGUS in equivalent emissions.

However, as the website explains, these stats do not include the carbon footprint of refining processing or transporting petrol, nor does it compute the damage caused to the earth by mining minerals like lithium and cobalt for EVs, which also use rock-crushing equipment that are huge energy guzzlers. In fact, the Union of Concerned Scientists has said that manufacturing an EV generates more carbon emissions than making a regular, fossil-fuel-siphoning car.

However, according to the same body of scientists, after all the tallying is over and done with, they have deduced that an EV spews half the amount of emissions compared to a conventional car over its lifetime, which is more than enough reason to cheer the efforts of Masayoshi Son and the Indian government to follow in the footsteps of its neighbour.

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