Nowhere To Hide: The Battle For Fallujah

High above Iraq's urban battlefields, tiny, remote-control spy planes-streaming video 24/7-provide a crucial edge to coalition forces. A report from the battle for Fallujah.

By Bing West
Photographs by Lucian Read

Published in the February 2005 issue.

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In a small tent on the outskirts of Fallujah, a dozen Marines in a unit known as the Watchdogs crowd around a pair of 26-in. monitors that show the same nighttime scene.

"There goes a mongoose kid," says Lt. Col. John "Ajax" Neumann, commanding officer and mission commander. "Stay with him."

Cpl. Phillip Saliba adjusts the zoom lens of an infrared camera on the underside of a remotely piloted aircraft circling 3000 ft. above the Iraqi city. Even from that height, the black-and-white video feed clearly shows a cyclist hunched over the handlebars, feet pumping furiously, tires kicking up a rooster tail of dust. To the Watchdogs, the rider looks like a mongoose scurrying across a field.

"He's heading for the safe house," Saliba says.

In the monochrome of the plane's camera, Fallujah is as bright as day, yet dingy and depressing--block after desolate block of courtyard walls, squat buildings and empty streets. The cyclist swerves left and disappears under a tin roof.

"We've already marked that location," Neumann says. In the four months that the Watchdogs have kept Fallujah under surveillance with Pioneer Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), they have pinpointed more than 100 safe houses used by insurgents and the mujahedeen--"muj" to the Marines. The bike riders are sentries.

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"He's probably going off watch," Neumann says.

High above, the UAV holds station, turning in lazy circles, the camera locked on the safe house, where an armed guard stands watch on a patio. A few minutes later, a pickup barrels down the street. The driver brakes in front of the safe house and backs under the tin roof.

"They think if they drive fast, we might not see them," a Marine says. "With all the dust they kick up, how could we miss them?"

"Call for a fire mission?" asks Lt. J.D. Parchman, the intelligence section watch officer. "We got a positive ID on weapons. Clear violation. Has to be muj."

"Negative," Neumann says. "It's almost H-hour, and we're supporting the opening raid. Push north to the hospital."

H-hour--19:00, Sunday, Nov. 7, 2004, the launch of Operation al-Fajr (the Dawn). After eight months of vacillation and negotiation by the Iraqi and U.S. governments, 10,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers, along with 2000 Iraqi soldiers, are about to kick off a campaign to regain control of Fallujah, the strong point of the Sunni insurgency just west of Baghdad and the sanctuary of the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. An estimated 70 percent of the 300,000 residents have fled; the 4000 insurgents who remain vow to fight to the death. American and Iraqi troops need to clear them out with minimum casualties to Multi-National Forces, Iraqi Security Forces and civilians. That means detecting where the enemy is hiding, and in what strength.

For such precise intelligence, the Americans turn to units like the Watchdogs of Marine Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron VMU-1 and their Pioneer UAVs. "Those muj are out there to kill our soldiers and Marines," Neumann says. "We're here to find them so our shooters kill them first."

The UAV deployment is part of the American military's increasing reliance on unmanned technology. In Iraq, this dominance of the robotic battlefield has helped limit both coalition and civilian casualties. Radio-controlled robots are used to detonate homemade bombs; tethered blimps are common at bases. About 10 types of UAVs patrol the skies, providing real-time surveillance and battle damage assessment to troops on the ground.

The 14-ft.-long Pioneer RQ-2B, which proved its worth in 1991 during Desert Storm, looks like a boxy model aircraft you might buy at Radio Shack, assemble in the garage, and fly in the nearest park for a day of fun with the kids. With radio-controlled landings and takeoffs, just like a model aircraft, the Pioneer can loiter over targets for more than 5 hours. Circling at less than 100 mph, it provides a steady platform for a daytime optical camera and a nighttime Forward-Looking Infrared camera.

Four months before Operation al-Fajr, the Watchdogs pitched their operations tent next to a runway about 12 miles west of Fallujah and started sending up four Pioneers a day on hundreds of sorties. Whenever insurgents came out of doors, the UAVs tracked them--day after day, night after night. The Watchdogs followed one pickup from a mosque to a highway beyond the city limits, where three men with their arms bound were pushed into a ditch and shot. The pickup was then driven back into town and parked in front of a safe house. The Watchdogs tagged it for later bombing.

Several times the Watchdogs monitoring the Pioneer's video feed saw pickups swerve into empty lots. The occupants would jump out, fire a few rockets and scurry off before a response attack could be launched. "We followed one pickup after it fired some rockets," says Staff Sgt. Francisco Tataje, the intelligence chief. "It swung up onto the main highway, and we had it intercepted. The driver had a perfect ID. No incriminating stuff. We gave the interrogation team a copy of our video. They called back later to say the guy confessed."

The conflict in Iraq has proved that UAVs can do more than collect data. And, with Operation al-Fajr ready to roll, the Watchdogs' billet has been expanded to include target acquisition and strike coordination. By making airborne robotic technology a common and useful battlefield tool at the lowest tactical level--regiments and battalions--the Watchdogs and similar units in Iraq have opened a new dimension in warfare.

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When Neumann's crew tracks a promising target, it sends a "story board"--a PowerPoint presentation with text, and digital photos, maps and video streams--to one of the regiments or brigades the Watchdogs support. The data also goes to the Tactical Fusion Center on the west side of town, which collects information from UAVs, companies on the front lines, electronic intercepts, agent reports and other intel. The Tactical Fusion Center then sends the information to regimental or battalion combat teams, which determine target priorities. The combat teams' Fires Sections assign the shooters--artillery, AC-130 Spectre gunships, strike aircraft or even Hellfire missile-equipped Predator UAVs.

As the six battalions taking part in Operation al-Fajr roll into town from the northern outskirts, the Pioneer flies to the Fallujah General Hospital, located on the west bank of the Euphrates at a great bend in the river. The Watchdogs study the twin monitors' high-contrast images, which show a line of white ghosts snaking around palm trees in the hospital courtyard and winding up onto the roof.

"Those guys are wearing packs," Neumann says. "They're friendlies. It's the Iraqi Commando Forces."

"Concur," says watch officer Parchman. "They're too disciplined to be muj."

Outside the hospital, armored cars kick up dust, their warm engines visible through the hoods as glowing white dots. The Marine 3rd Light Armored Reconnaissance (LAR) battalion is moving into position to cover the Iraqi raiders.

Lance Cpl. Robert Daniels reads a secure chat-room message that pops up on his screen. "LAR wants us to sweep across the river," he says. "Someone's firing."

"Take us east," Neumann tells the UAV pilot. "Shift from white-hot to black-hot."

The pilot takes the Pioneer across the Euphrates, while his partner tightens the camera's zoom and switches to display a negative image: Now heat-generating objects show up on the monitors as black images instead of white ones. The screen image jumps slightly and then comes into focus: two black spots moving behind an earthen berm.

"I confirm weapons," says Sgt. Jennifer Forman, an imagery analyst. "Watch their right arms when they run. They're shooting across the river."

Just as the black spots bob together, the screen suddenly blooms black, then settles back into focus, showing a thick gray cloud and a scattering of small black spots, like someone in the cloud has thrown out a handful of rocks.

"Tank gun got them," Neumann says. "Picked them up from their thermals. They're scratched. Scan up the street."

The Pioneer's camera tracks up a wide, empty boulevard bordered by ramshackle warehouses, tin-roof repair shops and dingy apartment buildings. A few hundred meters from the Highway 10 bridge over the Euphrates, four dark spots are splayed against one corner of a large building, with three similar spots at the other corner.

"One's lying down," Neumann says. "They're manning a crew-served weapon pointed at the bridge. Tell Regimental Combat Team-1 we have targets for Basher."

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STREET LETHAL: Marines patrol Fallujah during Operation al-Fajr. UAVs overhead provide troops with live intel.');">
STREET LETHAL: Marines patrol Fallujah during Operation al-Fajr. UAVs overhead provide troops with live intel.');">Click to enlarge
STREET LETHAL: Marines patrol Fallujah during Operation al-Fajr. UAVs overhead provide troops with live intel.

The combat team agrees with Neumann's assessment that it's a job for Basher, the four-engine Air Force AC-130 circling above the city. With its 105mm howitzer cannon, 40mm cannons and 20mm rotary cannons, the gunship is a flying artillery platform. Daniels types in a grid location for the building, accurate within a few meters. Regiment sends a one-line response: Basher on the way.

A minute goes by. The four dark spots crouch in the shadows. On the screen a black ball hits the edge of the building; black chunks go flying. Another black ball hits the target, and then another and another, enveloping the spots. Using an infrared spotlight to illuminate the insurgents, Basher's pilot is pounding away with 105mm artillery shells. Gray smoke rises from the scene.

"Watch for leakers," Neumann says. "There's one now, heading north. Stay with him."

A black spot breaks out of the smoke. Against the background of the macadam on the street, the man's silhouette stands out plainly. He runs with the speed of a sprinter.

"Ten to one he's headed for the mosque up the street," Neumann says.

Parchman watches the runner climb a wall. "He made it. Can't hit him there."

While Basher moves on to another target, the Pioneer circles to assess damage to the building. A large door in the rear slides open, and two men run around the side of the building. They quickly return, dragging a body. The Marines watch as the scene is repeated several times.

"Are they carrying a heavy weapon or a body part?" a Marine asks.

"Don't know," Parchman says. "We confirm four down. Mark this as a safe house. We'll come back later for a relook."

The next day, with Maj. Kelly "Maddog" Ramshur on watch as mission commander, the Pioneer circles al Shu-hada, a district the Marines have dubbed Queens. The lair of criminal gangs, terrorists and jihadists, Queens is a warren of drab concrete houses lining dirt roads, with scant vegetation. For most of the day, the Watchdogs see few lucrative targets. In midafternoon, though, the Pioneer's camera records a series of red flashes from a courtyard, which instantly catches the Marines' attention.

The half-completed building looks like a small soccer stadium, with a wall several stories high enclosing an oval courtyard. A single mortar tube in the courtyard points north toward Camp Fallujah, the sprawling command and logistics hub of the coalition operation. Every 10 minutes or so, three insurgents sprint from a house a few hundred meters north of the building and disappear under the eaves of the courtyard wall. A few minutes later, they dash into the courtyard. Each man drops a round down the tube and sprints back to the house. The mortar attack breaks the usual shoot-and-scoot pattern seen during the Fallujah engagement. This mortar crew is staying and fighting.

After six rounds explode around Camp Fallujah, Ramshur takes a phone call from the Army 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division--the Blackjack Brigade.

"Air's not available," Ramshur says to his crew. "Arty has the target."

The Marines murmur. Artillery is an area-fire weapon, not a precision instrument. But it is all that is immediately available.

Saliba places the crosshairs of the Pioneer's optical camera on the mortar tube and reads off the 10-digit grid on the screen. The coordinates are sent to the Tactical Fusion Center and the Blackjack Brigade.

After several minutes, Ramshur finally says, "Shot out."

The Marines crane forward to watch the explosion from a 155mm artillery shell fired from nearly 3 miles away. When a large gray puff pops up a football field away from the tube, the crew measures the miss distance and types in: Add one hundred, right fifty. That is, fire the shell 100 meters farther and 50 meters to the right.

Several minutes later, a large cloud of dirt erupts inside the courtyard. The crew's next command: Fire for effect.

A few minutes later, two bright orange flashes light up the courtyard, with a third about 100 meters to the south. When the smoke clears, the tube is still standing. The next volley delivers the same result--close but not effective. No secondary explosions. No visible damage to the tube.

During the ensuing lull, the three insurgents run from the safe house, pick up three mortar rounds, drop them down the tube and run back to the house.

"You wouldn't catch me playing dodge with 155s," one of the Watchdogs says.

Ramshur calls the Blackjack Brigade Intelligence Center, then tells his crew, "We're getting Predator."

Launched from a site near Baghdad, the Predator is 13 ft. longer than the Pioneer and packs a Hellfire missile with an 18-pound warhead. The most remarkable aspect of the Predator deployment is that a crew at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada--7500 miles away--is guiding the UAV. A few weeks earlier, the Watchdogs helped a Predator destroy a moving pickup with a mounted machine gun--one robot leading another robot to the target.

"Break, break," Ramshur says. "Predator's been diverted. Anvil has the mission. Stand by for talk on."

Anvil is the call sign for a flight of two Marine AV-8B Harrier jets flying at 19,000 ft. Meanwhile, the insurgents make another round trip sprint. Twelve rounds have been launched at Camp Fallujah--each one with the potential to add to coalition casualties. The brass wants the duel to end.

"What do you think, guys?" asks Ramshur. "The tube or the house?"

DRONE ZONE
About 10 types of unmanned planes provide live camera feeds to U.S. combat operations centers. Models shown here are examples of the three major types of aeronautical robots in America's growing fleet.
Predator WINGSPAN: 49 ft. OPERATING ALT. : 16,000 ft. HANG TIME: 40 hours WEAPONS: Two Hellfire-C laser-guided antitank missiles MISSION: High-risk, medium-altitude surveillance; some strike capability against ground targets. ESTIMATED COST: $3 million
Global Hawk WINGSPAN: 116 ft. 2 in. OPERATING ALT. : 65,000 ft. + HANG TIME: 36 hours WEAPONS: Unarmed MISSION: Long-range, high-altitude target surveillance. ESTIMATED COST: $10 million +
Raven WINGSPAN: 4 ft. 2 in. OPERATING ALT. : 100 to 500 ft. HANG TIME: 80 minutes WEAPONS: Unarmed MISSION: Low-altitude surveillance at platoon level. ESTIMATED COST: $40,000

"House!" chorus the Marines.

The house where the insurgents are hiding between rounds has a dome roof, a walled courtyard and an overhang at the front door, where a sentry is posted. Once the Harriers close in, Ramshur radios the details of the house's location to a Forward Air Controller, who lines up the jets.

"The house is the first one north of the vacant lot on the northeast corner," Ramshur says. "Has a dome roof. Wait--it's where that truck is. Got it?"

A truck pulls up to the house and five men walk inside, carrying something in their arms.

"Supper time," says Sgt. Roneil Sampson, an imagery analyst. "They're changing shifts. Domino's delivery."

Ramshur reads a secure text message: Air is cleared hot.

Impact is less than a minute away. The courtyard door opens. A man walks to the truck and slowly drives off.

"Boot muj sent out to get the Coke," says one Marine. "Luckiest bastard on the planet." Both video screens flash bright white, as if a fuse has blown. When the picture comes back into focus, the Marines see that the center of the roof is now a huge black hole.

"Now that's what I call a shack," Ramshur says. "Great job, Watchdogs. Great job."

Operation al-Fajr continued for another 11 days--sector by sector, block by block, house by house--until the Multi-National Forces had secured most of the city. The death toll: 38 U.S. troops, six Iraqi troops and an estimated 1200 insurgents. By mid-December exiled residents began to return to their homes.

A former Marine and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Bing West is the author of three books. In May, Bantam Books will publish his fourth volume, No True Glory: Fallujah And The Struggle In Iraq--A Frontline Account. Portions of this article originally appeared in West's online diary at www.slate.com.

The Future of Shopping

Tiny silicon identity chips being put in everyday objects and even implanted under the skin are changing the way we consume. Will they also invade our privacy?

By Rana Foroohar

Newsweek

June 7-14 issue - Antoine Hazelaar has a chip on his shoulder—or rather just beneath the skin of his left arm. It's a piece of silicon the size of a grain of rice, and it emits wireless signals that are picked up by scanners nearby. Ever since the 34-year-old Web-site producer had the chip implanted in his arm, he's enjoyed VIP status at Barcelona's Baja Beach Club. Instead of queuing up behind velvet ropes, Hazelaar allows the bouncer to scan his arm, and strolls right in. If he wants a drink, the bartender waves an electronic wand that deducts from the 100 Euro tab on Hazelaar's chip.

Such sci-fi clubbing is made possible by Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, technology—tiny digital chips that broadcast wireless signals. RFID tags are cheap and small enough to be disposable, and they're getting cheaper and smaller by the day. Retail stores are beginning to use them as glorified bar codes, putting them on cases of bananas or crates of Coke so they can keep track of their inventory. The technology has the potential to transform our relationship to the objects around us. In theory, stores could dispense with checkout counters—instead, you'd grab items off the rack or shelves and walk out the door, while an RFID reader takes note of the items and takes the money right out of your e-wallet. Your clothes could tell your washing machine what settings to use. "RFID could help give inanimate objects the power to sense, reason, communicate and even act," says Glover Ferguson, chief scientist for the consulting firm Accenture. The prospect is exciting, but it raises troubling questions about the invasion of privacy.

For now, businesses see it as a way to save money and improve service. Big groceries, department stores and other retailers around the world are asking suppliers to put RFID tags on shipments of goods. Staff will know exactly where items are and when they came in. Customers will never have to leave the store empty-handed because items will never run out—wireless signals will alert staffers to dwindling supplies of diapers or soup. What's more, RFID will help combat theft and counterfeiting, problems that cost businesses $500 billion a year.

For some retailers, RFID is a way to provide a more seamless shopping experience. British retail giant Marks &Spencer is currently tagging men's suits in several London stores as part of a test. When you buy a size 42, the stockroom—alerted by the tag——sends up another. Metro's Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany, is putting tags on individual items. Better not steal a razor—its RFID tag will warn security. Pick up a bottle of Pantene shampoo, and a promotional film plays on a nearby screen. The cream cheese can tell staffers when it's gone off. Wincor Nixdorf and Texas Instruments are developing a system that suggests accessories to clothing items. In Prada's New York store, if you hold a dress near a monitor, you'll see models wearing it on a runway.

As the Baja Beach Club trial shows, RFID can tag people as well as goods. Some hospitals are using RFID bracelets on newborn babies and elderly patients with dementia. Children in one Japanese cram school wave RFID cards to alert their parents that they've arrived. Amusement parks in the United States are issuing RFID badges that light up to let people know when it's their turn on the roller coaster.

Privacy implications remain a big obstacle. The fear is that companies or governments could use the tags as a means of surveillance. "Supermarket cards and retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley," says Katherine Albrecht, founder of the U.S.- based privacy group caspian. "If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long-term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science-fiction novel." Proponents counter that RFID tags transmit for only a few meters, and the data can be encrypted or deactivated once a product leaves the store. Nevertheless, caspian and other watchdog groups have won concessions from retailers. Wal-Mart and Benetton will only use the tags on pallets, not on individual items, and Metro has gotten rid of RFID-enabled loyalty cards. Utah now requires clear labeling of an RFID-tagged product; a bill in California would ban retailers from using RFID to collect information about consumers.

In any case, ubiquitous chipping is years away. The cost of RFID tags will have to drop from 20 cents each to five cents or less if they're to grace trillions of consumer items. Also, the signal doesn't pass through liquid or metal, which makes it tough to tag a can of soda or a nine-volt battery. And people may not like the idea of being surrounded by tiny transmitters sending out electromagnetic radiation. Undaunted, RFID chipmaker VeriChip is looking for big banks and credit-card firms interested in offering RFID-based e-wallets. If successful, they would truly give shouldering up to the bar for a drink a whole new meaning.

With Jonathan Adams in New York and Kay Itoi in Tokyo

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5093197/site/newsweek/

A Future With Nowhere to Hide?

Tracking turns the freedom of mobile telephony upside down

By Steven Levy

Newsweek

June 7-14 issue - We're all too familiar with the concept of technology as a double-edged sword, and wireless is no exception. In fact, the back edge of this rapier is sharp enough to draw blood. Yes, the idea of shedding wires and cables is exhilarating: we can go anywhere and still maintain intimate contact with our work, our loved ones and our real-time sports scores. But the same persistent connectedness may well lead us toward a future in which our cell phones tag and track us like FedEx packages,

Sometimes when we're not aware.

To see how this might work, check out Worktrack, a product from the Mountain View, California, "mobile services" company Aligo. The system is sold to employers who want to automate and verify digital time logs on their workers in the field. The first customers are in the heating and air-conditioning business. Workers have GPS-equipped cell phones that pinpoint their locations to computers in the back office. Their peregrinations can be checked against the "Geo Fence" their employers draw up, circumscribing the area where their work is situated. (This sounds uncomfortably like the pet-control technology, those "invisible fences" that give Rover a good stiff shock if he ventures beyond the backyard.)

"It they're not in the right area, they're really not working," says Aligo CEO Robert Smith. "A notification will come to the back office that they're not where they should be." The system also tracks how fast the workers drive, so the employer can verify to insurance companies that no one is speeding. All of this is perfectly legal, of course, as employers have the right to monitor their workers. Smith says that workers like the technology because it ensures that they get credit for the time they spend on the job.

Worktrack is only one of a number of services devoted to tracking humans. Parents use similar schemes to make sure their kids are safe, and many drivers are already allowing safety monitors to keep GPS tabs on their travels (OnStar, anyone?). Look for the practice to really explode as mobile-phone makers continue to incorporate GPS in their handsets. The U.S. government requires all cell phones to have GPS that can pinpoint the owner's location by the end of 2005, and other countries may follow suit.

The prospect of being tracked "turns the freedom of mobile telephony upside down," says Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. His concern is government surveillance and the storage of one's movements in databases. In fact, if information from the GPS signals is retained, it would be trivial to retain a log of an individual's movements over a period of years (just as phone records are kept). An even darker view is proposed by two academics who wrote a paper warning of the advent of "geoslavery." Its definition: "a practice in which one entity, the master, coercively or surreptitiously monitors and exerts control over the physical location of another individual to routinely control time, location, speed and direction for each and every movement of the slave."

My guess is that the widespread adoption of tracking will be done not against our will but initially with our consent. As with other double-edged tools, the benefits will be immediately apparent, while the privacy drawbacks will emerge gradually. The first attraction will be based on fear: in addition to employers' keeping workers in line, Mom and Dad will insist that their teenagers have GPS devices in order to be able to follow them throughout their day, a human equivalent of the LoJack system to find stolen cars. The second stage will come as location-based services, from navigation to "friend finding" (some systems tell you when online buddies are in shouting range), make our lives more efficient and pleasurable.

Sooner or later, though, it will dawn on us that information drawn from our movements has compromised our "locational privacy"—a term that may become familiar only when the quality it refers to is lost. "I don't see much that will bring about [protections] in the short term," says Mark Monmonier, author of "Spying With Maps." He thinks that we'll get serious about this only after we suffer some egregious privacy violations. But if nothing is done, pursuing our love affair with wireless will result in the loss of a hitherto unheralded freedom—the license to get lost. Here's a new battle cry for the wireless era: Don't Geo-Fence me in.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5093170/site/newsweek/

Wireless in the World

Wi-Fi technology is a luxury in some places, a weapon in others--and the only way to communicate for some. Here are 10 cities on the front lines of a revolution.

Newsweek International

June 7-14 issue - Keeping Watch
London, England
Population: 7.4 million
Why: Crimefighting enters the wireless era
Fact: Soon, cops will watch over their entire stomping grounds on laptops and PDAs

Police Sgt. John Baldock had spent many evenings staking out the door-way of the family-run Italian eatery Rosticceria Rusticana, where drug dealers plied their trade away from the surveillance cameras that dot London's trendy-cum-seedy Soho neighborhood. His big break came when Westminster's nerdy information-network manager, Andrew Snellgrove, stuck a tiny wireless camera in a lamppost across the street. A week later, Baldock had all the evidence he needed to arrest several dealers.

Police are about to turn Soho into the first wireless law-enforcement district. In the next six months, Snellgrove will install 50 wireless cameras and sensors around the neighborhood. They'll take real-time videos good enough to be admissible in court, and sensors will monitor unusual noises. Because the cameras won't be fixed, police will be able to move them constantly, creating the impression of total surveillance. Crooks, beware.

—Emily Flynn

Biggest Network
Seoul, South Korea
Population: 10.3 mil.
Why: Holds 20% of the world's Wi-Fi hotspots
Fact: Roughly half of all Internet usage in South Korea is conducted via wireless connections

Lee Hye Ryung's life revolves around the wireless Internet. During her 45-minute morning subway commute to school, the graduate student at Yonsei University in Seoul chats with her friends or plays online games through her PDA phone. She brings her laptop to every class and takes notes, searches the Internet and makes presentations with it—using Wi-Fi hotspots sprinkled around campus. The computer even comes with her on geology field trips to the remote countryside. "I have access to the Internet almost any time, anywhere," she says. "I feel insecure when I am not connected."

Lee isn't the only Seoul resident who's always online. The South Korean capital has the most extensive wireless-broadband network in the world, with more than 400,000 Wi-Fi subscribers. Wi-Fi is available in airports, hotels, government offices, libraries, banks and fast-food restaurants.

Korea Telecom started its mobile-broadband service two years ago. Its latest offering, Nespot Swing, combines conventional mobile-phone service with mobile-broadband Internet. A $500 PDA phone built specially for the service puts a 5-megabits-per-second Wi-Fi connection at your disposal. With its built-in camcorder, you can also take still or video pictures and upload them immediately to your blog. KT plans to raise the number of Wi-Fi hotspots from 13,000 to 23,000 in South Korea, with nearly half of them in the capital. "In major areas of Seoul, mobile Internet zones will be within three minutes' walk from any place," says KT vice president Hahn Won Sic.

If Wi-Fi technology is ever going to catch on to the extent that mobile phones have, though, service providers will need to find a way to appeal to adults—most users are students, who can't afford to pay much for the service. Or they can wait: the kids at Yonsei University are not getting any younger.

—B.J. Lee

Gratis in Gotham
New York, United States
Population: 8.2 mil.
Why: Heart of the rebel Wi-Fi movement
Fact: 500 public pay phones are being converted into hotspots for wireless users

The Big Apple now blasts Internet connectivity into the air along with taxi exhaust, the smell of honeyed peanuts from sidewalk vendors and the blare of honking horns. Some of it is official: traffic police in the borough of Queens ticket cars with handheld bar-code scanners from Symbol Technologies. Carried by cops, the scanners are linked via Wi-Fi to portable printers and also transmit the tickets back to central computers. The city says it's saving millions a year with just 1,000 of the $2,100 devices by reducing errors, and it will order 500 more this year. There are also 112 Starbucks coffee shops, 60 McDonald's restaurants and thousands of hotels all offering subscription access to Wi-Fi networks.

But New York is also one of the best places in the world to log on to free hotspots. Free networks cover the Columbia University campus, Bryant Park, Union Square and the Chelsea Piers Sports Complex on the West Side of Manhattan. Grass-roots groups are trying to cover their neighborhoods in free connectivity. One group, Evill Net, stitched together a free network that works from rooftops in the East Village. Since May 2003 another, the Downtown Alliance, has connected eight parks and open spaces in lower Manhattan, near the former site of the World Trade Center. It is now one of the most heavi-ly used Wi-Fi networks in the world. Who said nothing in New York was free?

—Brad Stone

Freedom in the Airwaves
Tallinn, Estonia
Population: 397,150
Why: Wireless bolsters a fledgling democracy
Fact: In 2000 Tallinn had only three Wi-Fi hotspots. Today there are more than 300.

The grim decades of Soviet rule in Estonia gave the Cafe Pegasus, an austere '60s building just inside Tallinn's towering medieval walls, a reputation as a clandestine meeting spot for writers and intellectuals. "This was a place where you spoke about things you wouldn't speak about anywhere else," says owner Mart Tomson.

How times change. These days Estonia is open and democratic, and the patrons of hyperchic Pegasus, like the rest of Tallinn, now embrace wireless technology almost as a democratic right. Thanks to a blend of private enterprise and government benevolence, Pegasus is among scores of Tallinn venues to boast free Wi-Fi access.

Estonians see a link between easy—or free—access to information and their new democracy. Back in 1991, when the country won its independence, a forward-thinking government looked to IT and the Internet as central pillars of its future economy. At relatively little cost, Estonia leapfrogged into a place among Europe's cyberelite.

Since then wireless has taken hold as nowhere else in Europe. Three of four people have a cell phone, and they can use it to pay for anything from a glass of beer to space in a parking lot (which, by the way, will call when your time is nearly up). Government ministers conduct weekly cabinet sessions online.

The key to the success of wireless has as much to do with a hands-off approach as with deliberate strategy. From the start, an independent Estonia pursued a ruthless free-market line: no state monopoly for telecoms, minimal regulation and healthy competition among commercial players. "The government sees no need to regulate," says Tex Vertmann, an IT adviser to Prime Minister Juhan Parts. In Estonia cyberspace belongs to all. That's democracy.

—William Underhill

Only Way to Communicate
Baghdad, Iraq
Population: 5.8 mil.
Why: The only way to stay connected
Fact: Only one third of Iraq's prewar phone lines are now in service, and they are unreliable

Twenty-two-year-old Hasanen Nawfal studies computer science at a private college in Baghdad, but he may be learning more on the streets. He and his buddies honed their computer skills looking for ways to circumvent the censorship of Saddam Hussein. When most Web services were banned, they accessed the Internet by hacking into the government network. Now they've picked up a new hobby: "war driving," or stealing other people's wireless bandwidth while driving past with a laptop. The practice has become popular among Baghdad's increasingly high-tech denizens. "Hijacking wireless networks has become a bad habit for us," says Nawfal. "All you need is to be about 100 meters away from the target access point," he says. "Then you sniff and decode the packets."

Baghdad's worsening security has crippled efforts to reconstruct fixed-line telephone networks—only about a third of the million or so lines have been restored—to say nothing of complicated fiber and cable systems. Cell phones and to a lesser extent Wi-Fi have become indispensable tools for thousands of Iraqis, journalists and U.S. officials. Although Baghdad doesn't have the Wi-Fi hotspots of San Francisco or Seoul, it is arguably the most wireless-dependent city on the planet.

Independent Iraqi entrepreneurs do a brisk business providing Wi-Fi to Iraqi and foreign customers. More than 35 companies sent in over 100 bids for rights to construct the country's future commercial-telecom industry, including what analysts believe will be a huge wireless component. The technology has already caught on with people who have had hard times with cable connections. "We used to have a DSL line that would go down for days at a time," says Adam Davidson, a correspondent for U.S. public radio. He switched to wireless. Soon his house's six tenants were surfing the Net on Wi-Fi, beamed to a receiver connected to a satellite dish on the provider's roof.

Although analysts say that the market for cell phones and Wi-Fi could reach $1.2 billion by 2008, commercial services haven't taken hold. That doesn't mean there's no innovation. The U.S. military is working up emergency networks for Baghdad's police and firefighters. After all, Baghdad is already a hotspot as it is.

—Scott Johnson

The Humblest Digital City
Pirai, Brazil
Population: 23,600
Why: For connecting the once remote
Fact: In one month this rural town in a low-tech country built itself a wireless network

You won't find Pirai in a Fodor's guide. Nor is this poky town of 23,600 inhabitants, whose renown peaked during the 19th-century Brazilian coffee boom, exactly the nerve center of Latin American high technology. But if it were up to Mayor Luiz Fernando de Souza, known to all as Pezo, or Bigfoot in Portuguese, all this will change. Late last year, on the eve of his eighth and final year in office, Souza launched his most ambitious plan ever. He vowed to outfit all municipal facilities, from the town hall to the public schools, with broadband, wireless Internet access.

It sounded quixotic at best. Only a fraction of Brazilians had Internet access of any kind. Even now, just 6 percent of the country's 11 million Web users enjoy broadband connections—and barely one in 20 of them has gone wireless. What's more, 90 percent of this vanguard lives in big cities, like Rio de Janeiro. But Bigfoot was never one to think small, and by early this year he'd gone off tilting at transmission towers.

Now humble Pirai, tucked discreetly behind a tall sierra 80 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro, may be the most advanced outpost of wirelessness in Brazil. Radio waves beamed from base stations perched on hills high above the town bring digital data into Pirai at a respectable 14 megabits per second. The signal is picked up by antennas, each the size of a cigarette pack, in health clinics, city hall and open-air kiosks where passers-by can log on for free. While most Brazilian public schoolers are lucky to have a library, students in Pirai elementary schools regularly consult Google and exchange e-mail.

Souza admits he is no computer whiz, but he proudly calls Pirai a digital city. "People thought the whole thing was a bit megalomaniacal," he says. "But I'm confident that technology can make a big difference for young people."

It's worth the gamble. In a continent where poverty has always prospered, fancy technology has long been the privilege of a wafer-thin class of sophisticates. Until the 1990s even a fixed telephone line was beyond the reach of most Latin American consumers. A decade of economic overhauling, including privatization of telephone services, changed things dramatically. Now mobile telephones are expected to outnumber land lines within a few years, and computer sales and Internet access are burgeoning.

Wireless technology has barely begun, but thanks to a healthy mix of pioneers like Souza, enterprising tech companies and a restless society hungry for the latest gadgets, that might soon change as well. Souza has made sure Pirai leads this trend. Several companies, including a software firm, have already migrated to Pirai, drawn by the reliable Web access. Students who were left behind in the classroom are using the Internet to catch up. "I'm even learning to use the Internet myself," Souza says. It's not a bad retirement plan.

—Mac Margolis

All Over the Place
Auckland, N.Z.
Population: 367,734
Why: City offers seamless connectivity
Fact: PCs and Web-enabled phones work anywhere within a 35km-wide wireless grid

Auckland is famous for sailing, aquariums, Maori culture and dinosaur skeletons. Wireless Internet access is perhaps not far behind. In most cities, connecting wirelessly to the Internet means scoping out a Wi-Fi hotspot and sitting with your laptop in one place, or surfing the Net over a pocket-size phone with a tiny screen. Six months ago Auckland became one of the few cities to see the deployment of a single wireless broadband network that blankets its entire area. Users can surf the Net from the beach, their office, their home or a moving bus.

Upstart telecom firm Woosh Wireless is responsible for developing the new network. The four-year-old firm installed three wireless base stations at each of 80 cellular sites around town, covering a 52-square-kilometer area. The technology lets subscribers surf the Net on their PCs but adds the freedom of mobile phones.

—Brad Stone

Higher Calling
Vatican City
Population: 1,000
Why: Spreading the faith via wireless
Fact: The pope sends a daily text-message prayer to the faithful on their cell phones

When you walk through the doors of St. Peter's Basilica these days, you might just catch the glow of a laptop or wireless PDA through the smoky haze of burning incense. The distant hum of Gregorian chants may even be interrupted by the bleep of a mobile phone or the ping of a text message. Vatican City joined the tech revolution in Christmas 1995, when Pope John Paul II launched the Vatican's Web site (vatican.va) with the text of his annual Urbi et Orbi address. Now it's taking advantage of wireless technology to spread the Word even farther. "When we came up with the idea that the Vatican go online, the holy father said, 'Yes, try it right away'," says Sister Judith Zoebelein, the technical director of the Vatican Internet Office. "But we had no idea how popular it would be."

The Vatican Web site, which is published in six languages, receives more than 2 million daily hits. Spurred by this success, the Roman Catholic Church is engaging in bolder experiments. Last year the Vatican News Service began delivering announcements to journalists on their BlackBerry wireless PDAs; in October it made the service available by subscription to anybody. Prior to that the church also began issuing a daily papal prayer in the form of a cell-phone text message; it now has more than a million subscribers. The Vatican hopes eventually to reach the millions of faithful in the developing world, who lack broadband Internet access or even reliable telephones. Its programmers are hard at work on a new version of the Web site that can fit the tiny screens of wireless PDAs. "Mass media can be a good means of evangelism," says Sister Judith.

In the next few months, Wi-Fi hotspots will be popping up all over St. Peter's Square and inside the church. By Easter, tourists with wireless laptops or PDAs may be able to download information about the architectural history of Bernini's columns or the significance of Michelangelo's Pieta in electronic form, to serve as e-book pocket guides. Sister Judith would love to see the church offer wireless e-learning of catechism or even marriage-preparation classes: "Technology, as it is made newly available, we believe becomes integrated into our environment under the guidance of the Holy Spirit." For the Vatican, the medium is indeed the message.

—Barbie Nadeau

Gambler's Link
Las Vegas, U.S.A.
Population: 478,434
Why: Wi-Fi fills boom- town's need to connect
Fact: This gambling mecca has no public Wi-Fi nodes, but nearly 70 commercial hotspots

Even inveterate gamblers need to check their e-mail once in a while. Hotels on the Strip like the Rio, Circus Circus and MGM Grand are joining the worldwide wave of hotels offering guests Wi-Fi access in their rooms. Dozens of Starbucks cafes, Subway stores and Panera Bread bakeries will let you log on while you munch. And chances are, if you're visiting Las Vegas for one of its many industry confabs, some enterprising company has turned the country's busiest convention center into a free Wi-Fi hotspot.

Vegas really shines, though, in setting an example for the many cities whose populations are exploding, and who are outrunning their utilities. Water shortages are chronic. And cable companies can't keep up with demand for Internet access. Local start-ups like Verde Communications are trying to plug the gap with wireless access. Verde's clients include the food court in the MGM Showcase mall, a bunch of local cafes and, most interesting, many of the city's RV parks. One, the Hitchin' Post RV Park and Motel, which first opened in 1970, uses Verde's technology to bring wireless Internet access to its residents for $36 a month. "It's a huge asset that drives customers to my property," says manager Brent Childress. It's not, however, much of a moneymaker. Verde divides the revenues with clients based on how much they initially contribute to building the network. Childress says Wi-Fi "brings in a little bit, but probably not enough to pay the entire bill.

-B.S.

Living the Wireless Lifestyle
Tokyo, Japan
Population: 12.4 mil.
Why: The cutting edge of cell-phone usage
Fact: Japan has 82 million cell phones, a fifth of which offer their users superfast Internet access

Chika Matsumoto rarely puts her cell phone down, even when she's hanging out with friends at a hamburger shop or soaking in the bathtub. The 17-year-old high-school student is constantly e-mailing her friends. "I want to be aware of what's going on with my friends and not to be left out," she says. Her mother wonders: is this an addiction?

If so, it's one most Tokyo residents share. Although this city may not have the most Wi-Fi hotspots, its population has, arguably, embraced the wireless lifestyle more than any other city. The Japanese were slow to catch on to the Internet, but they made up for it by going for cell phones in a big way. These days just about every person over the age of 12 owns a mobile phone82 million subscribers, of whom a fifth have a super-high-speed 3G phone. "In terms of the variety of ways mobile technologies help shape people's lives, there's no other place like Tokyo," says Hiroshi Miyanaga, the country's leading telecom expert and a professor at Tokyo University of Science.

The comfort level with cell phones should serve Tokyo residents well as wireless technology develops; many experts think the computer of the future will look more like a cell phone than like a PC. Already in Japan cultural pressures have pushed the cell-phone craze from an emphasis on voice to one on data. Riding a typically packed local train, Tokyo art coordinator Masako Hosoi sends out a one-liner to a friend that she'll be five minutes late for their lunch date. "I can't call her, because it would be annoying to the other passengers around me," she explains. The principle holds true in restaurants, coffee shops, beauty parlors, libraries and beyond.

Pundits are perhaps going too far when they warn that Japanese kids can no longer relate to one another except through their phones. But it is true, as social dynamics change, that traditional support structures are breaking down and technology is filling the gap. Hiroyo Ishibashi's fourth-grader son, Ryu, carries a wireless GPS-based tracking device called Cocosecom. When he's late coming home from school, she can pinpoint his whereabouts to within 10 meters. "I usually spot him walking in the neighborhood, and it's a relief," says his mother. "Neighbors used to look after children regardless of whether they were their own, but we no longer have that kind of thing." Japanese telecom companies have plans to equip mobile phones with smart cards, which will transform the devices into wireless credit cards. The cell phone is fast becoming a Swiss Army knife: all you need when you leave home.

—Kay Itoi

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5076471/site/newsweek/

The Singles Scene: Bleep! She's Your Type!

Add matchmaking to the list of things mobiles are good for

Newsweek

June 7-14 issue - Christoph Oswald has no problem approaching women. As he makes his way through the crowd at his favorite Frankfurt club, his cell phone scans a 10-meter radius for "his type": tall, slim, sporty, in her 30s—and, most important, looking for him, a handsome 36-year-old software consultant who loves ski holidays. Before he reaches the bar, his phone starts vibrating and an attractive blonde appears on its screen. "Hi, I'm Susan," she says. "Come find me!" Christoph picks her out of the crowd, and soon they're laughing over a drink.

Both Christoph and Susan have phones equipped with Symbian Dater, a program that promises to turn the cell phone into a matchmaker. By downloading Symbian, they installed a 20-character encrypted code that includes details of who they are and what they're looking for in a mate. Whenever they go out, their matchmaking phones sniff out other Symbian Daters over the unlicensed, and therefore free, Bluetooth radio frequency. If profiles match up, the phones beep wildly and send out short video messages.

Since the service started in September, more than 155,000 people, mostly in Western Europe and Southeast Asia, have paid 5 Euro each to install it on their phones. If the growth of wired online dating is any indication, the potential market is enormous. In 2003, revenue from online personals was $450 million, up 50 percent from the year before, say market researchers ComScore.

New, more powerful wireless programs are on the way. Scientists at MIT's Media Lab are developing another Bluetooth matchmaker, called Serendipity, which logs on to the Net to check members' online profiles. This allows users to go into greater detail about their heart's desire and find out more about likely mates.

In the United States Match.com, the biggest online dating service, with 12 million members in 246 countries, plans to exploit the E911 location-based service that the U.S. government has required for emergency tracking purposes. That would allow cell phones to notify their owners when potential soul mates come within 700 meters and where, exactly, the other person is. Match.com VP Jeff Rudluff thinks the obvious privacy concerns won't derail the service. The urge to find love, after all, is nothing if not powerful.

—Emily Flynn

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5093174/site/newsweek/

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Web 2.0 - the idea is to share

Websites and blogs are a fine way of sharing news, but the world of Web 2.0 is about stimulating multiple sensory organs and sharing your 'views' with others in quite a literal sense. Thanks to sites such as Flickr, PBase, Picasa, Metacafe and, of course, YouTube, photos and video clips have become as easy to upload and broadcast as the written word. In their most basic form, these services give us the means to share photos or home movies with family and friends, but on the larger scale they enable a kind of amateur, collaborative broadcast (look out for our feature on pod-casting next week!) These sites offer space to upload your media to their servers, and a range of tools with which to define who can see it and how they do so. These are more than basic Web galleries, however; you can accompany images or videos with text and categorise them via a system of intelligent, updateable metatags.

You can then collect them in albums, blogs or your own TV-style channels. When your collections reach a wider audience than your friends and family, that audience may need a way to have their say. They can comment, rate, or even add further metadata so yet others will find their way to your handiwork. It's this social aspect that makes the web 2.0 world so compelling; if enough people see and like what you do, there's no reason why you shouldn't get your 15 minutes of fame – if that's what you are after.

The technology behind these sites is generally standard (and standards-compliant) such as Flash, PHP, MySQL, Java or Perl. On YouTube or Metacafe, you don't even need to worry about file format conversions or plug-in viewers; the website does it all for you. You also get space on a server that can handle thousands of concurrent users, ease of use and having a high-profile platform from which to operate; YouTube receives an estimated 72 million visitors each month.

For the service providers, the kickbacks vary. The photo-sharing service Pbase relies on subscriptions, while Flickr, Metacafe and YouTube work on advertising models, offering the service for free but earning revenue from embedded adverts. In some cases, content producers get their own cut. Metacafe's rewards system means producers of successful videos can earn thousands of dollars.

Content sharing is a huge Web 2.0 growth area, and the long-established Internet players have been keen to get involved. Flickr is now part of the Yahoo empire while Microsoft is trialling its own YouTube-style service, MSN Soapbox. However, copyright issues are the thorns in the rosebush. Within weeks of YouTube's appearance, users had started to upload TV shows, music videos and movies, and Hollywood was quick to respond. Google bought YouTube last October and even though they may have anticipated lawsuits like the one that Viacom has brought, with more than 100 million clips viewed each day, the potential ad revenue is huge. Universal Music is known to be taking legal action against similar video-sharing sites, Grouper.com and Bolt.com.

'Smart dust' to explore planets

By Paul Rincon Science reporter, BBC News, Preston

Sand grain-sized particles could ride on Martian winds

Tiny "smart" devices that can be borne on the wind like dust particles could be carried in space probes to explore other planets, UK engineers say.

The devices would consist of a computer chip covered by a plastic sheath that can change shape when a voltage is applied, enabling it to be steered.

Details were presented at the National Astronomy Meeting in Preston.

Dr John Barker, from the University of Glasgow, said the particles could use wireless networking to form swarms.

The idea of using millimetre-sized devices to explore far-flung locations is nothing new, but Dr Barker and his colleagues are starting to look in detail at how it might be achieved.

The professor at Glasgow's Nanoelectronics Research Centre told delegates at the Royal Astronomical Society gathering that computer chips of the size and sophistication required to meet the challenge already existed.

Smart dust could be packed into the nose cones of planetary probes and then released into the atmospheres of planets, where they would be carried on the wind. For a planet like Mars, smart dust particles would each have to be the size of a grain of sand.

By applying a voltage to alter the shape of the polymer sheath surrounding the chip, dust particle could be steered towards a target, even in high winds.

The swarm

The polymer sheath surrounding the computer chip could be made to wrinkle or flatten out.

Wrinkling the plastic sheath would increase the drag on the particle, lifting it higher on the wind. Flattening out the sheath would cause the particle to plummet.

Wireless networking would allow these particles to form swarms, and Dr Barker's team has carried out mathematical simulations to see how this would work.

"We envisage that most of the particles can only talk to their nearest neighbours but a few can communicate at much longer distances.

"In our simulations, we have shown that a swarm of 50 dust particles can organise themselves into a star formation, even in turbulent wind."

The ability to fly in formation would allow the processing of data to be spread, or "distributed" between all the chips, and a collective signal to be beamed back to a "mothership".

Small sensors

Scientists have already demonstrated smart dust that crams sensors, power sources, digital communications and processing circuitry into a volume of a few cubic centimetres.

If they were to be used for planetary exploration, smart dust particles would have to carry sensors. But current chemical sensors would be too large to be carried on particles the size of sand grains.

The scientists hope the pace of miniaturisation will make smaller sensors available in coming decades.

"We are still at an early stage, working on simulations and components," said Dr Barker.

"We have a lot of obstacles to overcome before we are even ready to physically test our designs."

Many other applications have been proposed for smart dust. One idea is to use particles to gather information on battlefields. Another idea involves mixing the particles into concrete to internally monitor the health of buildings and bridges.

Your blog , your space

This is one of a six-part series on key WEB 2.0 technologies.

Blogging

About 10,000 new blogs are created every day. I would like to say that it should give you a picture of what's going on in cyberspace but that would be a gross understatement. Of all of the Web 2.0 mediums, blogging has made the biggest impact. They are almost as good as a personal website, far simpler to set up and as easy to use as email. Even though I can't honestly discount the possibility that there may be a few bloggers out there who have hidden agendas for world-domination, blogging has become the phenomenon that it is today simply because a healthy proportion of bloggers out there have something interesting to say.

As a method of getting your writing and ideas in front of an audience of potentially millions, there are few methods more effective than blogging. Even though hardcore bloggers will demand that a blog be updated at least once a week, your blog is your space to say what you want, when you want and the way you want. You need not be a great writer to have an active and popular blog, because blogs these days can have audio, video and pictures – making them versatile tools for self expression, irrespective of your medium of expression.

The key advantage of a blog is that you need not know a single HTML tag to be able to customise your blog and to start posting even though a little bit of technical know-how and common sense will take you an extra mile or two. And when it comes to posting, you can even email pictures and videos to your blog to post them instantly. It is no wonder that such pictures and mobile-phone captured videos published on the "blogosphere" (I promise that's the last time I am going to use that word!) became the first and most intimate accounts of the tsunami catastrophe and even from the scenes of terrorist attacks.

Most of us bloggers will only ever need the functionality and ease of use that a Blogger.com account offers, but for the more tech-savvy who are looking for more than just a personal Blog would find many uses for the professional features offered at Wordpress.com for free. There are also other free and paid blog services offered by different providers, but for all practical intents and purposes, Blogger and Wordpress can match up to any of them.

So how do you get yourself a blog? Well, first ask yourself whether you have anything interesting to say or show. If you do, read on to find out how you can become a blogger in another 20 minutes.

Try and make sure that you have a general theme for your blog – an idea about what you want it to be. It can literally be about "anything and everything" if you want it to be so.

Then go to http://www.wordpress.com/ (we will be using Wordpress.com in this example, but you may choose Blogger.com or any other blog service of your choice. Note that Blogger.com now requires that you have a Google account before you can sign up for a free account) and click on "Start a Blog in seconds" and even though that promise is not positively an honest one, you can still get your blog in 'minutes' but following the simple instructions on the site.

You can host your blog with most providers for free, or if you already have a registered domain, it is quite simple to direct your blog to the registered URL.

If you host your blog on your own specified server other than that of your blog provider, you may almost certainly have to download a piece of software from your provider and install it on your web-server before it can host your blog.

You can customize the look and feel of your blog by choosing a theme, the sidebar arrangement, by adding external links, changing the header image, adding RSS feeds and so on.

Perhaps you may want to circulate your blog only among your friends or you may want to advertise your blog and draw in as many visitors as possible.

To get the mildly offensive advice out of the way; the key to making your blog popular is by having something interesting to say. If the popularity of your blog is important to you, then you can also promote it on 'democratic news' or 'social book-marking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us or Furl (we will talk about these in the coming weeks) and also promote it on Blog tracking services such as Technorati. If the contents of your blog is targeted at a Sri Lankan audience, you can submit it to community blogs such as http://moju.lk/ or http://www.kottu.org/ Also make an effort to engage yourself constructively in blogger communities by commenting on blog posts that interest you and sharing thoughts and ideas with others who may be able to appreciate your input. Make sure you are polite and courteous towards other bloggers and respectful of the right of others to hold opinions that may not only be different but opposite and sometimes even offensive to you.

Techno Page welcomes bloggers to write in with their thoughts, ideas and any information they want to share. Please forward your epistles to technopage@gmail.com

Cell phones, text-messaging revolutionalize conservation approaches

Cell phones have been adopted at a pace unmatched by any technology in the history of mankind. While conventional use of these devices continues to be the expand, mobile phones are also increasingly being viewed as tools for conservation and development.

Ken Banks, currently a Visiting Fellow on the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, understands this well. Banks established kiwanja.net as hub for the latest information on how technology, in particular mobile phones, can be applied to tackle issues of economic empowerment, conservation, education, human rights and poverty alleviation.

Preparing a conservation plan in Kenya. Courtesy of the Kiwanja mobile image gallery

Banks says that the development of low-cost handsets and the spread of second-hand phones into emerging markets like South Asia and Africa – one of the fastest growing markets with well in excess of 125 million subscribers – is generating a revolution in how organizations approach conservation projects. Mobile phones offer these groups new ways to engage stakeholders, while reducing overhead costs and inefficiencies. The technology can even allow them to track animals, protect parks, and conduct surveys in some of the world's most remote forests.

In April 2007 Banks spoke with mongabay.com about his work.

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Mongabay: How did you become involved with applying mobile technology to conservation and development?

Banks: Originally I was in the information technology (IT) industry but my mother and grandparents have always been very keen on nature and the environment. I must have inherited the family gene for nature because ever since I was a child I've been fascinated by the outdoors.

Ken Banks in Mana Pools, Zimbabwe

The experience that really cemented my interest in conservation and development was a trip to Zambia in 1993. I was awarded a place on a Jersey Overseas Aid project where I helped build a school. While I was there, I started to think about where all the aid money was going and why it didn't seem to be particularly effective. I began to look at the practical side of conservation and development efforts, when previously my interest had been primarily in wildlife - the kind of stuff you saw on David Attenborough's shows and other TV programs. In 1995 I went back to Africa to help build a hospital in Uganda. By then I was really quite captivated and I knew it was something I wanted to be involved in.

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Mongabay: So it sounds like your first foray into this kind of work was from a humanitarian angle?

Banks with an infant during his overseas aid trip to Uganda, in 1995

Banks: Well yes, these were the opportunities that were available to me at the time from a foreign standpoint. In Jersey the IT company I was working for had Jersey Zoo among their clients, now known as Durrell Wildlife. During my 3 to 4 years involvement there, I got very interested in conservation from a developing country standpoint - not just what was going on in Jersey but the wider global issues. It gave me the opportunity to tap into some of the real leaders in the field and see captive breeding and habitat conservation programs firsthand. I also benefited from the excellent learning center at Durrell, where they train conservation workers from developing countries in the latest conservation techniques. It's through these experiences that my IT background really began to blend into conservation and development work. It was a great time and I was very fortunate to have experienced it.

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Mongabay: When did you go off on your own?

Banks: I left my job in Jersey in 1996 to go the University of Sussex to pursue a degree in Social anthropology with development studies. I sold everything I owned at that point and left for the UK with two suitcases. That was the beginning of the journey. I formed kiwanja.net in 2003 after I returned from a year working with primates in Nigeria.

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Mongabay: What is it that you do through kiwanja.net?

Banks: kiwanja.net helps local, national and international nonprofit organizations make better use of information and communications technology in their work. While the site is more of an information resource, I generally function as an intermediary between the technology - especially mobile technology - and conservation or development groups. You'll see organizations like the Gates Foundation looking at technology use in developing countries. I help put them in contact with people in the field as well as some of the technology and applications under development. Part of what I do is match-making in a sense. I have also developed mobile applications for use in conservation and development, such as FrontlineSMS.

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Mongabay: What advantages do mobile technologies offer conservation and development groups?

Cheap mobile phones are now sold in markets all over the world. Courtesy of the Kiwanja mobile image gallery

Banks: While large numbers of organizations have been trying to promote the spread of the Internet in rural parts of developing countries, penetration rates are still pretty low in many areas. Mobile phones, however, have been spreading rapidly and today are nearly ubiquitous in some countries, leapfrogging the number of land lines in a matter of 3 or 4 years. We now have a situation where even if people don't themselves own a cell phone, they can easily find access to one through another member of the community, or through various Village Phone schemes.

Because of their widespread adoption, we are now seeing mobile phones being used for many conservation and development applications. Many center around improving communication between stakeholders and NGOs - for example, sending out alerts on impending natural disasters like tsunami and hurricanes, or wildlife alerts, or posting job openings or health messages. The advantages of text messaging is that it is very quick, generally cheap, and direct. Most people read the text messages they receive, unlike spam. It also works on every phone regardless of form factor - a critical issue in areas where a lot of the phones can be as much as 5 to 7 years old. These phones are often useless for surfing the Internet but they work fine for SMS.

As for conservation applications, I focus on the improved communication capabilities. Unlike in the past where you had government agencies evicting people from their land in order to set up protected areas, today it is realized that conservation efforts must involve local people, otherwise you only disenfranchise them and drive them to oppose conservation efforts. Now with the rise of community-based conservation and integrated conservation and development projects, communication can reduce these issues - mobile phones allow us to open channels that were never before possible. For example, in Kruger National Park (South Africa), the park management used to have to send a Land Rover out to the 18 different communities living around the park to inform them of meetings, give them latest news, and so on. If a meeting was canceled or changed, the ranger had to go back out. It might take days to spread the world. Today it is possible to simply broadcast a text message. We can even set up a database that captures text responses from various communities on whether they will be able to attend or how they would vote on a particular initiative. This functionality frees up a lot of resources for more meaningful and productive activities from both the parks' and community's perspective.

Organizations are also finding that mobile phones can serve as an activism tool. SMS messaging can be used to organize petitions and plan demonstrations. In fact, the tool is so powerful that it is even a concern for repressive governments. In recent elections in both Cambodia and Iran the government shut down messaging servers to prevent demonstrators from organizing and campaigning. They didn't want to take any chances after what happened in Ukraine, where the Orange Revolution may not have been possible without text messaging services, and the Philippines, where President Estrada was toppled by gatherings organized by text messaging campaigns.

In Zimbabwe journalists are now using text messaging to distribute news since President Robert Mugabe clamped down on e- mail and shortwave broadcast media.

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Mongabay: It sounds like most of these applications are top-down approaches. Are the examples of user-generated content?

Banks discussing technology use at Johannesburg Zoo in 2005

Banks: Definitely, but it's in the early stages in many cases. The release of my FrontlineSMS system is an attempt to bring the technology into hands of the users, and to promote more of a bottom-up approach. In terms of user-generated content, current 'hot' applications include SMS blogging, which really blossomed during last year's Israel-Lebanon conflict. We saw news being generated by SMS messaging as Beirut was getting bombed. The real-time nature of the posts provided insight on what was really happening on the ground. This type of reporting - citizen journalism - is very much technology driven and the BBC, for example, regularly request people near the thick of the action, particularly with camera-phone images or mobile video, to send them in.

From a conservation perspective, mobile phones are increasingly used for surveys and monitoring. In Kenya, for example, Save The Elephants are using GPS/GSM collars to track elephants. Compared to the alternatives it's cheap, real-time, and doesn't depend on ARGOS satellites which drives up complexity and costs. These devices not only help the organisation understand how elephants use their environments, but it also provides farmers and villagers with an early-warning system so they can protect crops from being eaten and trampled. Human elephant conflict is still a big issue in many countries. In South Africa, a wireless animal tracking system provided by African Wildlife Tracking helps researchers track wildlife in game reserves. Once fitted with a tracking device, text messages are sent to the device to pinpoint the longitude and latitude of the animal. Again this is much simpler and cost-effective than involving multi-million dollar satellites, or more time-consuming VHF tracking systems.

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Mongabay: What are the biggest challenges to your work?

Banks: The big problem I see is that people are generally reluctant to share. It's hard to find examples of mobile phone applications for conservation so you see a lot of wheel-spinning and duplication. The mobile phone is being touted as the device that will bridge the digital divide, so there should be more collaboration between organizations trying to address these important issues. You know, how many 'ICT for development' portals do we need? Rather than going it alone, I think peoples' first instincts should be to look at collaboration wherever possible.

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Mongabay: So this is where you come in with kiwanja.net?

Banks with renowned British naturalist, Sir David Attenborough

Banks: Yes, kiwanja is developing into a bit of an information hub for the latest news on applying mobile technology to conservation and development, and crucially for me this has been needs-driven by the community, not something that I think is needed. The mobile applications database contains details of more than 200 projects from around the world that use mobile technology in fields including human health, economic empowerment, conservation, education, human rights and poverty alleviation, and it is growing all the time. I get emails from researchers telling me how valuable it has been in their work. There is also an image gallery showing mobile technology in action in developing countries. Again, I was concerned about the lack of images which many non-profits needed for campaigning literature, project proposals, websites and so on. Before that, most of the good images I was finding came at a price, whereas mine are free to use. Openness, sharing and transparency are key pillars of my work.

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Mongabay: How are mobile phones used for health?

Banks: In Nigeria and India we are seeing government agencies and NGOs use SMS as a health education messaging application. There are also groups using mobiles and mobile networks for disease surveillance. What just a few years ago took three months to report is now almost instantaneous. Spreading the word of outbreaks in remote areas saves lives.

One interesting health application is the SIMpill which helps with the problem of people not finishing their course of antibiotics. This of course only produces drug-resistant strains that are more difficult to treat. SIMpill is an SMS-enabled pill bottle which, when opened, delivers a text message to a central server. Each SMS is time stamped and kept as a record of the patient taking their medication. The doctor is warned via text message if the patient is not taking their medication properly.

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Mongabay: In what other ways can SMS and mobile telephony be used in conservation?

Banks: We are seeing SMS used in both fundraising and awareness-raising campaigns and for more conservation-specific applications.

Girl in Mozambique. Photo by Ken Banks.

One project I was heavily involved in was wildlive! , a service which promoted global conservation by providing news and information on various issues through peoples' handsets. It also had a direct fundraising angle through the sale of conservation-themed wallpapers, ringtones and games. Funds raised went to Fauna & Flora International, a UK-based organization, and directly to the conservation projects being promoted.

In Sumatra, tiger researcher Debbie Martyr kept a live field diary that was broadcast via a mobile internet site. Her experiences included live sting operations which used camera-phones to capture poachers and illegal fur traders in action.

In the Okapi Wildlife Reserve of the Democratic Republic of Congo, satellite phones enable patrols to text message their GPS location along with a short message from anywhere in the Reserve. The base operator can then call the patrol teams in an emergency, resulting in a much quicker response to threats to the Reserve.

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Mongabay: What do you think about the Amazon Conservation Team's (ACT) project in the Amazon which uses GPS and Google Earth to map tribal lands and protect the forest against illegal encroachment? It's not mobile technology but it seems to have some parallels.

Amazon natives use Google Earth, GPS to protect rainforest home. Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians (Amerindians) are using Google Earth, Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping, and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. Helping them is the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests.

Banks: ACT's project is very interesting. What makes it particularly exciting from my perspective is that it is very anthropological. Conservation is not just about working with wildlife, it's also about working with people so anthropology, with its human-centred focus, is of particular relevance. For many people it's still not an obvious fit, particularly when technology is involved. I've been speaking at companies, workshops and conferences a lot about this lately.

What I really like about the ACT project is that it's needs-driven, based on needs of the local people, not donors. The users - in this case the Amazonian tribes - see the relevance of the technology so they embrace it, and the technology fits in seamlessly with what they are trying to achieve. More remarkable is that the program also promotes cultural preservation in a climate where culture loss is a serious concern.

Did you see the announcement on the Darfur features added to Google Earth this week? What we are seeing is the creation of "communities of consciousness" that develop an interest and awareness in the human stories behind events. It's a great way to build strong support for an issue. I think ACT could do a similar thing if the tribes wanted to post up some of their sacred stories so that the general public could get a better understanding of their history and culture. It could serve as a rallying point for their concerns over forest development. Maybe they're already doing this.

While there are always concerns over whether technology will drive people away from their traditional lifestyles, in cases such as this technologies can provide new opportunities whilst allowing people to continue to live in traditional ways. As Mark Plotkin at ACT has said, it's the best of both worlds.

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Mongabay: What are your thoughts on the "One Laptop Per Child" (OLPC) initiative that provides low-cost (i.e. $100), durable laptops to children in developing countries?

The $100 laptop. Photo courtesy of One Laptop per Child.

Banks: I think it is an interesting experiment - which is basically what it is - but the jury is still out on OLPC. Personally I have problems more with the process than the product. One of the best arguments I've heard on why it has the potential to be ethically problematic is that you are asking some of the world's poorest countries to foot the bill for what is essentially a prototype. These governments will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars each, up front, to fund an unproven technology. It is fraught with risk and on a production scale that has never been attempted before in the ICT for development field. While it may turn out that these concerns are totally unfounded, it seems like an expensive way of "having a go" - especially for governments least able to afford it. Comparably, if you look at the mobile phone it is ubiquitous, cheaper, and less complex. We're seeing more companies and organizations developing emerging market handsets based on 2, 3 or 4 years of real-world experience. You can't say that about OLPC. OLPC can't really compare itself to anything, although OLPC 2.0 (if I can call it that!) would be able to.

But, to be fair, OLPC might well be a revolution - I'm not trying to knock the project. You have to credit the developers for going out there and trying to do something bold for the benefit of humankind.

Interestingly, India actually turned down the project. Instead, it is evaluating home grown technologies (called NetTV and NETPC), which begs the question of whether a single product can really work on a global scale in emerging markets. The world is not homogenous and technology definitely needs to be tested out in the field. I've often seen a disconnect between technology developers and the real-world use of their products. At a recent conference I attended in India for W3C, there was very little emphasis on the user - it was all about the technology. There's a big difference between how something is used in an airport lounge and how well it might work in a remote village with limited power supply, 100-degree heat, dust storms and a semi-literate user. For many developers, how their technology works in an emerging-market context is generally an after-thought.

In the places where I work, it is the first question I tend to ask.

Ken Banks is currently a Visiting Fellow on the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University.

Use HTML to Open a Link in a New Window

Don't you hate it when you click a link on a page and up pops a new window. Even worse, you leave a site and up pops a window reminding you to come back soon, or visit their sponsor or whatever.

Why do they do that? If it's so irritating, then why am I going to show you how to do it?

In fact it's a very useful technique and, used sparingly, can be helpful to your visitors. One of its main uses it to avoid 'losing' a visitor. For example, in the middle of one of your pages you have a link to another site. Your visitor follows the link... and doesn't come back. You've lost them!

Web designers overcome this problem in all sorts of ways. They sometimes put all their external links on a separate page - not very helpful for the visitor but they are less likely to go until they have finished with you. Another technique is to use frames - the visitor clicks a link which then opens in a separate frame on the same page so that they view the other site from within yours. But lots of people don't like frames - it might make it difficult for them to 'escape' from your site, and they might not know how to 'bookmark' the new site. Perhaps frames just don't suit the design of your page.

The answer is of course... a new window!

New Windows with HTML

Forcing a link to open in a new window is simply a matter of adding an additional attribute to the link's code. Suppose you have a straightforward link to a page. The visitor sees something like...

Visit Fontstuff today!

Here's the code...

Visit Fontstuff today!

Now let's modify the link to force it to open the linked page in a new window. What the visitor sees is no different...

Visit Fontstuff today!

...but when they click the link a new browser window opens displaying the linked page inside. Here's the code...

Visit Fontstuff today!

The addition of the TARGET attribute to a hyperlink lets you dictate where the linked page opens. To open a new page I have used target="_blank" but there are others...

target="_blank"	Opens the linked page in a new window.
target="_self"	Opens the linked page in the same window. This is the default for ordinary pages and doesn't need to be specified. It has a use when working with frames.
target="_parent"	Opens the linked page in the parent frame in a frames page.
target="_top"	Opens the linked page in a full (i.e. top level) window when used in frames pages. This one is useful for letting a linked page 'break out' of a frame.

In fact, you can insert any window name that you might have defined elsewhere. Using the JavaScript technique outlined below you could create a new window with a particular name, then use this method to cause all subsequent linked pages to open in it. (Find out how to do this and check out the demo!)

Setting a Default

If you want all the links on your page to open in a new window you don't have to modify every one. It's a simple matter to apply a default setting for the page so that all the links behave the same way. Here's how...

Insert the following code...

<

...into the header of your document's HTML (i.e. anywhere between the and tags but not inside any other pairs of tags already there). You can substitute "_blank" with one of the other names if appropriate.

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How FrontPage Does It...

FrontPage 2002, FrontPage 2000 and FrontPage 98 Select the text you want to hyperlink (or the link you want to edit) and choose Insert > Hyperlink. In the Edit Hyperlink dialog box find Target Frame: and click the Change Target Frame button. The Target Frame dialog box offers a list of common targets, or you can enter your own. For a new window select New Window and you'll see _blank appear in the Target Setting box. Click OK twice and it's done. To set a default, check the Set as page default box and all links on that page will work the same way. If you have already made your hyperlinks, you can quickly set the default from the Page Properties dialog box. Choose File > Properties (or right-click on the page and choose Page Properties...) and on the General tab find Default Target Frame. Click the Change Target Frame button and proceed as described above.

FrontPage Express Select the text you want to hyperlink (or the link you want to edit) and choose Insert > Hyperlink. In the Edit Hyperlink dialog box click in the Target Frame: box and type "_blank" (without the quotes). Click OK. To set a default target for all the links on the current page choose File > Page Properties (or right-click on the page and choose Page Properties...). Find Default Target Frame and enter the target name as above.

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For complete control over how and where your new window appears you can use JavaScript. Take a look at the article on Opening New Windows with JavaScript.