India's Homegrown System for "Fixed Wireless" Has Legs

A novel way of providing plain old connected telephone service wirelessly is concocted in Chennai (Madras)

3 min read

1 July 2003—No copper? No problem. Systems for connecting customers to the telephone system wirelessly rather than by means of the tried-and-true copper loop can be an attractive option in areas that have yet to set up a copper infrastructure. One such system, developed at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)�Madras (Chennai), is being extensively deployed in rural parts of India and has already attracted serious interest in a dozen other countries, including South Africa, Brazil, Russia, Egypt, and Iran.

Methods of providing local telephone service via radio connections to the home or office are generally referred to as ”fixed wireless” in the United States, or ”wireless in local loop” in India. The IIT system, called corDECT, was developed by a telecommunications and computer networking group under Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a professor of electrical engineering.

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How Police Exploited the Capitol Riot’s Digital Records

Forensic technology is powerful, but is it worth the privacy trade-offs?

11 min read
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 Illustration of the silhouette of a person with upraised arm holding a cellphone in front of the U.S. Capitol building. Superimposed on the head is a green matrix, which represents data points used for facial recognition
Gabriel Zimmer
Green

The group of well-dressed young men who gathered on the outskirts of Baltimore on the night of 5 January 2021 hardly looked like extremists. But the next day, prosecutors allege, they would all breach the United States Capitol during the deadly insurrection. Several would loot and destroy media equipment, and one would assault a policeman.

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