Babbage

A FRIEND of Babbage's often complains about asymmetry in their correspondence. On a good day your correspondent may dash off a thousand words in ten minutes (admittedly not all of equal merit). The recipient feels overwhelmed and sometimes takes weeks to summon enough typing energy to reply. It's all the fault of Babbage's father, who in 1979 insisted that the onrushing wave of computers would wash away any who did not know how to type. At the time learning to type smacked of lowly clerical work. Those aiming for better things might struggle through a class, but hope never to touch a keyboard again.

Babbage took the paternal advice to heart, however, learning his home keys on an old manual typewriter, then an electric one, and eventually earning a portion of his college fees as a typesetter. As a result, his typing speed crests well above 100 words per minute (wpm). That's pretty decent but far short of the clip reached by the best performers (some of whom compete in online typing games).

The asymmetry is even more pronounced in other situations. A photographer friend of Babbage's notes that when he switched to the iPhone, he felt speedy compared to his chums that still relied on the older T9 predictive numeric keypad text entry system. Another says that he feels like swallowing from the standpipe when a buddy uses Apple's Siri, a so-far iPhone 4S-only voice-recognition and dictation system, to produce text messages, while he is tapping on virtual keys.

Continue reading "Touchy typing"»

A PIECE of legislation designed to extend payroll-tax cuts in America might not sound like something that will have a profound impact on the country's telecoms industry. But the bill, which was recently given a green light in Congress, has been met with huge cheers from wireless firms hungry for extra airwaves. Their enthusiasm is understandable: in addition to extending the tax cuts and making various other changes, such as tweaking the pension scheme of the CIA’s spooks, the bill contains provisions that could ultimately place a huge chunk of wireless spectrum in the sub-700 megahertz (MHz) band on the market and raise an estimated $15 billion for the government’s coffers.

That more wireless airwaves are badly needed is not in doubt. America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given warning that the country faces a “spectrum crunch” unless additional airwaves are found for wireless operators in the next few years. Without them, firms will struggle to cope with the huge volumes of data being generated by the proliferation of smartphones, tablet computers and other devices. Cisco, a big IT firm, estimates that global mobile-data traffic will hit an annualised rate of 130 exabytes a year in 2016, or the equivalent of the content of 33 billion DVDs.

The legislation’s progress means that America will probably become the first country in the world to experiment with a so-called “reverse incentive auction” of airwaves to help wireless firms cope with this data deluge. The bill gives the FCC the power to solicit “bids” from TV broadcasters, who can stipulate a price at which they are willing to part with some or all of the spectrum they no longer need as audiences for their programmes shrink. The FCC can then turn round and sell those airwaves via a traditional auction to wireless firms who badly need them to handle the huge volumes of data coursing through their networks.

The proceeds would be split between the broadcasters and the government, with some $7 billion going to fund a new national mobile-broadband network for police, firefighters and other emergency services. The bill also makes clear that the FCC can create new “guard bands” that contain “unlicensed” spectrum which can be used by firms such as Google who are keen to develop public Wi-Fi networks.

Continue reading "Reverse auctions move forward"»

THE American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) sure knows how to draw a crowd. Around this time each year thousands of academics, hacks, public-relations types and policy wonks, even the odd politician, descend on a city picked by the AAAS, the world's biggest organisation devoted to promoting all manner of boffinry and the publisher of Science magazine, as the venue for its annual shindig. In 2012 the honour fell to Vancouver. It is the first time in thirty years or so that the meeting has been held in Canada. (Montreal was the first Canadian city to host it, in 1857.)

If news-room chatter is anything to go by, some 4,000 delegates and 1,100 assorted media folk have come along. The word is this is fewer than in previous years—notwithstanding the wintery attractions of nearby Whistler, whose slopes currently boast over seven metres of snow. One reason could be that since the terrorist attacks of 2001 American citizens can no longer nip across their northern border without a passport, a document many Americans do not possess. The financial crisis may also have played a part, with many institutions facing tighter travel budgets. And even at the best of times, reaching Vancouver from Europe is a hassle. It apparently took one determined reporter 26 hours to get to British Columbia from Germany; your correspondent arrived from London last night, after a somewhat less gruelling, albeit still knackering ten-hour flight. 

One of the bigger challenges attendees is poring over the 160-page conference programme in order to select a handful of lectures, seminars, symposia, briefings, etc, dozens of which run in parallel, taking up most of Vancouver's vast convention centre from Friday through Monday. As ever, topics range from astrophysics to quantitative methods in monitoring human-rights violations, all subsumed under some predictably trite theme. This year it is "Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society".

It was unclear to Babbage how exactly a lecture he stumbled into by Joseph LeDoux of New York University, who received this year's McGovern Award in the behavioural sciences, fitted into this. But it was fascinating nonetheless. Dr LeDoux argued that it is wrongheaded to interpret animal behaviour in terms of human emotions. Sure, animals experience cognitive states which are evolutionarily related to joy or fear, say, as felt by people. But the human emotions come with so much linguistic and behavioural baggage that imputing them to a cat, or even a chimp, runs the risk of anthropomorphisation. It makes more sense, Dr LeDoux says, to examine what he calls survival circuits—the neural systems which govern basic functions like defence, nutrition, procreation, maintaining the body's fluid balance or temperature regulation.

Different organisms respond differently to similar stimuli. In the presence of a threat, for instance, members of one species freeze while those of another flee. The underlying brain mechanisms are different, too. Even in a single species and for one sort of sensory input, like smell, different neural circuits are recruited in situations where the perceived threat is innate or learned. These often involve distinct bits of larger brain regions. Only a few of the dozen or so segments of a rat's amygdala, a part of the brain associated with primal behavioural responses, flash up when it sees a cat.

Dr LeDoux has been probing the precise mechanics of conditioned responses using the new-fangled methods of optogenetics. This involves injecting viruses enriched with light-sensitive molecules into selected brain cells. A signal send down a fibre-optic cable attached to the cell can then trigger electrical and chemical events corresponding to those which occur naturally as a rat learns to associate the crackle of leaves with a pouncing feline, for instance. Such fiddling has allowed Dr LeDoux and his colleagues to condition a rat to freeze on hearing crackling leaves without it ever having been confronted with a corresponding threat (though the reaction is less strong than in the case of natural conditioning). Controlled experiments like this help distinguish between assorted types of behavioural responses.

There may be good reason, Dr LeDoux concludes, that English has 37 words to describe distinct flavours of fear (like apprehension, consternation, angst, etc). These are, of course, a cultural and linguistic artefact. But they may also reflect different neural mechanisms for dealing with a variety of threats. And there is nothing to suggest that other animals' neural lexicons are identical to, or any less varied than man's.

THE Internet, which began life as a way for academics to gossip and share data, was never designed with security in mind. As it changed into a commercial platform, programmers began bolting security on. One common security feature on the modern web is called secure HTTP, or HTTPS. It is designed to encrypt web traffic between surfers and servers in the hope of frustrating eavesdroppers. That extra layer of security is vital: without it, web payments would be completely insecure and e-commerce could never have taken off.

HTTPS relies for its security on something called public-key cryptography, which scrambles messages using a mixture of publicly-available and privately-held secret keys. In the past couple of days, a teams of researchers led by Arjen Lenstra of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, have uncovered a flaw in how such encryption is implemented. The researchers were trawling through a database of 7.1m publicly-available keys. They found that around 27,000, or 0.4%, were insecure.

Public-key encryption was born of a mathematical observation. While it is easy to multiply two prime numbers together to give a third number, it is much, much harder to work backwards and figure out the original two primes by looking at third number alone. This ensures that encrypting data, which relies on multiplying primes, is easy. Decrypting it, meanwhile, which requires finding these so-called prime factors, is so difficult as to be impractical even with the speediest supercomputers—for anyone lacking the correct key, that is.

But the system rests crucially on the premise that each and every key is generated with different prime numbers. To create a new key, a computer picks a few thousand randomly-generated numbers and checks to see which of them are primes. Two of these are used to produce a key. The insecure keys identified by the researchers were generated with recycled prime numbers that had already been used to generate keys for other people. Re-using primes in this way is a big no-no: it makes it drastically easier for an attacker to crack the encryption.

Continue reading "Pick a prime, any prime"»

MOST people like to draw a strict line between man and machine. But these days the human body, if necessary, can be chock full of gadgets. Pacemakers, artificial hips (though hopefully not the ASRs made by DePuy), stents and pain pumps (which deliver painkillers directly into the spine)—all can make an ailing body feel healthy once more. Your correspondent’s fiancé has a titanium-reinforced spine and can wallop any foe on the tennis court. Given all this, the concept of an implanted drug device seems simple enough.

But it was not until this week, more than a decade after work on the product began, that one set of inventors began to see the fruits of their labour. In a paper published online on Thursday in Science Translational Medicine, Robert Farra and his colleagues described the first clinical trial of an implanted microchip that delivers medicine. Dr Farra is the president of the aptly named MicroCHIPS, a firm in Massachusetts that hopes to transform the way that patients receive drugs. Many patients fail to take their medicine as prescribed, a problem that will grow worse as chronic disease becomes more common. An implanted device would ensure that delinquent patients take their medicine without even realising it.

In this first trial, Dr Farra tested microchips in eight women with osteoporosis. Each chip had 20 tiny reservoirs filled with a drug usually delivered by injection. Each reservoir was covered with a thin membrane that would melt when an electric current was applied, releasing the drug into the body. The idea was to wirelessly program the chip to release a dose from one reservoir each day for 20 days. Implanted in each woman’s abdomen, the foreign gadget prompted the body to form a fibrous capsule around it. But the chip nevertheless seemed to work, releasing the drugs, which then penetrated the capsule and moved into the bloodstream.

The trial was not all good news. The chip failed in one patient. And there remains much more work before the chip can come to market. To be useful to practicing doctors, such chips must hold many more doses—Dr Farra wants to have 365. MicroCHIPS will not seek regulatory approval in America until 2014. There will surely be setbacks. But this week’s news, at least, was a step in the right direction.

HALFWAY between marriage and prostitution lies the sugar daddy. Not quite a husband, not quite a John, he looks after his girl and expects her to be loyal to him—a loyalty that is frequently unreciprocated. But if you are a poor African teenager, having a sugar daddy is not such a bad deal. Eventually, Mr Right may come along and in the meantime life is, as the term suggests, a lot sweeter than it might otherwise be. Except for one thing. In many parts of Africa, relationships between older men and younger women are one of the main transmitters of HIV.

With that in mind, it has often been hypothesised that if teenage girls were given an alternative income—one that might, for instance, allow them to stay on at school—they would be less likely to get infected. It is a plausible hypothesis but one that has not, until now, actually been tested.

That lack has just been remedied by Berk Özler, of the World Bank, and his colleagues. In a paper just published by the Lancet, they describe how they conducted a randomised clinical trial of the idea that money, and money alone, can stop the spread of HIV.

They carried out their experiment in the Zomba district of Malawi, recruiting nearly 1,300 never-married women between the ages of 13 and 22. They divided Zomba into 176 areas, and each participant in a given area was treated in the same way. That area-wide treatment was, however, decided at random by a computer. In some areas, which acted as controls, the women were simply monitored. In some they and their parents were given small amounts of money each month (between $1 and $5 for the women, and between $4 and $10 for the parents), again decided at random by the computer. In a third set of areas money was doled out in a similar way, but only in exchange for a promise by the woman to attend school. If she failed to do so, no money was forthcoming.

When the results were in, the team found that the unpaid women had suffered more than twice the HIV infection rate experienced by the paid women over the course of the 18 months of the experiment, and four times the infection rate of genital herpes. Intriguingly, there was no difference between the infection rate suffered by those required to go to school and those who received the money unconditionally. Whether the actual amount of money mattered was not clear. For that to emerge a larger sample would be needed.

What is abundantly clear, however, was that the money did make women behave differently. They had younger boyfriends than those in the control group, and had sex less frequently. Liberated from the need to find a sugar daddy, they could behave in a safer way. 

Those attempting to stop the spread of AIDS have, in the past, tried many ways of getting people to change their behaviour in order to reduce the risk of infection. They have extolled, exhorted and even threatened, all to little avail. They have not, though, previously, resorted to bribery. But it seems to work.

A NASCENT industry links up ever larger networks into what becomes a global communications web. A relatively small group of experts then uses this web to dispatch short, condensed messages across the world. This, in a nutshell, is the story not just of microblogging and Twitter, but also of the telegraph. The 19th-century's Morse key was replaced in the 20th by the telephone (which is, in a sense, less efficient since the telegraph's format was inimical to rambling). Telephones required more wires but no real expertise, like being proficient at Morse code. Short text communications languished for 100 years.

As a consequence, Twitter has much more in common with telegraphy than it does with either broadcast media or with text messaging, with which it was initially designed to be compatible. This affinity is what inspired Martin Kaltenbrunner, at the Linz University of Arts, to create a functional, albeit obsolete, bit of kit. His Tworse Key project mixes open-source code and gorgeous gubbins. Plug the Tworse Key into a computer via an ethernet cable and let it find the internet. Tap away in Morse code, and the system converts messages into text and posts them via a Twitter account. The demonstration is wired to @tworsekey. (Your correspondent was alerted to the Tworse by a 24-year-old friend conversant in Morse code. No, you read that right; her family is full of "hams"—amateur radio operators.)

Mr Kaltenbrunner's aim was to build and document the operation of a bundle of software and hardware licensed on open-source terms. The idea was to give his students an example of how to create such projects. The key relies on Arduino, an open-source prototyping platform that has in the past few years spurred experimentation with hardware on a scale unseen since the home-electronics fad of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Babbage participated.

The Interface Culture programme at Linz examines the link between humans and computers by crafting working technological artefacts that are not necessarily designed with commercial production in mind. The required mix of functionality and aesthetics means that a student must be part engineer and part artist, vocations that rarely cross paths in normal curricula. The programme, which offers a master's degree, is conducted in English. "We can afford to create useless projects," Mr Kaltenbrunner says, "so maybe in the long run we can produce new ideas."

He encourages his students to publish their work so that the ideas spread more quickly. His pedagogical example is meant to inspire: the Tworse Key is lovingly constructed of gleaming gears and other titbits, and installed on a wooden box that hides a circuit board. The ethernet cable is wrapped in cloth for that classic feel.

The American Radio Relay League, the country's amateur radio association, has been in touch about including the Tworse Key in a book spotlighting projects that "hams" might build. The ability to tap Morse code at a rate of at least five words per minute was a requirement for a basic amateur-radio licence for 95 years, dropped in 2007. Mr Kaltenbrunner confesses that he knows just five letters by heart and must convert text to Morse code via a website before tweeting with Tworse. His next project is to learn the whole obsolete alphabet.

OUTSIDE a village called Mau, in Uttar Pradesh, half a dozen chimneys rise from kilns into a colourless sky. These ovens, six among the 100,000 which turn out the 200 billion bricks made each year in India, are worked by dalits—members of castes once regarded as Untouchable.

India’s brick kilns are noxious sources of pollution, particularly soot, and working them means a life that is always nasty, frequently brutish and often short. But on top of this social evil is an environmental one. The exhaust from the kilns mixes with diesel emissions and other fumes to form a vast brown smog, known as an atmospheric brown cloud, which is up to 3km thick and thousands of kilometres long. Two of its main ingredients, the small carbon particles which the soot is composed of, and ozone, a triatomic form of oxygen, are important contributors to the greenhouse effect, and thus to climate change. Among other negative effects, the cloud is therefore thought to be accelerating the retreat of Himalayan glaciers, which are found at a similar altitiude.

A way of curbing pollution from India’s kilns would thus ameliorate the lives of those who work them, help make Asia a cleaner continent, and slow down global warming. Burning the coal that fires the kilns in a more efficient and less polluting way would also save money for the kiln’s owners—an alignment of interest that might encourage the change to happen. Unfortunately, the recommended change of design (at least, the change recommended by the United Nations’ Environment Programme) is an expensive one. So-called vertical-shaft kilns cut soot emission by three-quarters, but they cost around 10m rupees ($200,000) each and require good-quality clay, able to withstand rapid heating. That makes them too expensive for most kiln owners. But recent research conducted as a collaboration between two Indian green technology and consulting firms, Greentech Knowledge Solutions, and Enzen Global Solutions, has suggested some more easily affordable changes.

Greentech’s main suggestions are to increase the number of air ducts in the kilns’ smokestacks and set the bricks to be fired in a zigzag pattern, rather than in the current block arrangement. These two, simple measures improve the circulation of air within a kiln, and thus the process of combustion. That, the company says, reduces a kiln’s emissions of soot by 60%. It also reduces its fuel consumption by 15%. The cost, around 1m rupees a kiln, can thus be recouped in three or four months.

Two further ideas in the firms’ report might be a bit more difficult to implement, but would also help. One is the widespread adoption of a technique commonly used in central India, which involves mixing coal dust with the clay the bricks are made from. This makes use of the otherwise useless dust, which burns, in situ, firing the brick from within. It follows that, because the coal is mixed with the clay, most of the resulting crud (70%, the researchers found) is retained within the brick once it has been fired. 

The other proposal in the report is that brickmakers use machines which produce hollow bricks. A hollow brick uses less clay and thus requires less fuel to fire. It is also a better product, because it provides more insulation. Hollow-brick machines are expensive, though, costing at least 20m rupees apiece.

Greentech reckons that if all of its recommendations were adopted, they would save 5m of the 25m tonnes of coal which India’s brick kilns consume every year, and cut the country’s annual emissions by the equivalent of 9m tonnes of carbon. They would also make the jobs of those who work the kilns rather less horrible.

THE haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca every Muslim is expected to make at least once, can be a pretty stressful experience. The rites, which last from the 8th to the 12th day of the 12th month of the Islamic calendar, are fiendishly complex. Missing one of them or performing it ineptly can be costly. Offenders have to sacrifice an animal, or even come another time, to make amends.

The holy city is also notoriously tricky to get around: each year more than 2m Muslims converge on it and often have a hard time finding their tents in the giant camps whose alleys are not well marked. "Some people get lost for days before being able to rejoin their group," says Habiburrahman Dastageeri, a 31-year-old German-Afghan, who has yet to go on his own haj, but has already struggled with the umrah, a less complex, and less crowded, pilgrimage to Mecca that can be performed at any time of the year.

The experience inspired the computer scientist to develop a smartphone app which helps hajjis to avoid stress so they can focus on their religious duties. The app, currently available only for iPhone, though an Android version is in the works, is called Amir, which means "guide" in Arabic (among other things). It offers a check-list to ensure the pilgrim is fully prepared before setting off to Saudi Arabia. It also includes interactive tutorials, for instance on what to do while walking seven times counter-clockwise around the Kabah, the Black Stone, or how properly to stone the Devil. Once they arrive, pilgrims can use Amir to check where they are and to locate their tent. On top of that, the app has a built-in emergency button so people in need can easily be located by an ambulance or the police.

Writing a haj app was not easy, says Mr Dastageeri. It took him more than two years. Yet the effort is starting to pay off. Although downloads of the app, which is not cheap at €19.99 ($26), still number in the dozens, it has already sparked interest. Several Middle Eastern investors want to buy a stake in Mr Dastageeri's start-up, which is based in Stuttgart. And the Saudi government seems keen on having pilgrims use Amir. When Mr Dastageeri recently met with officials, they immediately started brainstorming about how the app could be used to improve crowd control and security in Mecca, where collapsing ramps and stampedes have already caused many deaths.

Helpfully, religious rules do not seem to prohibit pilgrims from using smartphones on Islam’s holy grounds. Some have argued that cameras should not be allowed in Mecca. But since virtually all modern phones include one, bringing them along is accepted as long as no pictures are taken. Even conservative Muslims do not appear to have a problem with Amir, says Mr Dastageeri. But just to make sure, he has asked Abu Muneer Ismail Davids, an Islamic scholar based in Australia who has written several books on haj rites and teaches preparation classes, to endorse the app. Mr Davids gave Amir the thumbs up.

FORESTS are chock-full of carbon. Some three-quarters of the stuff on the Earth's surface lies trapped in leaves, branches, stems and roots. Two to three times more is buried in the soil but it is hard to dislodge. Vegetal carbon, by contrast, is released into the atmosphere whenever woods are engulfed by fire, pests or tree-uprooting winds. Or humans: some experts reckon that deforestation accounts for as much as 17% of global manmade emissions. Others, though, put the figure at as little as 6%.

The discrepancy arises because the data for exactly how much carbon is stored in forests is inconclusive. The generally accepted measure, the United Nations' "Global Forest Resources Assessment", is calculated from figures about forest size reported by individual countries. But some countries do not undertake such inventories. Much of the data from those that do is outdated. And the original purpose of the inventories—to estimate how much timber could be commercially useful—means that not all types of wood are tallied. It is hard putting a number on the amount of carbon stored in forests when nobody is quite sure how much forest there is.

A new study from the Woods Hole Research Centre uses remote-sensing technology (along with old-fashioned fieldwork) to measure more accurately how much carbon is stored in tropical forests. Researchers trudge into a forest to measure trees in a 500 square metre plot. This data is used to calibrate a technique called light detection and ranging (lidar). Like its cousins radar and sonar, lidar, works by broadcasting electromagnetic waves towards a target and then building up a picture from the reflection. In the case of lidar, the waves are in the form of an infra-red laser beam sent from a satellite. As a result, fewer boots on the ground are needed.

The researchers put the total amount of carbon in tropical forests at 229 billion tonnes. This is 21% higher than UN's latest estimates. They also calculated that the net emission of carbon into the atmosphere thanks to tropical deforestation from 2001-10 amounts to 1 billion tonnes per year, 10% less than previously thought.

Crucially, the data allowed the researchers to chart tropical regions' carbon density in unprecendented detail on a large-scale map: each pixel corresponds to a square patch 500 metres on each side. It offers a picture of how carbon is distributed not just across different countries, but also across different types of flora. For example, nearly half of tropical Africa’s carbon turns out to be locked up in non-forest vegetation like shrublands or savannah. 

These findings ought to help tropical countries to meet the reporting requirements set out in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. More importantly, they may have far-reaching consequences for efforts like a scheme under which developing countries would be paid not to cut down trees. The latest findings bolster the idea that this scheme, known as "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation", or REDD, should cover not just forests but other plant patches, too. 

THE toothfish, found in southern waters, is an unlovely creature. All gawping mouth and bulging eyes, it was called the ugliest fish on the planet by Greenpeace. But when it arrives on a plate under a more appealing name, Chilean sea bass, it is becomes a tasty—and expensive—restaurant dish. The export value for all the toothfish found in the waters around the Antarctic is put at $110m. As a consequence, the threat of commercial fishing looms ever larger. The toothfish is not alone in the freezing waters around the south pole. Many of the 10,000 other species found there are unique to the region. Not all are as valuable (or as ugly) but they, too, sometimes get caught up in vast nets laid by illegal fishers. And overfishing of krill, a tiny crustacean that other marine life feed on, threatens the whole eco-system of the region.

Responsibility to protect marine life in the Antarctic region rests with a commission established under the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), signed 30 years ago as part of the Antarctic Treaty System. In 2002 this body agreed to create a network of marine protected areas (MPAs), the watery equivalent of forest reserves, by this year. This looks unlikely to happen. But some progress is being made to protect what are among the most pristine seas in the world, rich in biodiversity and relatively untouched by human activity.

For an area to be protected, one (or more) of the convention’s 25 member countries must formally propose it. This is done on the basis of the "best available scientific methods", which are meant to prove its value as a marine reserve. CCAMLR’s scientific committee then inspects the proposal. Finally, all members of the Convention must agree before an area can be marked as protected.

The commission created the first Antarctic MPA in 2009 when the British government proposed listing an area near the South Orkney Islands, home to some 1,200 species. A second listing is expected this year. New Zealand and America are presently working on a scenario (jargon for a kind of draft proposal) to protect the Ross Sea. According to conservationists, the Ross Sea is the most intact marine ecosystem on the planet, with large populations of all its top predators still present.

But there may still be roadblocks, frets Steve Campbell of Antarctic Ocean Alliance, an advocacy made up of a nine conservation groups including Greenpeace and the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. The Ross Sea is stocked with krill and holds some $30m worth of toothfish, which could lead CCAMLR members to consider economic interests over environmental concerns. But the success of the South Orkneys Marine Protected Area is encouraging. And there are big plans for the future. Last year CCAMLR listed 11 areas that it considers "high priority" as prospective MPAs. Mr Campbell's group has identified 19 areas in total. Listing the Ross Sea is a step in the right direction.

EVEN as mobile phones are becoming a cheap utility hundreds of thousands of people continue to part with a pretty penny to talk to others in parts of the world that lack network coverage. Callers are prepared to pay as much as $14 to connect to a satellite phone in exchange for secure, reliable connections. (Ringing landlines from such devices can be less than one-tenth that.)

Security is often paramount, especially for souls dispatched to far-flung corners of the globe which are often war-torn, controlled by unsympathetic regimes, or both. No surprise, then, that like modern mobile phones, satellite gubbins come with built-in encryption. This makes it practically impossible for anyone monitoring the airwaves to eavesdrop on the calls. 

Or does it? Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum, in Germany, think they have managed to crack two popular encryption protocols, known as A5-GMR-1 and A5-GMR-2. These are commonly used in the Thuraya satellite phones used across swathes of Africa, the Middle East and North Asia. (Thuraya has yet to respond to the revalations.) The researchers hope that their paper, published on their website, will help interested parties fix the flaw. More importantly, perhaps, it might prompt phone-makers to act. 

"We can assume that this has probably been known about since the beginning of this century," says Benedikt Driessen, one of the authors of the new paper. He and his colleagues say that it takes about $2,000 worth of gear and half an hour to decipher a satellite phone call. With more computing power, it could be done in real time. Indeed, an Israeli company already offers just such a service commercially.

Those Thuraya customers particularly concerned with security can install end-to-end encryption software that adds one more layer of security, using another protocol, known as AES. (Government agencies, especially those dealing with security and intelligence, tend not to rely on commercially available encryption.) Alternatively, a Berlin-based company, Cryptophone, promises "end-to-end encrypted calls from and to mobile, fixed-line and satellite networks" and claims to be the only firm to provide secure phones that come with full source code available for independent review. No doubt someone will be flogging a crack for these tweaks soon.