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LYNCHBURG, Va (WSET) — Strangers may soon be able to use your Wi-Fi — It’s all through Amazon Sidewalk.

It’s an internet-sharing network for Amazon Echo, Ring and Tile devices. Officials say it’s a way to use WiFi from neighboring homes that also have Amazon products.

Randy Marchany a cybersecurity expert with Virginia Tech feels this is another way to collect information. He says it’s specifically picking up on user habits and whereabouts.

A secure quantum internet is one step closer thanks to a quantum memory made from a crystal, which could form a crucial part of a device able to transmit entangled photons over a distance of 5 kilometres. Crucially, it is entirely compatible with existing communication networks, making it suitable for real-world use.

There has long been a vision of a quantum version of the internet, which would allow quantum computers to communicate across long distances by exchanging particles of light called photons that have been linked together with quantum entanglement, allowing them to transmit quantum states.

The problem is that photons get lost when they are transmitted through long lengths of fibre-optic cable. For normal photons, this isn’t an issue, because networking equipment can simply measure and retransmit them after a certain distance, which is how normal fibre data connections work. But for entangled photons, any attempt to measure or amplify them changes their state.

Researchers at Oxford University have developed an AI-enabled system that can comprehensively identify people in videos by conducting detective-like, multi-domain investigations as to who they might be, from context, and from a variety of publicly available secondary sources, including the matching of audio sources with visual material from the internet.

Though the research centers on the identification of public figures, such as people appearing in television programs and films, the principle of inferring identity from context is theoretically applicable to anyone whose face, voice, or name appears in online sources.

Indeed, the paper’s own definition of fame is not limited to show business workers, with the researchers declaring ‘We denote people with many images of themselves online as famous‘.

COVID 19 pandemic, automation and 6G could end the metropolitan era from building high sky scrapers for companies. Companies can operate like a network from home to home without going to office. This will help a lot to bring down Urban Heat Islands and make our cities more efficient in transportation and communication to send the data even faster.

Tom Marzetta is the director of NYU Wireless, New York University’s research center for cutting-edge wireless technologies. Prior to joining NYU Wireless, Marzetta was at Nokia Bell Labs, where he developed massive MIMO. Massive MIMO (short for “multiple-input multiple-output”) allows engineers to pack dozens of small antennas into a single array. The high number of antennas means more signals can be sent and received at once, dramatically boosting a single cell tower’s efficiency.

Massive MIMO is becoming an integral part of 5G, as is an independent development that came out of NYU Wireless by the center’s founding director Ted Rappaport: Millimeter waves. And now the professors and students at NYU Wireless are already looking ahead to 6G and beyond.

Marzetta spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the work happening at NYU Wireless, as well as what we all might expect from 6G when it arrives in the next decade. The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.

Early Tuesday morning, large portions of the web sputtered out for about an hour. The downed sites shared no obvious theme or geography; the outages were global, and they hit everything from Reddit to Spotify to The New York Times. (And yes, also WIRED.) In fact, the only thing they have in common is Fastly, a content-delivery network (CDN) provider whose predawn hiccup reverberated across the internet.

You may not have heard of Fastly, but you likely interact with it in some fashion every time you go online. Along with Cloudflare and Akamai, it’s one of the biggest CDN providers in the world. And while Fastly has been vague about what specific glitch caused Tuesday’s worldwide disruptions, the incident offers a stark reminder of how fragile and interconnected internet infrastructure can be, especially when so much of it hinges on a handful of companies that operate largely outside of public awareness.

Hundreds of websites worldwide crashed this morning following a massive internet outage – with the UK government, Amazon and Spotify among those experiencing issues.

Millions of users across the globe reported problems trying to access web pages, with Netflix, Twitch and news websites including the BBC, Guardian, CNN and the New York Times hit by the problem.

Passengers desperately trying to fill out locator forms on UK.Gov to enter the UK from Portugal and abroad were also affected by the outage.