Билет 8 вопрос 2 The connected home gets a little closer

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 08, 2013 — Futurists have long touted the idea of the connected home, where appliances and chores can be managed with the swipe of a finger. While it has yet to become reality, companies at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show are striving to shift the focus from home entertainment to the tech-savvy home.

Smart appliances, such as refrigerators, washers and dryers, continue to be the focus for larger electronic companies, including Samsung and LG. While these products have been around for years, consumers have yet to fully adopt the added functionality.

LG is hoping to make it easier to use the appliances’ enhanced functions. With the tag line “Touch the Smart Life,” the company showcased several products that use Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that lets you touch your phone (with support for Android models) to appliances to control settings, check the contents of the fridge while on a grocery run or remotely start a robot vacuum to clean the house.

The connected home also falls into the trend of the ‘Internet of Everything’ — the idea of ubiquitous computing and connected, well, everything. If there is one smaller company that looks like the successful model of this trend, it is Nest. Nest is attending CES to continue to promote its thermostats, and Mullins said he feels focusing on a single item is a good idea for companies trying to get connected products into the home.

“I think this whole thing, the Internet of Things, is going to take a little bit of time to progress. We’re definitely not looking to take giant leaps and bounds, but we want to start off with a product, get it into homes, and get people to start to connect with it on a daily basis. And then from that we can expand out. But for now, it’s focus on the central piece — that’s the one thing we have to get right,” he said, adding one of the keys to success is “very little friction” with consumers, citing important factors such as ease of use and installation.

App-based home solutions are very hot this year, with companies such as iSmart Alarm showing at CES. The company offers an app to connect your iPhone with motion sensors, contact sensors and cameras to help manage home security. The benefit, it says, is not being forced to pay a security company a monthly monitoring fee, as well as the ability to take the devices with you when you move, as opposed to picking up a new bill for expensive installation services.

Raju Mudhar

tout – рекламировать, расхваливать

shift – перемещать, смещать

savvy – сообразительный, толковый

expand out – расширяться

ease – облегчение, упрощение

Answer the questions:

1. What does technology of smart home let you do?

2. What will help you manage home security?

3. Is “Smart Home” technology a real or still futuristic idea?

Билет 9 вопрос 2 Government of Belarus using 'new tools' to silence dissent on internet, says Index on Censorship report

http://www.independent.co.uk, Jan. 04, 2013.The government of Belarus is employing a host of “new tools” to silence free voices and track down dissent on the internet according to a report published today. Researchers at Index on Censorship have been investigating ways in which Europe’s last dictatorship monitors web activity at a time when internet use in Belarus is rapidly expanding.

Belarus boasts half a million new internet users every year making it one of the fastest growing online markets. Access to broadband has also increased dramatically, from just 10 percent of inhabitants able to use high speed internet in 2010 compared to 70 percent of internet users by September 2012.

The mainstream media in the former Soviet republic is almost exclusively state owned. The growth of the web has enabled dissidents and opposition groups to meet and exchange ideas with newfound vigour following the brutal December 2009 crackdown that began when protests broke out in the aftermath of disputed presidential elections.

Yet the report’s authors, who conducted a field trip to Belarus last month, warn that the growth of internet use has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in tools to monitor their activity.

Among the tools the researchers found in place were web filters on multiple government controlled WiFi networks, surveillance technology allowing the authorities to intercept all web traffic, the removal of secure access to particular websites including Facebook and the creation of fake versions of popular dissident websites such as Charter97.org.

Andrei Aliaksandrau, Index’s Belarus programme manager, said: “[Belarusian president] Alexander Lukashenko has significantly expanded his government’s control over the internet in the last two years. Few people in Belarus realize the level of state surveillance now being carried out by Lukashenko’s security services. This poses a huge threat to internet activists in Belarus.”

The report details how websites that are critical of the Belarusian government are often targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DdoS) attacks, a disruption technique that employs thousands of computers used to bombard a website with requests for information that overwhelms and temporarily takes down the target site.