Qi wireless charging standard offers more design freedom
Wireless charging is getting a new technology treatment which offers more design freedom. The Wireless Power Consortium’s advance in its Qi wireless charging standard means that phones and chargers will no longer need to come into direct contact, .said Ars Technica on Thursday. The Qi 1.2 chargers are expected to show up later this year and into 2015, On Thursday, the WPC announced “advances to the resonant extension of the Qi specification,” giving users the option to embed wireless chargers deeper in structures, such as furniture and desktops, or use direct-contact surface applications. Menno Treffers, chairman of the WPC, said this also meant backward compatibility with products already in the market.
WPC’s spec is to add support for resonant charging. With version 1.2, explained Engadget, “the addition of resonance charging to Qi’s wireless-resonance-charging/ features “makes it so the receiver (the device that needs to be charged) and the transmitter (the charging pad or surface that’s pushing the power to the device) won’t need to physically touch each other anymore;” and can be up to 45mm (1.77 inches) apart. According to the WPC, “Q1.1 receivers based on inductive v1.1 specification and charging at a Z-height of 7 mm, are now capable being charged at a Z-height of 30 mm.” The consortium also said that “New magnetic resonance v1.2 receivers can now be charged at Z-height of 45mm, expecting further Z-Height in final production designs.”
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-qi-wireless-standard-freedom.html
BitTorrent unveils NSA-proof online calling and messaging software
BitTorrent Inc., the San Francisco company behind the most popular technology for sharing files online, is branching out into a new arena: snoop-proof calling and texting.
The company announced the availability Wednesday of a preliminary, test version of BitTorrent Bleep software, which will enable people to make calls (voice only) and send messages over the Internet without using a central server to direct traffic. Instead, users will find one another through groups of other users, with no records of the calls or texts stored anywhere along the way.
Once a connection is made for a call or text, the communication travels directly between the two computers involved. That peer-to-peer approach also defies mass surveillance. Granted, it doesn’t pay to underestimate the National Security Agency’s ability to monitor even well-hidden communications. But Bleep certainly makes the job harder than the most popular online calling and messaging apps do.
Bleep will be available by invitation only for now, the company said, because it still has plenty of rough edges. It’s also limited to computers running Windows 7 or 8, although support for more platforms is coming.
http://phys.org/news/2014-08-bittorrent-unveils-nsa-proof-online-messaging.html#ajTabs
