Items tagged with airport
Apple is discontinuing its line of wireless routers, including its AirPort Extreme base station and AirPort Express, both of which support simultaneous dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity and can be configured and managed through an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. It's a somewhat surprising move when there is so much focus in the tech industry on the fast growing Internet of Things (IoT) market and connecting homes, though the writing has been on the wall for more than a year. In late 2016, Apple dismantled its AirPort division and reportedly reassigned employees who had been developing the company's branded routers to other projects. Once Apple disbanded the AirPort team, it was really...
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If you’re an Apple enthusiast that fills your home in gear from the company, including its wireless routers, we have some bad news to bring you. According to a credible report from notorious insider Mark Gurman, Apple has demolished its wireless router division. The deconstruction process has taken place of the past year, with engineers that previously worked on products like the AirPort Express, AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule being shuttled around to other divisions within the company. While Apple’s wireless routers integrate nicely with iPhones, iPads, and Macs, they don’t have broad appeal in a segment of the tech market that is often faced with tight margins.AirPort Extreme (L)...
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Spending time in a busy airport terminal is not something that many of use enjoy doing; it’s something that we have to do. With that in mind, most of us will hop on whatever free Wi-Fi option available, battling it out with other travelers with whatever table scraps of bandwidth are available. For everyone else, there’s always paid options which often provide a faster, more stable connection. Boingo has both options covered with its Secure, Multiplatform, Analytics-Driven, Responsive and Tiered (SMART) Network. Although Boingo doesn’t give us any indication of connection speeds, it says that it will now be offering all passengers free Wi-Fi access. This will be enough for folks just looking to...
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Apple's WWDC keynote today focused primarily on software, as well it should have, but a bit of hardware news also made it out. On the networking side, the company's long-standing AirPort line received a new AirPort Extreme. The design is actually massively different than anything we've seen before, with a taller and slimmer body replacing the flatter version that came before. From a technical standpoint, the ability to support 802.11ac transfers is all new, promising up to 3x faster local connections and transfers with hardware that supports it. There are six total antennas, three for the 2.4GHz band and three for the 5GHz band. There's also a built-in firewall, three Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports,...
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As expected, Apple unloaded a slew of announcements at its WWDC today, including an update of the venerable Mac OS X, a couple of refreshed MacBook Air notebooks with Intel Haswell processors inside, and a totally redesigned Mac Pro. In OS X Mavericks, Apple is eschewing the big cat-themed naming scheme while adding some new features. First, there’s Finder tabs, so when you have multiple Finder windows open, you can just group them together into one windows with multiple tabs; additionally, you can drag items between tabs, which is a nice touch. Another nifty new Finder-related feature is the ability to add tags to a document when you save it, which makes for much easier searching. The...
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San José airport officials are close to striking a multimillion dollar deal to convert an old parking lot into a private airstrip that would be used primarily for Google's fleet of aircraft. Signature Flight support, a global player in FBO and flight support services, won a bid to develop and operate the 29-acre, $82 million facility on the airport's west side, pending city approval. "We’re pleased that the evaluation process for the development of Mineta San José International Airport’s West Side is now complete, and the recommended outcome will prove to be incredibly prosperous for SJC, the City of San José, and Silicon Valley," said Director of Aviation Bill...
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Is there anything worse than scampering through airport security, getting to your gate, firing up your laptop to send one last important e-mail before an intercontinental flight... and finding that the airport Wi-Fi will run you $10 per hour? Well, sure, but we could probably count those things on one hand. To combat that feeling, JiWire has announced a partnership with AWG (Advanced Wireless Group), the largest provider of free Wi-Fi in North American airports, to offer free, ad-supported Wi-Fi to travelers across the United States. The partnership provides advertisers with access to more than 293 million passengers in major airports throughout the United States, and it should make crisscrossing...
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Is Wi-Fi important? Certainly. And it's becoming more so to travelers each and every day. We spotted a survey a year or so ago where an impressive amount of people suggested that Wi-Fi was about the more important asset in an airport, possibly even more important than a solid selection of food. Now a new Boingo survey is digging a little deeper into Wi-Fi usage at airports. If you aren't familiar with that name, Boingo is a hotspot company that installs paid Wi-Fi in a variety of places; most notably, airport terminals around the globe. Buy a single Boingo account, and you can online on any of their hotspots. So naturally, they have a great pool of data to pull from. Boingo manages 60 airport...
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In the wake of the pair of thwarted bombings by Al Qaeda last month, the TSA has announced additional restrictions and guidelines for passengers traveling both within the United States and internationally. In additional to logical and prudent steps, such as banning packages from Somalia and Yemen (temporarily) and additional screening for packages classified as high risk, there's a new pair of rules that're collectively bizarre. From the DHS press release: Toner and ink cartridges over 16 ounces will be prohibited on passenger aircraft in both carry-on bags and checked bags on domestic and international flights in-bound to the United States. This ban will also apply to certain inbound international...
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Gadget lovers have a particular hate for airport security. Even if they're trained professionals who fly on a weekly basis, there's just no quick way to get through the rigors involved in passing onto the sterile side. Those grey buckets become your worst enemy: before you know it, you've claimed five or six of them and taken up the whole belt, and the passengers behind you are glaring and growing increasingly impatient. Anyone who travels with numerous notebooks, cameras, hard drives, battery packs and lenses knows the pains of passing through airport security. Each laptop has to go in its own bin, and if you have too many cables, drives and other gizmos in your carry-on, you'll have to set...
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The TSA takes a lot of heat, some of the fair, some of it not so fair. But one thing that has been a great improvement over the years is the organization's openness and willingness to communicate with passengers. The TSA Blog is a great place to hear more on decisions being made that will affect your airport travels, and the latest post comes just on the heels of the iPad launch in the U.S. For awhile now, many travelers have assumed that any "notebook like" gadget had to be slapped in a separate grey bin for solo screening. Now, we're being told otherwise, and for once, it's good news rather than bad. E-readers, netbooks, iPads and anything smaller than a "standard sized laptop" (we're guessing...
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As if you really needed one more reason to take the car, ferry or bicycle to your next destination, the Department of Homeland Security has just issued another update to its long list of search rules that'll most certainly spark up some debate. Thankfully for those with United States passports, this one probably won't have a serious impact on you, but if a foreigner is in front of you in the line to get stamped into this nation, get ready for even more possible delays.DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano recently announced new directives that clarify oversight for searches of computers and other electronic media at U.S. ports of entry. In short, this basically means that TSA officials and the like...
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A study on laptop loss at airports was just released, and we don't know what is more depressing: how many laptops are "lost" at the airport, how few of the "lost" laptops have their data protected, or how few of the "lost" laptops are ever recovered. The Airport Insecurity: The Case of Lost Laptops report was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and was sponsored by Dell. The report finds that "business travelers lose more than 12,000 laptops per week in U.S. airports." That works out to over 62,400 laptops per year. If the average business laptop costs $1,200, then roughly $749 million worth of laptops are lost each year at U.S. airports. To make matters worse, the report claims that for those...
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Apple's usually so very careful about updating its site, generally taking it down when they introduce a new product. But the Swiss version of the Apple Store appears to have accidentally leaked information about an update to the Airport Express which adds 802.11n support.We had heard reliable reports that Apple will be launching a new version of their Airport Express next week, likely on Tuesday. Apple Retail stores should have stock of the new Airport Express by mid week. The new model will be priced at the same price as the current model ($99). Though details have not been confirmed, it appears the upgrade will most likely include support for 802.11n wireless networking.MacGeneration...
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It's free, so do they have the right to censor it?Officials have blocked access to content they deem provocative on the airport's free Wi-Fi service.The Denver Post points out that some of those questionable sites include, Vanity Fair, the gossip column perezhilton.com, the hipster-geek site boingboing.net, and photos from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Of course, hard copies of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue are displayed on newsstands in the airport along with issues of Penthouse and Hustler.But the airport's spokesman Chuck Cannon told the Associated Press on Wednesday that he would rather "weather infrequent complaints about access than handle angry parents whose children might...
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The words "game software" in a subject always catches our attention. In this case researchers are trying to teach guards how to randomize their search routes, to better patrol airports.Guards are usually told to patrol in a random fashion but, being human, they tend to form habits that patient criminals can exploit. To help make their rounds less predictable, Paruchuri and colleagues created software based on game theory that simulates various random paths that a guard could take around Los Angeles International airport (LAX), and also how criminals might react. Potential rewards, such as catching more criminals, and costs, such as a terrorist explosion, are evaluated for each path....
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Maybe we're exaggerating a bit; we didn't exactly invade Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. But the folks at Intel decide to use a quote from our '06 Holiday Buyer's Guide in an advertisement that ultimately made its way onto a large billboard that's currently on display at O'Hare... We've all been in this business for many years now and have published thousands of articles between us, but there's just something exciting about seeing your name, or at least in this case our site's name, up in lights. That said, we would qualify the quote that was used here with a "currently" at the end perhaps. As with Planes and Trains, with Desktop PC...
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Avis is teaming up with Autonet Mobile to offer a WiFi hotspot that serves the rental car, and about a hundred foot radius around it. Autonet Mobile's In-Car Router is about the size of a laptop and draws power from the car's cigarette lighter outlet. The hardware itself is a bridge for a cellular provider's 3G network (Avis will likely have contracts with 3G providers around the country), acting as a WiFi gateway for those connected to it. Other 3G-WiFi bridges are already available from the likes of Linksys and Kyocera, but this appears to be the first targeted exclusively at vehicles. Business travelers will have one fewer excuse to offer about why they didn't see the e-mail....
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