ADK gives Arduino fans a new toy to mod their Android.

Android has released a feature in its operating system that will allow mobile phones to interact and connect with accessories over USB. To help developers understand the new protocol Google defined, they have released the ADK, an Arduino Mega with a shield meant to demonstrate the capabilities of the hardware.

When announced last month, the few ADK's on the market immediately sold out. I was lucky enough to receive one from the Google team at Maker Faire. It has some impressive features that signal the types of projects Google may want Android developers to dream up.

The ADK comes with a joystick, three RGB LED's, a temperature sensor, a light sensor, a capacitive touch sensor, as well as a relay and terminal block for controlling motors.

What can you do with all those bells and whistles? Google demoed a treadmill that would tell your Android device how far you'd walked. You could use it to turn on lights in your house, check the ambient temperature in a room and much more — all from your Android powered device.

You could even build a giant labyrinth such as Google did when it unveiled the ADK at Google I/O last month:

Want to learn more about using the ADK or where to get your hands on one? Visit Google's Android development site for more information.

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Google Code Jam begins May 6th

Google Code Jam is open to anyone 13 years or older who is determined to solve a series of increasingly difficult algorithmic problems that face developers. Programmers have a limited amount of time to solve these problems (usually between 2 and 4 hours). The good news is you can use whatever language and development environment you desire.

The competition begins on May 6th, with the first of four rounds weeding out the best of the best with a day to strategize over solving the first problems. In successive rounds, the best competitors are selected to solve increasingly difficult challenges. The top 25 finalists will be brought to Google's Tokyo office for the last round, with the winner going home with $10,000 and major nerd cred.

The international competition began in 2003 as a way for Google to find the best programming talent around the world. As of 2008 there were over 11,000 registrants vying for the top prize.

If you're interested in participating, you still have time to register. Learn more about Google Code Jam on its website.

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HTTPS Everywhere can help protect you while surfing the web.

Firesheep was created by Eric Butler to highlight the lack of security on many websites (including popular ones like Google, Facebook and Twitter) and strongly encourage those companies to make their sites more secure.

So what does that mean for you? We've all become accustomed to seeing a lock appear on a website when we go through the checkout process. This indicates that the website is securely transmitting your credit card data data. Similarly your bank implements HTTPS across its site because that's vital to their business. But many other companies only implement HTTPS when you're logging into a site, but not for the duration of your visit.

Often what happens is that during login a website will securely transmit your login information, but once you're logged in, your session is no longer secure. A cookie with your login information is saved on your browser so you don't need to keep logging in to browse. Every time you switch pages, that cookie information is transmitted to the web server. That's where Firesheep comes in. Firesheep steals your cookie information and allows another user to take over an account.

I spoke with Chris Palmer, director of technology for the San Francisco based Electronic Frontier Foundation about Firesheep, HTTPS and web security:

LK: Why do we need HTTPS anyhow?

CP: Because it's the best available protocol for web applications that provides any security at all. Remember, HTTPS is the bare minimum baseline for web security.

LK: If it's so vital, why haven't websites focused more on implementing HTTPS across their sites?

CP: There are several reasons.

1. If they are aware of the problem at all, web app developers continue to believe, incorrectly, that passive and/or active network attacks are difficult, expensive, and/or rare. In fact, passive and active network attacks are (and have been for some time; nevermind Firesheep) cheap, easy, and not uncommon. Therefore, developers don't realize they need to seek a solution.

2. Developers and business people incorrectly believe that "encryption is computationally expensive", and that therefore deploying HTTPS would require vastly more server resources. In fact, symmetric encryption performs on par with functions like compression that are universally understood to be affordable; web applications are I/O-bound, not CPU-bound; and most web sites pay an I/O cost far higher than necessary. Although HTTPS does incur some additional network I/O, most HTTP sites do more (or much more) network I/O than is necessary — thus, HTTPS is not the problem.

The result is that, if operators really do care about cost and performance, they can tune their sites to be faster and cheaper to run even with HTTPS.

LK: Is it technically challenging to implement HTTPS?

CP: Not inherently. However, sites that have accumulated "technical debt" may have a high cost of change. The cost is not specific to HTTPS; technically indebted software always has a high cost for ANY change. Developers who labor for 5 – 10 years under the belief that HTTP is secure will have embedded that assumption into the core of their software, and un-doing the mistake can be expensive. But again, that is not specific to HTTPS.

LK: There has recently been talk of Blacksheep, a browser plugin that alerts users when someone on the same network is using Firesheep. Does this offer protection from Firesheep?

CP: No.

LK: Eric Butler, the creator of Firesheep, has opened a can of worms. Is this his fault?

CP: The worms were already legion and crawling around all over the place. Firesheep merely grabs some of the already-present worms and puts them in your cereal. The real problem is that site operators have chosen to pass on the risk of using the Internet to their users, by not deploying a minimum standard of safety engineering. We users, security experts, and security activists should make maximum use of the Firesheep brouhaha to pressure site operators to meet the minimum safety standard.

Actually using Firesheep on non-consenting people is of course unethical, but I would not put the blame for such misuse on the Firesheep developers.

LK: What can we do to protect ourselves while surfing the web on open Wi-Fi networks?

CP: HTTPS Everywhere attempts to make maximal use of HTTPS for some sites that make HTTPS service available, and the latest release also secures the cookies for some sites. However, be aware that HTTPS Everywhere is necessarily limited; basically it is working in spite of site operators who have chosen not to deploy HTTPS correctly or completely.

This is why EFF, Access Now, and others urge people to contact site operators and demand HTTPS service. I would hold GitHub.com up as an example of how operators should respond to the news that HTTP is unsafe.

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Richard Lowenthal is CEO of charging company, Coulomb Technologies. Photo: Andrea Kissack

Detroit has been at the center of the country’s auto industry ever since Henry Ford rolled his first Model T off the assembly line in 1908. But as hard times have fallen on America’s Rust Belt, there is a new region hoping to give Detroit a run for its money. Amidst start-up companies and corporate office parks, clean tech entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are plugging into an emerging electric car industry. Andrea Kissack visited several local EV companies.

Tesla Motors

The battery factory of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto is the cleanest factory I’ve ever seen. It looks more like a sterile biotech lab. J.B. Straubel is taking me on a tour. He’s the Chief Technical Officer and one of Tesla’s founders.

With its Roadster sports car, which does 0 to 60 in less than four seconds, the company has made electric cars seem…sexy. A range of more than 200 miles has made Tesla’s batteries the bench mark for electric vehicles. But it all comes at a price. A stripped down Tesla Roadster starts at 109,000 dollars. Straubel points out a big black box at a work station in front of us. It’s one of Tesla’s battery packs. “It’s not very exciting on the outside, but that’s what powers the Roadster. It's about 1,000 pounds,” says Straubel. As we dodge an approaching forklift, Straubel makes sure to point out that Tesla is not only building battery packs for its own cars but selling them worldwide.

Tesla Headquarters in Palo Alto. Photo Credit, Andrea Kissack

Tesla Motors has just taken over the shuttered NUMMI auto plant in Fremont where it will build it’s next EV. The cheaper, longer range Model S Sedan is a four door car with a range of up to 300 miles and a price tag of about 60,000. In the midst of high unemployment in Silicon Valley, the company is hiring. Hoping to expand from 800 to 2000 employees over the next two years. Telsa has received an infusion of cash from its CEO and co-founder, Elon Musk. Musk made his fortune helping to start Pay Pal. Other companies are also chipping in, including Google.

Google

I met up with Dan Reicher, one of the leaders of Google’s Green Energy Team, at the company’s EV charging docks on the sprawling Google campus in Mountain View. "We think EVs offer so many advantages in terms of environment economy and security that we though we should put some of our investor dollars into those kinds of companies,” says Reicher. Reicher is surrounded by eight Priuses that the company has converted after market into plug-ins. The fleet is used by employees to carpool to work.

Hacking hybrid Priuses and charging them under a solar carport is the kind of garage startup mentality that has given Silicon Valley its innovator reputation. “What’s exciting here at Google is just very smart engineers who say, we can do that. You got a problem? We’ll figure out a way to solve it. You got an opportunity? We’ll engineer a way to take advantage of it,” Reicher says.

Charging Companies

It’s not just venture capital that’s flowing into EV related companies. The Obama Administration is spending 2.4 billion dollars to try to revitalize the industry. The money is going toward research to make longer lasting, cheaper batteries as well as into creating a charging infrastructure. Jonathan Read is CEO of ECOtality. The company has received 100-million dollars in stimulus funds and is giving away its smart chargers in some cities in an effort to invigorate the market. Read just moved his company from Arizona to San Francisco to be closer to the action. He tells me, “These are not your father’s chargers.” Read says his sleek, black and white chargers, named “Blink,” are quite intelligent. “They have all the telecommunications capability in them. And all of this is based on a big network of chargers being interconnected talking to each other and being able to talk to the utilities,” says Read. Like other EV-related businesses, including charging companies Coulomb and The Better Place, ECOtality is hiring. The company has plans to add 1,200 jobs over the next year.

Silicon Valley Culture

There are, of course, areas outside of Silicon Valley working on the electric car including advanced battery research out of Boston and Wisconsin. Nissan’s Leaf will be manufactured in Tennessee and the Chevy Volt will be built in Michigan. But the new automobile of the 21st century is likely to benefit from the culture of Silicon Valley, where people are used to taking a chip, a cell, an idea and working on it until it becomes something big.

Within these regions, the top selling electric and plug in hybrid sales are coming from: China, Japan, France, Germany, U.S.

Listen to Silicon Valley: The New Detroit? radio report.

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Google Mars view from the slopes of the Olympus Mons caldera. Credit: Google Earth

I was sitting at my computer the other day, quietly exploring minute details of the surface of planet Mars, when I realized once again that in my lifetime planetary exploration has gone from telescopic-view-only to robotic rovers poking microscopes close up at Martian geology!

Did I say quietly exploring the surface of Mars? Yes I did—and you can, too. First of all, if you're not familiar with Google Earth, please go and google Google Earth and get your free download today (this is NOT a sales pitch!). A modestly powered computer with a decent graphics card is all you need to probe every nook and cranny of planet Earth, sometimes to the detail of spotting people walking in the streets….

But there's a magic button on Google Earth (it looks like planet Saturn, for some reason) that instantly transports you to planet Mars—Google Mars, that is. It's a simple button click to explore Mars, Google Earth style.

This detailed digital Mars has been created with all of the data collected by the fleet of robots we've sent—from Viking to Mars Global Surveyor to Mars Odyssey to Mars Express to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and of course Pathfinder, Phoenix, and the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

First on my itinerary was Olympus Mons, that extinct, Arizona-sized shield volcano that rises 15 miles above the average global terrain. Swooping into the San Francisco Bay-sized caldera, I got a sense of what it would be like to be there, standing on the caldera rim. There were even strips of super-high resolution imagery provided by MRO's HIRISE camera, allowing me to hover maybe a hundred feet above the ground and see rocks and piles of sand!

Next on the list had to be that other famous gargantuan feature, Valles Marineris, the "Grand Canyon of Mars" which, if it were moved to Earth, could stretch from Oakland, California to New York City—putting Grand Canyon National Park within a day's drive of anyone in the US…. Google Earth/Mars has a flight simulation mode that allows you to pilot an aircraft over and through (and into) the terrain.

Like a kid in a science supply shop (okay, that's the kind of kid I was), next I hopped on up to the landing site of NASA's Phoenix lander, on the wide flat plains near the Northern Polar Ice Cap. Yup, those plains are really flat. To my delight, I found that someone had inserted a panoramic picture taken by the orbiting MRO spacecraft when it captured Phoenix descending through the atmosphere.

Onward, planetary explorer…. I had to feel—not just see, but feel—what the landscapes that Spirit and Opportunity have been exploring for 5 years are like. On Spirit's side of the globe, Gusev Crater, I poked about the Columbia Hills, following in the tracks of the robot. Over at Opportunity's digs, I dropped into Victoria Crater, enveloping myself in "Street View"-style panoramas that almost set my feet down on Martian soil.

Okay, I could go on telling you about my adventures on Mars for days—but since you can do it yourself now, I'll let you go to it. Have fun, and send back a postcard! (Which, by the way, you can do from Google Mars….)

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