The Era Of Wireless And The Wiry Household

These days we are much worried about electromagnetic pollution around us emanating from all kind of wireless devices.  And, yet, search an average household and you are very likely to find a basket or box full of a variety of wires.  Most of these will be chargers for various devices.  Then you will have earphones and headphones.  You will also find data cables for connecting portable devices to a bulkier computer or laptop.

Apart from these, there are those well known wires coming in from the external world too.  Apart from the electricity power cable there is one for broadband internet-cum-telephone cable and one for the TV (unless you have IP TV.)  While a complete wiring schema for distributing the electrical power throughout the house has been around for quite some time, that for the other two cables is yet to become mainstream.

For telephones, the problem has been mitigated by cordless phones with multiple handsets.  Similarly wired LANs have disappeared from households with the advent of wireless routers (though the issue of relocating your router remains.)  I wonder if something similar can be done for the TV too, so that you could be free to move your TV to any location in your house with the requirement of just a power point.

With the current state of technology, the most entanglement is found near the TV installation in the house.  Though these days TVs in many homes have a decorative wooden mounting which also serves to conceal this entanglement, if you look carefully you will find the following:

• Power cable for the TV.
• Power cable for the STB.
• The incoming TV cable.
• The cable(s) connecting TV and STB.
• If you have a DVD player too, power and data cables for the same.
• If you have a Chromecast, Roku or a similar device, a power cable and a connector for the same.
• An extension board and its lead.
• Wires going out to the home theater system.

The next jumble will be found close to the router.  Here you will find the following:

• Incoming cable for internet and telephone connected to a splitter.
• Two cables coming out from the splitter, one for the telephone and the other for the router.
• A power cable for the cordless telephone.
• A power cable for the router.

And then it is very likely that there will be a charging station with an extension board which can accommodate one charger for devices with mini-USB, one for Apple devices and one for the laptop.

Some people bring their devices from abroad where the plugs are different.  Hence you are also likely to find a collection of adapters or universal plugtops.

Needless to say that this paraphernalia does require some time for management and proper stock taking.  The management includes straightening out tangled leads and earphone wires as also finding a few missing cables and chargers.

This state of affairs is calling out for some more innovations, the foremost being a self charging battery like the self winding watches of the yesteryear.  Technologists should also ponder if is it possible to transmit energy through narrow laserlike beams and have reflectors and beam-seeking receptors. To start with this transmission could be for low power requirements like charging mobiles and tablets.  

It is heartening to note that these days many gadgets are coming with power adapters that accept input from 100 to 240 volts.  This has eliminated the need for step-up and step-down adapters.  Bluetooth too is a big help as it eliminates the need for a connector cable in many cases.

Ideas are invited for the least wiry household set up.

Malware Affects Routers!

I came across a strange case of computer malware recently.  On my laptop many sites started downloading slowly and also flashing a message saying "Your flash player is out of date. Update it now."  If you chose to update, it will take you to a page that will tell you that it was a different build of the player that had many advantages over the original one from Adobe.  Very gentlemanly! It told you it was not the original!  It went on to say that if you were not happy with this build you could uninstall it anytime by going to such and such menu and option.  Again, very gentlemanly and disarming albeit a little too much and so a little suspicious.  It also had e-Trust logo appearing at the bottom on the right.  But this logo was just an image and was not clickable.  If you hovered your mouse pointer on the download button, the URL displayed at the bottom showed that it would download a file named setup.exe!

I closed this tab that looked fishy and gentlemanly in equal measures.  Then I went to Adobe's site to update my flash player.  Lo and behold!  It says that Chrome - the browser that I use - automatically updates the built-in flash player!  Could it be a problem with my browser?  I opened IE but the behavior of websites remained the same.

Then came the big shock!  Access to my Google services stopped.  Whenever I tried to open a sub-domain on Google, I got a message that a secure connection to the server was not possible!  Being denied access to Google services is almost as bad as being denied access to your bank accounts.  I was feeling terrible and abandoned my laptop and tried to access my Google account on my Android phone.  There too some server error message was flashed and access denied.  I tried many things including deletion of my Google account on my phone.  But then I was not allowed to add it back for the obvious reason that Google servers were not available!  I used the browser on the phone.  I could visit Google search and Google news but not specific services associated with my account and logging in was not possible for want of a secure connection.  But then I found the same messages about out-of-date flash player appearing in the browser on my phone too!  I jumped to my tab.  And it too was behaving the same way.

I googled and found many people suggesting the same things that I had tried earlier and also such extreme steps as reloading the operating system or flashing your phone to factory settings!  However I was lucky to reach a site which suggested that in such a case the malware is probably resident in the router.  This sounded logical as all the devices were affected in the same way.

So I put a pin in the hole on the router and reset it.  Next I needed the password on the router to set up the wireless.  But it had been restored to factory default.  I was glad to have a 3G data connection on my phone.  I browsed and found out the default password for my router, set up the wifi again, and presto!  everything was back to normal and the internet access speed improved too.

Now, dear readers, I am very curious to find out what kind of malware was that setup.exe and what could be the total number of malware targeting routers.  Any information on this topic will be appreciated.  And if you are innocent of such knowledge, beware of any message in your Chrome browser telling you to update your flash player!