I've written before about both the desire for universal dc power and more simply universal laptop power at meeting room desks. This week saw the announcement that all the companies selling cell phones in Europe will standardize on a single charging connector, based on micro-USB. (A large number of devices today use the now deprecated Mini-USB plug, and it was close to becoming a standard by default.) As most devices are including a USB plug for data, this is not a big leap, though it turned out a number of devices would not charge from other people's chargers, either from stupidity or malice. (My Motorola RAZR will not charge from a generic USB charger or even an ordinary PC. It needs a special charger with the data pins shorted, or if it plugs into a PC, it insists on a dialog with the Motorola phone tools driver before it will accept a charge. Many suspect this was to just sell chargers and the software.) The new agreement is essentially just a vow to make sure everybody's chargers work with everybody's devices. It's actually a win for the vendors who can now not bother to ship a charger with the phone, presuming you have one or will buy one. It is not required they have the plug -- supplying an adapter is sufficient, as Apple is likely to do. Mp3 player vendors have not yet signed on.

USB isn't a great choice since it only delivers 500ma at 5 volts officially, though many devices are putting 1 amp through it. That's not enough to quickly charge or even power some devices. USB 3.0 officially raised the limit to 900ma, or 4.5 watts.

USB is a data connector with some power provided which has been suborned for charging and power. What about a design for a universal plug aimed at doing power, with data being the secondary goal? Not that it would suck at data, since it's now pretty easy to feed a gigabit over 2 twisted pairs with cheap circuits. Let's look at the constraints

Smart Power

The world's new power connector should be smart. It should offer 5 volts at low current to start, to power the electronics that will negotiate how much voltage and current will actually go through the connector. It should also support dumb plugs, which offer only a resistance value on the data pins, with each resistance value specifying a commonly used voltage and current level.

Real current would never flow until connection (and ground if needed) has been assured. As such, there is minimal risk of arcing or electric shock through the plug. The source can offer the sorts of power it can deliver (AC, DC, what voltages, what currents) and the sink (power using device) can pick what it wants from that menu. Sinks should be liberal in what they take though (as they all have become of late) so they can be plugged into existing dumb outlets through simple adapters.

Style of pins

We want low current plugs to be small, and heavy current plugs to be big. I suggest a triangular pin shape, something like what is shown here. In this design, two main pins can only go in one way. The lower triangle is an optional ground -- but see notes on grounding below.

I have written before about how overzealous design of cryptographic protocols often results in their non-use. Protocol engineers are trained to be thorough and complete. They rankle at leaving in vulnerabilities, even against the most extreme threats. But the perfect is often the enemy of the good. None of the various protocols to encrypt E-mail have ever reached even a modicum of success in the public space. It's a very rare VoIP call (other than Skype) that is encrypted.

The two most successful encryption protocols in the public space are SSL/TLS (which provide the HTTPS system among other things) and Skype. At a level below that are some of the VPN applications and SSH.

TLS (the successor to SSL) is very widely deployed but still very rarely used. Only the most tiny fraction of web sessions are encrypted. Many sites don't support it at all. Some will accept HTTPS but immediately push you back to HTTP. In most cases, sites will have you log in via HTTPS so your password is secure, and then send you back to unencrypted HTTP, where anybody on the wireless network can watch all your traffic. It's a rare site that lets you conduct your entire series of web interactions entirely encrypted. This site fails in that regard. More common is the use of TLS for POP3 and IMAP sessions, both because it's easy, there is only one TCP session, and the set of users who access the server is a small and controlled set. The same is true with VPNs -- one session, and typically the users are all required by their employer to use the VPN, so it gets deployed. IPSec code exists in many systems, but is rarely used in stranger-to-stranger communications (or even friend-to-friend) due to the nightmares of key management.

TLS's complexity makes sense for "sessions" but has problems when you use it for transactions, such as web hits. Transactions want to be short. They consist of a request, and a response, and perhaps an ACK. Adding extra back and forths to negotiate encryption can double or triple the network cost of the transactions.

Skype became a huge success at encrypting because it is done with ZUI -- the user is not even aware of the crypto. It just happens. SSH takes an approach that is deliberately vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks on the first session in order to reduce the UI, and it has almost completely replaced unencrypted telnet among the command line crowd.

I write about this because now Google is finally doing an experiment to let people have their whole gmail session be encrypted with HTTPS. This is great news. But hidden in the great news is the fact that Google is evaluating the "cost" of doing this. There also may be some backlash if Google does this on web search, as it means that ordinary sites will stop getting to see the search query in the "Referer" field until they too switch to HTTPS and Google sends traffic to them over HTTPS. (That's because, for security reasons, the HTTPS design says that if I made a query encrypted, I don't want that query to be repeated in the clear when I follow a link to a non-encrypted site.) Many sites do a lot of log analysis to see what search terms are bringing in traffic, and may object when that goes away.

I'm really enjoying my Canon EOS 5D Mark II, especially its ability to shoot at 3200 ISO without much noise, allowing it to be used indoors, handheld without flash. But as fine as this (and other high end) cameras are, I still see a raft of features missing that I hope will appear in future cameras.

Our world has not rid itself of atrocity and genocide. What can modern high-tech do to help? In Bosnia, we used bombs. In Rwanda, we did next to nothing. In Darfur, very little. Here's a proposal that seems expensive at first, but is in fact vastly cheaper than the military solutions people have either tried or been afraid to try. It's the sunlight principle.

First, we would mass-produce a special video recording "phone" using the standard parts and tools of the cell phone industry. It would be small, light, and rechargeable from a car lighter plug, or possibly more slowly through a small solar cell on the back. It would cost a few hundred dollars to make, so that relief forces could airdrop tens or even hundreds of thousands of them over an area where atrocity is taking place. (If they are $400/pop, even 100,000 of them is 40 million dollars, a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of military operations.) They could also be smuggled in by relief workers on a smaller scale, or launched over borders in a pinch. Enough of them so that there are so many that anybody performing an atrocity will have to worry that there is a good chance that somebody hiding in bushes or in a house is recording it, and recording their face. This fear alone would reduce what took place.

Once the devices had recorded a video, they would need to upload it. It seems likely that in these situations the domestic cell system would not be available, or would be shut down to stop video uploads. However, that might not be true, and a version that uses existing cell systems might make sense, and be cheaper because the hardware is off the shelf. It is more likely that some other independent system would be used, based on the same technology but with slightly different protocols.

The anti-atrocity team would send aircraft over the area. These might be manned aircraft (presuming air superiority) or they might be very light, autonomous UAVs of the sort that already are getting cheap in price. These UAVs can be small, and not that high-powered, because they don't need to do that much transmitting -- just a beacon and a few commands and ACKs. The cameras on the ground will do the transmitting. In fact, the UAVs could quite possibly be balloons, again within the budget of aid organizations, not just nations.