The future of cars is connected, which will become increasingly important as more autonomous features become standard, requiring cars to communicate with each other while on the road.

Europe just vetoed a proposal to use a new form of WiFi to connect cars in a decentralized manner, rather than cellular-based technologies, like 5G, on European roads. The work is designed to force car makers and technology vendors to choose a single communication standard for European roads, and allow all vehicles to interconnect in the future.

Car makers had argued that while 5G may be interesting in the future, but WiFi is already standardized, and available on the market.

I haven’t owned a car in years, but was surprised when I traveled to North America and rented a car that turned out to be 4G-equipped. Something about the car itself being directly connected to the internet felt creepy, because I couldn’t be sure who it was talking to (almost certainly the insurance company, at the very least!). There is no standardization or rules about the use of 4G in cars, but it’s increasingly becoming common there.

The argument for connecting cars is fairly simple: it promises to offer road safety improvements. If cars can be aware of each other’s location, speed and other information, it’s possible that it could help avoid collisions, or use cloud computing power to help optimize driving conditions.

Car makers in Europe, like Renault and Toyota would prefer to use WiFi, but that wouldn’t provide an internet connection, just localized networking. Daimler, Ford, BMW and Qualcomm prefer 5G, which allows connectivity beyond just the cars close-by. 

But, as you might know if you’ve been reading this for a while, 5G is largely a pipe-dream today. Yes, there have been promising demonstrations in isolated locations, but it’s going to be years before it hits everyone’s pockets. 

A vote for 5G is a vote to delay connected cars entirely, until the technology is widely available and car-ready... but I’d argue standardizing this properly is much more important than rushing it out the door.

HQ Trivia is struggling, plans a subscription service
Once a breakout hit that demonstrated the power of live video on mobile, now it’s struggling to even get downloads. It just laid off 20% of staff, and it has plans to launch a $9.99/month subscription.... in order to get higher prizes. Good luck with that!

An Australian ISP got a $380,000 bill for using a block of IPv4 addresses
We ran out of these years ago, so they’re in short supply... but the cost of these is mind-boggling now.

California has a new law that bans bots from politics or advertising products (unless they say they’re a bot)

Connected-device maker, D-Link, has agreed to 10 years of security audits for poor security practices

Long read: A deep-dive with Google’s engineers about Android Q, and the future of updates