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Toshiba Adds Two-Way Wi-Fi To SD Card
judgecorp writes "Toshiba has announced an SD card with Wi-Fi. This is an advance on previous products such as the Eye-Fi Pro X2, as it allows two-way transfers over Wi-Fi. This will be a very convenient feature. It has been labelled a security worry — but most of us already have cameras with wireless connections ... called phones."
We may all already have phones - but this would be invaluable for someone who takes a professional-quality image or video of say, law enforcement. Any data recorded stands a better chance of being immediately put out of reach from your average plod
"You want me to erase all the evidence I just recorded of you officer? Of course."
How would this work?
SD cards are just block storage. Surely it wouldn't modify the underlying filesystem while being connected to a host? Wouldn't that potentially corrupt the filesystem?
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
And WiFi helps this how? It's not like there's an open WiFi available at the average photo scenery.
what is best current cameraphone? It is N8.
and it is terrible camera.
- limited to 28mm wide = terrible for person photographing (you want 50mm, 85mm or 110mm usually) and even for most landscape situations (you want to zoom on those as well)
- no macro function at all. macro means at least 1:1 ration and N8 has only a close-up functionality.
- Almost infinite DOF, even with 2.8f what means no great videos, potrait or even landscape photos. only because camera is build to so small case that you are forced to work at limits of physics unless you can build case to much deeper.
no matter who made the lens or how many megapixels, N8 camera is almost unusable when compared even to pocket cameras.
Wow! 2 way WiFi you mean it sends as well as receives?
So your camera is an orange?
No, what it means is that you can have a scheme something like:
What this means is that a photographer can shoot until their battery runs out while a nearby notebook or WiFi enabled SAN device records the images. Instead of being limited to 32 GB, you can happily fill a terabyte drive or more.
Or if you're concerned about the data's safety locally (journalist working in a dangerous area, someone taking pictures of authorities who might take the camera away) you can even set the device that's receiving the images to upload into a remote FTP or some kind of cloud based service.
Or am I missing something?
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
No, but it make it much faster and simpler to download the photos to your laptop. Or possibly even to upload them to your server via McDonald's or Starbucks (free wifi for the win).
even the best cellphone camera is a toy compared to what a pro or semi pro would be using
I agree, but we should be careful not to underestimate cellphone cameras, they can be surprisingly good:
iPhone @ New York streets
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonatasluzia/6103884318/
http://365iphone.blogspot.com/2011/08/1382010.html
http://365iphone.blogspot.com/2011/08/2882011.html
http://365iphone.blogspot.com/2011/08/2382011_24.html
http://365iphone.blogspot.com/2011/08/2082011.html
http://365iphone.blogspot.com/2011/08/1782011_17.html
http://365iphone.blogspot.com/2011/07/1872011_18.html
I see that they put "pro" in the name (Eye-Fi Pro X2).... there is nothing "professional" about it. Both Canon and Nikons top range (professional) cameras use only Compact Flash. This card should be called the "Eye-Fi Semi-Pro/Noob X2"
http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/air-1-3-apples.html
I think everyone's missing the point regarding the meaning of that quote.... I took it as the OP saying the following - "there has been potential security worries flagged up by people regarding having WiFi enabled SD (I suppose especially 2-way ones), however this technology has existed for years in phones, and whilst security can be a worry, it can be mitigated with proper management".
While that may have been out 10 years ago, it will not fit in typical camera SD card slots because it is too long, and therefore is unusable for cameras where the card slot is enclosed. In addition, this has storage capabilities as well, as opposed to simply being a SD form factor for a wifi adapter.
I think the higher security worry should be that this could be used to silently plug a pre-configured Wifi device on a PC. What if you make it discreet, using some sort of rootkit and use a program to extract data from the device - and the networks it has access to?
People already use this today, see Stuxnet. This would allow for an extra communication device and could come handy. You'd avoid wired networks security measures, and short of scambling wireless frequencies or scanning for odd signals, which not many companies do because they have no reason to, you're defenseless. Scary.
I just reached into my desk drawer and pulled out my SD card with built-in 2 way WiFi that I bought years ago. How is this new?
I'm just saying that comparing (example) my Iphone 4 camera to a digital SLR is like apples to oranges.
"Apples" to Oranges? Hmmm.......
;-)
FWIW, Apples' phones may be restricted by their being stuck in a mobile phone, but so are Oranges'.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Actually, cell phones are a much more serious threat as far as security goes. Sure you can hook a 1.4x teleconverter to a 2x teleconverter to a 500mm lens and be taking pictures from a quarter mile away, but you still need to be close enough to have an unobstructed line of site, which is tough and while you're doing it you're going to have all sorts of folks wondering why you're using bird photography gear in an urban environment. And have to answer questions when the police confront you for being suspicious.
A cameraphone requires that you be a lot closer, but it fits in your pocket and if you're doing it correctly it's likely that nobody is even going to notice that you're taking photos.
These devices are primarily for studio work. Previously the work would be done tethered to a computer, but now they can do it wirelessly using a WiFi device. It's nice in that it makes it a bit easier to move around in the studio, but this technology is unlikely to be of much value outside of a studio environment.
yea and when compact flash was king in PDA's you could get wifi, ethernet, gps, modems you name it
no one even makes compact flash anymore, besides its just an ide interface not magic
SDIO Wi-fi cards have been around for ages; I remember trying to find one for my Palm Treo 650 to get it online and not being able to afford it.
one
two
Shoot first, upload later.
Yes, and this manufacturer has been making devices like this for years. What's special is that it's compatible with standards slots and works bidirectionally.
That would be, to descend into the vernacular, "fucking SWEET".
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
BACK THEN:
What Sandisk did 10 years ago was a network card running over a SPI bus. (It's just like you classic network card, but over an SDIO slots' bus instead of PCIe or USB)
That means that, using correct drivers, a PalmOS or a WindowsCE PDA could use the card to access WiFi network. (At a time where most built-in options were IrDA and maybe bluetooth for the top-level PDAs).
I did use similar card to get WiFi access on my Plam Tungsten T3 and Tapwave Zodiac.
They are similar to the CF Wifi cards for PDA (which are WiFi adapter, running over an IDE/ATAPI/Compact Flash/16bit PC card Bus). Psion used such WiFi CF modules.
Later models also added memory as an extra functionality. Using only 1 single slot, you got a WiFi adapter *AND* a few megabyte of Flash, both packaged inside a SD-Card.
WHEREAS:
The WiFi SD cards that started appearing since a couple of year like the Eye-Fi series are an entirely different beast. Ten years ago, the most you could embed into such a piece of plastic was a network controller. Today, inside an SD Card package, you could even fit a system-on-a-chip. That means that the SD card it self contains some logic. You pop-up the card into any SD-card enabled device, and the SD-card's onboard electronic is able to connect and upload pictures on its own. Without need of any support from the device (except, well at some point of time you need to set the configuration. But you could do that from a supported device, say a Windows Laptop with a special SDIO-to-USB adapter. And then plug it into a unsupported device). Whereas older cards were "just" Wifi adapter, with the host device (usually a PDA with proper drivers) doing all the work, the modern WiFi SD cards are autonomous.
A Toshiba or EyeFi card is to a Sandisk, exactly the same as what KillerNic and Intel's AMT are to plain old network card. Both are connected to a network, but the modern devices contain enough logic to be able to do things on their own.
Or if you prefer, these modern WiFi cards contain their very own simplified file servers, with which you can fetch files written on the flash portion, even if the photo camera into which is inserted has no fucking idea of a network is in the first place.
Similar concept have been available since a long time on CF cards too (except that the first didn't have wifi connection, but simple cabled connection. They were basically dual-ported flashcards, with photocamera writing on one side, and the PC reading on the other). I've only witnessed a couple of very expensive professional gigs running such setups.
What is new in today's card, is that its supposed to be 2-way. The filesystems format used commonly on flash media (FAT32 or more recently FATX and NTFS) are awefully messy pieces of shit. Among other, they cannot be simultaneously written on by two different systems (note that most hi quality modern filesystems neither, unless they were specifically designed for). So usually, the photo camera mounts the card with full read/write access, and the embed wifi sharing system inside the SD card only reads the data. It cannot attempt to write to the card, because the main device, the photocamera, won't be aware of the modifications done by the embed system, won't take them into account, and will end up corrupting the data on the flash.
Thus EyeFi are read-only: they can only autonomously upload/send photo. Not download/recieve them.
I suspect that Toshiba's two-way sharing won't be universally supported by all cameras. It either requires some support from the camera firmware (so the cards can use locks and request-for-refresh to make the camera aware that the data is being rewritten).
Or some full support from the camera (perhaps, with supported camera, the two-way is handled by the camera it self, and the WiFi SD is put into a "dumb netowkr adapter over SPI" mode) - so in fact these camera work exactly like the WiFi enabled ones, except that it uses an external old-style WiFi card instead of its own.
Or some other weird restriction (the phot
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3rd parties did write drivers for other PDAs too back then. Palm had a driver for most Palm OS devices. So the disclaimer isn't 100% correct.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Tethered cell phones/pocket wifi can usually remedy that problem.
Monstar L
The newstaper didn't bother with local storage; it was all being uploaded live all the time. As long as you have connectivity, of course.