IDG Contributor Network: Time for digital detox? Searching for Wi-Fi becomes normal vacation behavior

Almost a quarter (21 percent) of Americans would rather give up sex than lose Wi-Fi for a month, and 10 percent would give up a friend than forego wireless connectivity.Those are just two of the findings in a survey conducted by a travel agency that runs digital detox tours.Digital detox vacations are trips where social media, smartphone and camera use is banned by the tour organizers. The idea is that a more in-the-moment experience is obtained when devices aren’t used.Intrepid Travel, which has four detox vacation tours lined up for this upcoming winter season, says there’s a market for vacations free from technology. And to prove it, the company commissioned a study.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Twitter location data reveals users’ homes, workplaces

Geographic location stamps transmitted in tweets can provide enough information for people to deduce where a Twitter user lives and works, say researchers. The deduction occurs through the clustering of the posting locations. The assemblage provides location patterns that provide a good guess as to where the poster spends most of his or her time. When that’s coupled with other data, such as the time of day, non-scientists recruited for the study simply picked out the homes and workplaces of the tweeters, said researchers from MIT and Oxford University in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Twitter location data reveals users’ homes, workplaces

Geographic location stamps transmitted in tweets can provide enough information for people to deduce where a Twitter user lives and works, say researchers. The deduction occurs through the clustering of the posting locations. The assemblage provides location patterns that provide a good guess as to where the poster spends most of his or her time. When that’s coupled with other data, such as the time of day, non-scientists recruited for the study simply picked out the homes and workplaces of the tweeters, said researchers from MIT and Oxford University in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Paper to be an IoT-connected device

Regular paper, of the kind one writes and prints on, can be embedded with radio frequency tags, researchers say. That could ultimately allow internet connectivity.Not only could the internet paper be manufactured with tags added at the mill, but an end user could actually draw the tagged antennas on by hand using conductive ink in a school or the workplace.By responding to commands via gestures, the paper can be made to “do anything from controlling music using a paper baton to live polling in a classroom,” the University of Washington says in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Challenges for IoT: Connectivity, protocols, funding

Connectivity and protocols are the largest technical challenges business people face as they attempt to adopt Internet of Things (IoT) projects, according to a new report.Those connectivity and protocol issue apparently come up in both planning and deployment, and then again in the analysis of IoT data, the study says.The industry survey was performed in Europe recently by U.S.-based PLAT.ONE, a software and industrial solutions firm specializing in IoT development. The survey asked executives what kinds of trouble they experienced with IoT projects.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Low-income neighborhoods have worse cell phone service, study finds

Poor neighborhoods in the U.S. get 15 percent less cell phone coverage than their richer counterparts, a new study has found.This confirms the “existence of a mobile-divide in the U.S.,” say the researchers from Imperial College Business School in an abstract of their paper published in Telecommunications Policy via ScienceDirect.“Operators install two fewer mobile antennas per tract in lower income areas for equal distributions of subscribers,” the London business school says. That’s across the board, and it includes both urban and rural areas. So, it isn’t just a rural-divide issue, the researchers say.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Low-income neighborhoods have worse cell phone service, study finds

IDG Contributor Network: Using radio frequency noise detection to identify and track electronic equipment

One day the inventorying of electronic equipment in the workplace could be accomplished through radio frequency (RF) noise detection rather than labelling and tagging. The concept is based on the fact that all electronics always emit distinct radio noise when they’re running.Those unique RF prints could be used instead of serial numbers or expensive, attached RFID identifying tags and could quickly ID the gear. Even gadgets of exactly the same model type appear unique when analyzed, say researchers (PDF).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Using radio frequency noise detection to identify and track electronic equipment

One day the inventorying of electronic equipment in the workplace could be accomplished through radio frequency (RF) noise detection rather than labelling and tagging. The concept is based on the fact that all electronics always emit distinct radio noise when they’re running.Those unique RF prints could be used instead of serial numbers or expensive, attached RFID identifying tags and could quickly ID the gear. Even gadgets of exactly the same model type appear unique when analyzed, say researchers (PDF).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Skull-produced sounds could replace existing biometric authentication

Are you happy with your on-device biometric fingerprint scanner? I’m not. The scanner on my most recent tablet has failed to unlock the device. The cause then was probably dirty hands coming in from the garage. I disabled that biometric experiment—likely never to be used again.I'm not the only one who sometimes disregards security in favor of ease of use. Half of passwords are more than 5 years old, a report found last year. And three-fourths of those surveyed then said they use duplicate passwords. Clearly not secure. The more complicated and consequently secure one makes the password, though, the harder it is to remember.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Skull-produced sounds could replace existing biometric authentication

Are you happy with your on-device biometric fingerprint scanner? I’m not. The scanner on my most recent tablet has failed to unlock the device. The cause then was probably dirty hands coming in from the garage. I disabled that biometric experiment—likely never to be used again.I'm not the only one who sometimes disregards security in favor of ease of use. Half of passwords are more than 5 years old, a report found last year. And three-fourths of those surveyed then said they use duplicate passwords. Clearly not secure. The more complicated and consequently secure one makes the password, though, the harder it is to remember.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Hit by DDoS? You will likely be struck again

More than half of all DDoS strikes have resulted in some kind of customer data loss, intellectual property theft or disappearance of money, according to a new report from Neustar.It’ll happen again, too. The IT firm also discovered that the vast majority of organizations (82 percent) are attacked again after the first DDoS onslaught.“DDoS attacks continue to pose a legitimate threat as a dangerous weapon used to create chaos and hold organizations hostage,” Neustar says in the report.Not many are “spared,” the security outfit says, and almost half of those blitzed once were thrashed six or more times.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Hit by DDoS? You will likely be struck again

More than half of all DDoS strikes have resulted in some kind of customer data loss, intellectual property theft or disappearance of money, according to a new report from Neustar.It’ll happen again, too. The IT firm also discovered that the vast majority of organizations (82 percent) are attacked again after the first DDoS onslaught.“DDoS attacks continue to pose a legitimate threat as a dangerous weapon used to create chaos and hold organizations hostage,” Neustar says in the report.Not many are “spared,” the security outfit says, and almost half of those blitzed once were thrashed six or more times.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How much will you trust your robot?

Robots will be managed and run by humans, at least to begin with, according an automation expert.And if you're the one controlling them, it begs questions such as how are you going to get along with these contraptions? It also prompts concerns such as how one stops the machine from misunderstanding, says Thomas B. Sheridan, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies humans and automation.Researchers need to become more active in addressing these kinds of questions rather than skimming over potential challenges, says Sheridan. He’s been reading up on the scientific consensuses on the subject and says his peers aren't doing enough research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Who will manage IoT in the enterprise?

Most IT departments throughout enterprises are about to relinquish control of the Internet of Things, a research firm says.IoT will not generally be managed by IT, reckons Bob O’Donnell. His company, TECHnalysis Research, recently completed an online study about which department will be running IoT within organizations.Surprisingly, operations, facilities and manufacturing was the principal selection, the researcher found (with 42 percent). It will be the “most common department to be responsible for IoT projects,” O’Donnell says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: School district repurposes buses as Wi-Fi hotspots

A poverty-stricken school district in Southern California has come up with a novel way to alleviate the lack of internet access for kids in its catchment area. It’s repurposing school buses as internet hotspots.The school buses are parked overnight in impoverished areas where hard-wired broadband Internet access isn’t usually available and students aren’t able to access the internet. Most of the school district’s students reside in stone-broke rural areas and/or reservations.All of the children in the vast, 1,220-square-mile school district qualify for reduced-priced or free meals, says the Office of Educational Technology (OET). And almost half of the students are English-language learners.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Government worst of all industries in cybersecurity, says report

“Government, we have a problem”—to paraphrase the crew of the 1970 moon flight reporting back on Apollo 13’s technical fault. But it sounds about right to describe, in one line, the somewhat frightening state of U.S. government infrastructure—including that of NASA, which is the worst of the federal agencies—exposed recently in a report.Network infrastructure weaknesses and vulnerabilities abound, according to SecurityScorecard.The tip of the iceberg appears to be the now-famous 2015 Office of Personnel Management loss of 21 million people’s Social Security numbers and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Government worst of all industries in cybersecurity, says report

“Government, we have a problem”—to paraphrase the crew of the 1970 moon flight reporting back on Apollo 13’s technical fault. But it sounds about right to describe, in one line, the somewhat frightening state of U.S. government infrastructure—including that of NASA, which is the worst of the federal agencies—exposed recently in a report.Network infrastructure weaknesses and vulnerabilities abound, according to SecurityScorecard.The tip of the iceberg appears to be the now-famous 2015 Office of Personnel Management loss of 21 million people’s Social Security numbers and other Personally Identifiable Information (PII).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ISPs see big ingress by mobile operators for internet, study finds

A massive drop in the numbers of those using desktop computers is shown among the datasets released by the Commerce Department last month.That data, based on July 2015 figures, is just one facet of the extraordinary data dump.More juicy stuff includes that well over half of households (60 percent) who use the internet at home use "mobile internet service" while in the home.The government numbers come from a massive, 53,000-household Computer and Internet Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau last year. The large size of the sample means the numbers are representative of the entire population, the department says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Networked clothing getting closer

Clothes with embroidered electronics that can act as internet-connecting antennas or as health monitors are just around the corner.High-precision embroidered circuits have been woven into fabrics with 0.1mm accuracy in experiments. That kind of precision could allow in-clothing antennas to be matched perfectly to radio waves and for sensors to be incorporated into fabrics in such a way as to feel the same on skin as the base material, scientists from Ohio State University say.The revolutionary “functional textile” medium will be known as “e-textiles,” John Volakis, director of the ElectroScience Laboratory at Ohio State University, said in a news release. His team has developed the precise technique.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here