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The Difference Between 4G and LTE Explained

John Martellaro ·

We live in our iPhone. Almost. And every day, we use the wireless communication technologies called 4G and LTE. But what do those terms really mean? What’s the difference between them? How do we interpret our iPhone’s display?  This article nicely explains it all. It’s an easy-to-read primer on the tech we use every day

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American Data Leak Happened Yet Again

Andrew Orr ·

Thanks to marketing firm Exactis based in Florida, the private data of millions of Americans has been leaked yet again. This new American data leak comprised of 2 terabytes of data that includes phone numbers, home addressees, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name in the database.

“It seems like this is a database with pretty much every US citizen in it,” says Troia, who is the founder of his own New York-based security company, Night Lion Security. Troia notes that almost every person he’s searched for in the database, he’s found. And when WIRED asked him to find records for a list of 10 specific people in the database, he very quickly found six of them. “I don’t know where the data is coming from, but it’s one of the most comprehensive collections I’ve ever seen,” he says.

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Facebook, Google, Microsoft Use Harmful Privacy Practices

Andrew Orr ·

The BBC reports that Facebook, Google, and Microsoft use harmful privacy practices against users when it comes to privacy settings. They’re called dark patterns, and they are designed to nudge people away from turning on privacy settings, but give them an illusion of control at the same time.

For example, Facebook warns anyone who wishes to disable facial recognition that doing so means that the firm “won’t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo to impersonate you”.

“And Google’s privacy dashboard promises to let the user easily delete data, but the dashboard turns out to be difficult to navigate, more resembling a maze than a tool for user control,” it added.

Microsoft received praise for giving equal weight to privacy-friendly and unfriendly options in its set-up process in Windows 10.

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Blue Screen Light From Phones is Making Us Miserable

Andrew Orr ·

Writing for FastCoDesign, Amber Case writes how the blue light that iPhones give off make us miserable by messing with our circadian rhythms. iPhones and Macs can counteract this with Night Shift, but is that enough? We should look to the military, which uses orange for dense information displays.

[Harvard researchers] found that blue light suppressed melatonin for about twice as long as the green light and shifted circadian rhythms by twice as much (3 hours compared with 1.5 hours). And worse, it’s been linked in recent studies to an increased risk of obesity and some cancers.

Airplane cockpits, submarines, and other military-grade systems are specifically designed for information density, with primary, secondary and tertiary information sources. A key difference in all of these interfaces is color–by and large, many military displays are deep red or orange.