Research by Google has confirmed that more people than ever before now use sites with the HTTPS protocol. Indeed, the company’s figures show that over half of the total pages loaded by users on desktop Chrome use HTTPS. This also makes up over two thirds of the total browsing time of the users in question. So how do they know all this? Well, the fact is that Google has been tracking the use of HTTPS over Chrome since 2015. The latest figures are shown in the company’s transparency report. This shows the impressive increase in the use...
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A survey recently carried out by a research team from King’s College in London has shown that people over the age of 50 could benefit from playing online games to train their brain. The study group of almost 7,000 people was brought together by the BBC, the Medical Research Council and the Alzheimer’s Council. They were studied for a total of 6 months, with tests carried out on their cognitive skills at the start, after 3 months and right at the end of the period. Playing Games for 10 Minutes at a Time One group of participants...
If you have ever wondered how many Wi-Fi hotspots in the world then some recent research from Wi-Fi provider iPass could go some way to answering the question. Their new study says that in the next 4 years the number of hotspots around the globe will increase to over 340 million. This would work out as one for every 20 people on the planet. At the moment, there are expected to be 47.7 million Wi-Fi hotspots in the world by the end of 2014. This works out as a hotspot for every 150 people on Earth, while there is one for every 11 people...
Internet users in London will be pleased to see that the capital will soon be a 5G city. If you thought that 4G was fast then wait until you see how fast 5G is. London Mayor Boris Johnson has said that the city will be ready for 5G by 2020. This is expected to make it the first major city to offer a 5G mobile network. The scheme is part of the plans to invest in London over the long term in the Infrastructure Plan for London. Johnson is quoted as saying that the UK capital is becoming the “tech capital of Europe”. They want to make...
Another security breach at eBay has led to more than 1,000 customers of Stubhub having their accounts broken into. Unlike the last time though, this problem hasn’t come about through the company’s servers being hacked. Instead, the attacks were carried out with the help of user IDs that the hackers had obtained in other attacks on other sites or directly on people’s computers. It seems that the hackers gathered a large number of user passwords for the site and then started accessing those accounts in 2013. Once they had broken into...
A controversial and secret Facebook experiment has led to criticism of the social media giant. The psychology experiment by Facebook involved them manipulating news items, which were then seen by close to 700,000 people who didn’t know that they were seeing a news feed that had been tampered with. The idea behind this experiment was to see if “exposure to emotions” caused users to then post in a different way. The work was done by Facebook in collaboration with a couple of US universities and they said that it didn’t involve any...
Just when you wondered how else Facebook could make itself a part of your life, it is now going to bring out a mobile app that listens to your music or whatever you are listening to on the TV. The idea is that the app tries to recognise a show or a song and then gives the user the option of publishing the information it brings up on their profile or else for certain friends of theirs to see. The idea behind this is that many people now share details of their favourite TV shows with friends on social media. This is called the second screen...
A new survey has suggested that tablet computers are encouraging more older folk to go online. The annual survey carried out by Ofcom analyses the way Brits spend their time using technology. This year’s report shows that the number of people over the age of 65 going online has risen by more than a quarter, to a new total of 42%. This strong rise has been put down to increased tablet use among more mature users. The number of over 65s using a tablet for going online increased from 5% in 2012 to 17% in 2013. Even so, the over 65s only...
Worrying news has revealed that hundreds of thousands of home routers have been take over by hackers. The total number of routers over the planet which are said to have been attacked runs to over 300,000. This issue has come about become of a loophole in their core software which the hackers have taken advantage of. The huge network of hacker routers was discovered by the security researchers who work as part of Team Cymru. The devices which have been affected are said to be based both in homes and in small businesses all over the world. What...
Have you ever sat there in front of your PC and started complaining about the speed of your internet connection? Of course you have. We all do. There is good news and bad news for anyone who wants access to faster internet. The good news is that some people have created the world’s most rapid internet connection. The bad news is that you can’t use it. It was done in Germany and the speed achieved clocked in at an astonishing 100 Gigabits per second. The work on the lightning fast Wi-Fi was carried out by a group of researchers from...