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  • Eavesdropping on the Brain with 10,000 Electrodes

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    Imagine a portable computer built from a network of 86 billion switches, capable of general intelligence sophisticated enough to build a spacefaring civilization—but weighing just 1.2 to 1.3 kilograms, consuming just 20 watts of power, and jiggling like Jell-O as it moves. There’s one inside your skull right now. It is a breathtaking achievement of biological evolution. But there are no blueprints.

    Now imagine trying to figure out how this wonder of bioelectronics works without a way to observe its microcircuitry in action. That’s like asking a microelectronics engineer to reverse engineer the architecture, microcode, and operating system running on a state-of-the-art processor without the use of a digital logic probe, which would be a virtually impossible task.

    So it’s easy to understand why many of the operational details of humans’ brains (and even the brains of mice and much simpler organisms) remain so mysterious, even to neuroscientists. People often think of technology as applied science, but the scientific study of brains is essentially applied sensor technology. Each invention of a new way to measure brain activity—including scalp electrodes, MRIs, and microchips pressed into the surface of the cortex—has unlocked major advances in our understanding of the most complex, and most human, of all our organs.

    The brain is essentially an electrical organ, and that fact plus its gelatinous consistency pose a hard technological problem. In 2010, I met with leading neuroscientists at the
    Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to explore how we might use advanced microelectronics to invent a new sensor. Our goal: to listen in on the electrical conversations taking place among thousands of neurons at once in any given thimbleful of brain tissue.

    Timothy D. Harris, a senior scientist at HHMI, told me that “we need to record every spike from every neuron” in a localized neural circuit within a freely moving animal. That would mean building a digital probe long enough to reach any part of the thinking organ, but slim enough not to destroy fragile tissues on its way in. The probe would need to be durable enough to stay put and record reliably for weeks or even months as the brain guides the body through complex behaviors.

    For an electrical engineer, those requirements add up to a very tall order. But more than a decade of R&D by a global, multidisciplinary team of engineers, neuroscientists, and software designers has at last met the challenge, producing a remarkable new tool that is now being put to use in hundreds of labs around the globe.

    As
    chief scientist at Imec, a leading independent nanoelectronics R&D institute, in Belgium, I saw the opportunity to extend advanced semiconductor technology to serve broad new swaths of biomedicine and brain science. Envisioning and shepherding the technological aspects of this ambitious project has been one of the highlights of my career.

    We named the system
    Neuropixels because it functions like an imaging device, but one that records electrical rather than photonic fields. Early experiments already underway—including some in humans—have helped explore age-old questions about the brain. How do physiological needs produce motivational drives, such as thirst and hunger? What regulates behaviors essential to survival? How does our neural system map the position of an individual within a physical environment?

    Successes in these preliminary studies give us confidence that Neuropixels is shifting neuroscience into a higher gear that will deliver faster insights into a wide range of normal behaviors and potentially enable better treatments for brain disorders such as epilepsy and
    Parkinson’s disease.

    Version 2.0 of the system, demonstrated last year, increases the sensor count by about an order of magnitude over that of the initial version produced just four years earlier. It paves the way for future brain-computer interfaces that may enable paralyzed people to communicate at speeds approaching those of normal conversation. With version 3.0 already in early development, we believe that Neuropixels is just at the beginning of a long road of exponential Moore’s Law–like growth in capabilities.

    In the 1950s, researchers used a primitive electronic sensor to identify the misfiring neurons that give rise to Parkinson’s disease. During the 70 years since, the technology has come far, as the microelectronics revolution miniaturized all the components that go into a brain probe: from the electrodes that pick up the tiny voltage spikes that neurons emit when they fire, to the amplifiers and digitizers that boost signals and reduce noise, to the thin wires that transmit power into the probe and carry data out.

    By the time I started working with HHMI neuroscientists in 2010, the best electrophysiology probes, made by
    NeuroNexus and Blackrock Neurotech, could record the activity of roughly 100 neurons at a time. But they were able to monitor only cells in the cortical areas near the brain’s surface. The shallow sensors were thus unable to access deep brain regions—such as the hypothalamus, thalamus, basal ganglia, and limbic system—that govern hunger, thirst, sleep, pain, memory, emotions, and other important perceptions and behaviors. Companies such as Plexon make probes that reach deeper into the brain, but they are limited to sampling 10 to 15 neurons simultaneously. We set for ourselves a bold goal of improving on that number by one or two orders of magnitude.

    We needed a way to place thousands of micrometer-size electrodes directly in contact with vertical columns of neurons, anywhere in the brain.

    To understand how brain circuits work, we really need to record the individual, rapid-fire activity of hundreds of neurons as they exchange information in a living animal. External electrodes on the skull don’t have enough spatial resolution, and functional MRI technology lacks the speed necessary to record fast-changing signals. Eavesdropping on these conversations requires being in the room where it happens: We needed a way to place thousands of micrometer-size electrodes directly in contact with vertical columns of neurons, anywhere in the brain. (Fortuitously, neuroscientists have discovered that when a brain region is active, correlated signals pass through the region both vertically and horizontally.)

    These functional goals drove our design toward long, slender silicon shanks packed with electrical sensors. We soon realized, however, that we faced a major materials issue. We would need to use Imec’s
    CMOS fab to mass-produce complex devices by the thousands to make them affordable to research labs. But CMOS-compatible electronics are rigid when packed at high density.

    The brain, in contrast, has the same elasticity as Greek yogurt. Try inserting strands of angel-hair pasta into yogurt and then shaking them a few times, and you’ll see the problem. If the pasta is too wet, it will bend as it goes in or won’t go in at all. Too dry, and it breaks. How would we build shanks that could stay straight going in yet flex enough inside a jiggling brain to remain intact for months without damaging adjacent brain cells?

    Experts in brain biology suggested that we use gold or platinum for the electrodes and an
    organometallic polymer for the shanks. But none of those are compatible with advanced CMOS fabrication. After some research and lots of engineering, my Imec colleague Silke Musa invented a form of titanium nitride—an extremely tough electroceramic—that is compatible with both CMOS fabs and animal brains. The material is also porous, which gives it a low impedance; that quality is very helpful in getting currents in and clean signals out without heating the nearby cells, creating noise, and spoiling the data.

    Thanks to an enormous amount of materials-science research and some techniques borrowed from
    microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), we are now able to control the internal stresses created during the deposition and etching of the silicon shanks and the titanium nitride electrodes so that the shanks consistently come out almost perfectly straight, despite being only 23 micrometers (µm) thick. Each probe consists of four parallel shanks, and each shank is studded with 1,280 electrodes. At 1 centimeter in length, the probes are long enough to reach any spot in a mouse’s brain. Mouse studies published in 2021 showed that Neuropixels 2.0 devices can collect data from the same neurons continuously for over six months as the rodents go about their lives.

    The thousandfold difference in elasticity between CMOS-compatible shanks and brain tissue presented us with another major problem during such long-term studies: how to keep track of individual neurons as the probes inevitably shift in position relative to the moving brain. Neurons are 20 to 100 µm in size; each square pixel (as we call the electrodes) is 15 µm across, small enough so that it can record the isolated activity of a single neuron. But over six months of jostling activity, the probe as a whole can move within the brain by up to 500 µm. Any particular pixel might see several neurons come and go during that time.

    The 1,280 electrodes on each shank are individually addressable, and the four parallel shanks give us an effectively 2D readout, which is quite analogous to a CMOS camera image, and the inspiration for the name Neuropixels. That similarity made me realize that this problem of neurons shifting relative to pixels is directly analogous to image stabilization. Just like the subject filmed by a shaky camera, neurons in a chunk of brain are correlated in their electrical behavior. We were able to adapt knowledge and algorithms developed years ago for fixing camera shake to solve our problem of probe shake. With the stabilization software active, we are now able to apply automatic corrections when neural circuits move across any or all of the four shanks.

    Version 2.0 shrank the headstage—the board that sits outside the skull, controls the implanted probes, and outputs digital data—to the size of a thumbnail. A single headstage and base can now support two probes, each extending four shanks, for a total of 10,240 recording electrodes. Control software and apps written by a fast-growing user base of Neuropixels researchers allow real-time, 30-kilohertz sampling of the firing activity of 768 distinct neurons at once, selected at will from the thousands of neurons touched by the probes. That high sampling rate, which is 500 times as fast as the 60 frames per second typically recorded by CMOS imaging chips, produces a flood of data, but the devices cannot yet capture activity from every neuron contacted. Continued advances in computing will help us ease those bandwidth limitations in future generations of the technology.

    In just four years, we have nearly doubled the pixel density, doubled the number of pixels we can record from simultaneously, and increased the overall pixel count more than tenfold, while shrinking the size of the external electronics by half. That Moore’s Law–like pace of progress has been driven in large part by the use of commercial-scale CMOS and MEMS fabrication processes, and we see it continuing.

    A next-gen design, Neuropixels 3.0, is already under development and on track for release around 2025, maintaining a four-year cadence. In 3.0, we expect the pixel count to leap again, to allow eavesdropping on perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 neurons. We are also aiming to add probes and to triple or quadruple the output bandwidth, while slimming the base by another factor of two.

    That Moore’s Law–like pace of progress has been driven in large part by the use of commercial-scale CMOS fabrication processes.

    Just as was true of microchips in the early days of the semiconductor industry, it’s hard to predict all the applications Neuropixels technology will find. Adoption has skyrocketed since 2017. Researchers at more than 650 labs around the world now use Neuropixels devices, and a
    thriving open-source community has appeared to create apps for them. It has been fascinating to see the projects that have sprung up: For example, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle recently used Neuropixels to create a database of activity from 100,000-odd neurons involved in visual perception, while a group at Stanford University used the devices to map how the sensation of thirst manifests across 34 different parts of the mouse brain.

    We have begun fabricating longer probes of up to 5 cm and have defined a path to probes of 15 cm—big enough to reach the center of a human brain. The
    first trials of Neuropixels in humans were a success, and soon we expect the devices will be used to better position the implanted stimulators that quiet the tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease, with 10-µm accuracy. Soon, the devices may also help identify which regions are causing seizures in the brains of people with epilepsy, so that corrective surgery eliminates the problematic bits and no more.

    Two long and slender devices have delicate wires at left, tape-like connectors at center, and circuit boards at right. The top device is bigger and has one delicate wire, the bottom device is smaller and has four delicate wires.
    The first Neuropixels device [top] had one shank with 966 electrodes. Neuropixels 2.0 [bottom] has four shanks with 1,280 electrodes each. Two probes can be mounted on one headstage.Imec

    Future generations of the technology could play a key role as sensors that enable people who become “locked in” by neurodegenerative diseases or traumatic injury to communicate at speeds approaching those of typical conversation. Every year, some
    64,000 people worldwide develop motor neuron disease, one of the more common causes of such entrapment. Though a great deal more work lies ahead to realize the potential of Neuropixels for this critical application, we believe that fast and practical brain-based communication will require precise monitoring of the activity of large numbers of neurons for long periods of time.

    An electrical, analog-to-digital interface from wetware to hardware has been a long time coming. But thanks to a happy confluence of advances in neuroscience and microelectronics engineering, we finally have a tool that will let us begin to reverse engineer the wonders of the brain.

    This article appears in the June 2022 print issue as “Eavesdropping on the Brain.”

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  • How Technology Has Transformed Education Over the Past Two Decades

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    It is remarkable how drastically information technology has altered schooling during the past two decades. Internet use was widespread in 1998, but its promise as a catalyst for online education had not yet been understood. With totally online programs flourishing in today’s schools and institutions, let’s highlight how the previous two decades have made education more effective and accessible to a greater number of individuals than ever before.

    Introduction of Online Education

    Late in the 1990s, the first online education courses were distributed to students on self-contained discs, similar to how correspondence courses were previously delivered. This was of minimal use and offered little assistance to the students enrolled in the classes. However, it was sometimes the only choice for many students, including parents with young children and people with disabilities, to continue their education.

    Early in the twenty-first century, as internet speeds increased and apps such as Blackboard became popular on college campuses, the possibility of studying entirely online increased significantly. Today’s online students are able to receive an education of the same caliber as any on-campus student.

    The Online Learning Environment

    If you have never taken an online course before, you may question how students are able to get the same level of knowledge as those who attend classes on campus. It all begins with online syllabi, pre-recorded lectures, and live teleconference conversations. Oftentimes, course readings can be digitized or offered as interactive software to instruct students on the technical parts of the course.

    The Canvas learning management system has evolved into a method for integrating all coursework in a manner that is specific to the course being taken. Remote consultations with professors provide students with any further assistance they may require, and most exams may be done from the convenience of home or a nearby library. When all of these factors are paired with the capacity to engage with other students through online forums, online education may deliver the same level of education as on-campus courses.

    The Advantages of Online Education

    There are other advantages of online education that you may not have considered while deciding between online and on-campus degree programs. Even if you live far from campus or in a location-restricted circumstance, you will still be allowed to attend the university of your choosing.

    It is also beneficial if you have a full-time job and can only complete studies at odd hours when there are no planned classes. Online learning may give more direct means of accommodation for persons with impairments, allowing them to overcome obstacles that have hindered their progress. If you are a self-motivated individual with the capacity to work alone, you may want to enroll in online college courses.

    Online Learning Creates New Employment Opportunities

    The ability to operate a computer proficiently is rapidly becoming a need in the modern labor market. Employers are increasingly depending on services like Slack to manage processes and keep staff informed. The ability to handle an online course will provide you with a head start on these new job challenges.

    Due to the increasing prevalence of remote work and online projects, in which stakeholders collaborate from different cities and states, online education may equip you with the abilities to hit the ground running when you get your first job. What was once referred to as “computer literacy” is now a requirement for practically all job applicants, and in certain circumstances, such abilities will be assumed. 

    What Can You Discover Through Online Programs?

    In many employment categories that you may have assumed required on-campus training, online programs may bring chances you did not expect. Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in information technology online may equip students for lucrative careers in cloud computing, web design, cybersecurity, and software development. Additionally, highly technical areas such as mechatronics, mechanical engineering technology, and electronics engineering might improve your employment prospects.

    In reality, online enrollment has enabled several colleges to sustain and grow courses that were at risk of being eliminated owing to poor attendance. Expect the number of these courses to increase and prosper over the next two decades.

     








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  • 869,000 apps may disappear from Play Store soon. Read what Google has to say about this.

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    Major media outlets are reporting that Google might be planning to disappear 869,000 unused apps from Play Store soon. According to CNET, these apps that have not been updated for a while might be really harder for users to find until new updates have been made by their respective developers.

    The reason behind this drastic measure is to ensure that apps are maintained to a certain standard and also the obvious security reason. The major issue with Play Store is that developers don’t have to renew their Developer license often. All they need to do is to make a one-time purchase of $25 dollars and you can publish apps for the rest of your lives.

    See Also: How to Cancel HBO Max on Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, and Roku

    But when it comes to iOS, there is an annual fee that developers are required to renew if they want to maintain their projects in the App Store so less users are inclined to kind of abandon their work.

    In the case of App Store, it is only 650,000 apps that not updated or less maintained.

    The biggest problem is..

    On the other hand the biggest problem, there are certain apps that are doing very well in terms of reach and engagement but requires very little changes or updates when it comes to the app features. In those cases, the developers are forced release changes with less change or none. That is certainly an extra burden of the developer’s time and effort.

    So, what is your opinion on the matter? Is it necessary or does it burden the developers in the plaform? Do let us know in the comments below.

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  • 100% Solid Travel Router: Your Laptop!

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    Lately, I’ve gotten many messages asking for a recommendation on “travel routers.” Summer is here, and folks want to stay securely connected while on the go. Who wouldn’t?

    Whether you stay in a hotel room or an Airbnb, a secure Wi-Fi network helps make the temporary lodging feel like home, at least in getting connected.

    Privacy and security matters aside, that private network is also a matter of convenience. You won’t need to enter a new Wi-Fi network and its password into all your devices, a pain if you also bring along streaming devices — I’ve always included a Fire TV on our trips.

    But packing a travel router can also be a pain — they are all not that compact considering the extra cords. Most importantly, hooking one to an existing Wi-Fi network is a lot of work, sometimes even impossible, and most locations do not offer a wired connection.

    That’s where this post comes into play. I’ll show you how to turn a laptop into a versatile mobile router, allowing you to connect just one device — the computer itself — to a new Wi-Fi network and keep the rest connected automatically, just like at home.

    I’ve done this for years. When through with this post, chances are you’ll also find that if you have a laptop, getting a travel router is no longer relevant.

    Dong’s note: I first published this piece on December 29, 2019, and updated it on May 25, 2022, with up-to-date and relevant information.

    Turning a laptop into a mobile hotspot or travel router
    Your computer as a travel router: The key is adding a second Wi-Fi/network adapter to a laptop.

    A laptop computer as a travel router: It’s a big mobile hotspot

    You likely already know how to turn your phone into a personal Wi-Fi hotspot. If not, go to your phone’s settings, search for “hotspot,” and the rest is self-explanatory.

    The idea here is to make the phone work as a mobile hotspot, like a JetPack from Verizon, to share its cellular Internet connection with other Wi-Fi devices.

    Specifically, the phone connects to the Internet via its cellular connection, then shares that connection via Wi-Fi signals it broadcasts using its Wi-Fi adapter. The phone uses its Wi-Fi adapter in the reverse direction and works as a little router.

    You can do the same thing with a computer. In this case, there are more options on the Internet. It can be a cellular modem, a Wi-Fi network, or a wired network.

    What you need to turn a computer into a hotspot Wi-Fi router

    You first need a computer (running Windows 10 or macOS) and a live Internet connection. And then you need a bit more. The computer must have a free Wi-Fi card that’s not in use for the current Internet connection to broadcast the Wi-Fi signals to other devices.

    That said, if you want to use a laptop’s built-in Wi-Fi adapter to broadcast the Wi-Fi signals, the machine must access the Internet via a different means, one among these:

    1. A cellular connection is like a cellular modem or a satellite. This case is relatively rare.
    2. A wired connection via its network port. This case applies when the location offers a wired connection via a network port. Few laptops have a built-in network port, and others require a USB ethernet adapter.
    3. A separate Wi-Fi card connects to the laptop’s USB port. This is the most popular case since most venues come with Wi-Fi-based Internet access.

    I’ve used all three above, and the setup process was the same in each case. For this post, though, I picked #3 — it easily applies to everyone. Specifically, I used a Netgear A7000 USB Wi-Fi adapter.

    But it’s always a good idea to carry along an additional USB Wi-Fi adapter and (optionally) a USB Ethernet adapter for your laptop. For mac users, though, this can get complicated. Hit the button below for more.

    Extra: USB network adapters to get

    Hardware options

    On the hardware front, things are easy if you use a Windows computer — virtually all USB adapters (Wi-Fi or Ethernet) will work, and there are many options.

    (This is why I’ve always used Intel-based Macs, which can run Windows natively via Boot Camp.)

    If you use macOS, things are complicated. Below is my short take on what to get based on my experience.

    macOS 11 (Big Sur) and 12 (Monterey): No USB Wi-Fi adapter for now

    If you have a Mac running Big Sur or Monterey — that’s macOS version 11 or 12 — there’s no third-party USB Wi-Fi 5 adapter that officially works. Future Wi-Fi 6 adapters might change this but that remains to be seen.

    So, unless you’re willing to do some hacking, the only extra network adapter option for Big Sur and Monterey is a USB Ethernet adapter.

    It’s always safe to use one from Apple. But if you want a third-party option, I’d recommend the 5Gbps TRENDnet TUC-ET5G or 2.5Gbps TUC-ET2G. Both are supported natively or have a built-in driver for Windows and macOS all the way to Monterey. I’ve used both since my review of them.

    macOS 10.15 (Catalina) or older: Plenty of options

    For macOS 10 (and Windows), virtually all USB Wi-Fi 5 adapters will work.

    However, the rule of thumb is to check with the vendor’s support page to make sure driver software is available for your OS before getting it.

    If you want to make a quick decision, get one of the following, I’ve used them all:

    Additionally, almost any USB Ethernet adapter will work, too, including the Multi-Gig ones mentioned above. But, again, it’s safer to get an Apple one.

    Finally, most of these USB adapters use a USB-A connector. If your computer only has USB-C (Thunderbolt) ports, you’ll also need an adapter.

    Once you’ve gotten the hardware ready, the rest is relatively a walk in the park.

    How to make a hotspot Wi-Fi router out of a Windows computer

    For this part, the computer is connected to an existing Wi-Fi network using the add-on USB Wi-Fi adapter and will use its built-in Wi-Fi adapter to broadcast Wi-Fi signals to clients.

    However, if you use the adapters in the reversed roles, the steps are the same as long as you leave one of the Wi-Fi adapters free.

    So connect the computer to the existing Internet-ready Wi-Fi using whichever adapter you’d like. We’ll share that broadband connection using our own Wi-Fi network.

    1. Launch the Mobile Hotspot feature of Windows

    Find Mobile Hotspot Settings on the Start Menu — you can search for it — and click on it to open up the dialog where you can turn on this feature and customize it.

    Mobile Hotspot Windows
    Your Windows computer as a travel router: You can quickly find any setting by searching for it on Windows 10’s Start Menu, including the Mobile hotspot feature.

    2. Turn the Mobile hotspot on

    On the Settings page that appears, move the slider of the feature to On. The computer will pick its current Internet connection as the source of the sharing.

    Then click on Edit to change your Wi-Fi network’s name or password.

    Mobile Hotspot Windows Turning on
    Your Windows computer as a travel router: Turn the mobile hotspot on, choose Wi-Fi (default) as the sharing method, and click on Edit to customize the settings (recommended), or you can use the defaults.

    3. Customize the new Wi-Fi network

    Change the settings of the Wi-Fi network to your liking. Here you can pick the same SSID and password as your home Wi-Fi if you want your other devices to connect automatically.

    Mobile Hotspot Windows Customziation Mobile Hotspot Windows Done

    Your Windows computer as a travel router: It’s a good idea to customize the mobile Wi-Fi network to make it the same as your home Wi-Fi.

    And that’s it. You’ll find the new Wi-Fi network — “Dong-Knows-Tech-Mobile” in this example — avaible in the airspece for other devices to use.

    Windows’ Mobile hotspot feature allows for sharing the Internet to up to eight Wi-Fi devices.

    How to turn a Mac computer into a travel router (Wi-Fi mobile hotspot)

    There are a few more steps on a Mac computer, but the process is still relatively simple.

    Note that if you use a USB Wi-Fi or Ethernet adapter with a Mac, it will be identified as an “Apple USB Ethernet Adapter.”

    For this part, I used the add-on card to connect to the existing Wi-Fi network, leaving the computer’s built-in card — identified as “Wi-Fi” — free to broadcast signals to clients.

    1. Run the Sharing app

    Open the Mac computer’s control panel by clicking on the Apple icon (top-left corner) and then on System Preferences.

    Find the Sharing icon and click on it.

    Steps to turn a Mac into a travel router or mobile hotspot 2
    Your Mac computer as a travel router: The Internet sharing feature is part of the Sharing app located within the computer’s System Preferences.

    2. Pick the right hardware

    On the Sharing window:

    • Click on Internet Sharing (you can’t check the box yet). You will note that the “Apple USB Ethernet Adapter” is being used as the source of the Internet connection you want to share.
    • Check the box in front of “Wi-Fi.”
    • Click on the Wi-Fi Options button.
    Steps to turn a Mac into a travel router or mobile hotspot 3
    Your Mac computer as a travel router: You first need to pick the free Wi-Fi adapter and customize the network.

    3. Customize the hotspot’s Wi-Fi settings

    Customize your mobile Wi-Fi network. Again, it’s a good idea to name it after your home Wi-Fi with the same password. But you can customize it however you want. Then click OK.

    Steps to turn a Mac into a travel router or mobile hotspot 4
    Your Mac computer as a travel router: You can customize the travel Wi-Fi network to your liking.

    4. Turn Internet Sharing on

    Click on the box in front of Internet Sharing a dialog will pop up; now click on Start to confirm.

    Steps to turn a Mac into a travel router or mobile hotspot 5 Steps to turn a Mac into a travel router or mobile hotspot 1

    Your Mac computer as a travel router: You need to confirm before you can turn on Internet sharing.

    And that’s it. Now the new mobile Wi-Fi network — “Dong’s MacBook Pro” in this example — is ready for other clients to use. And if you’ve picked the same Wi-Fi name and password as your home’s, your other devices will connect automatically.

    Generally, you can connect up to 15 devices to a Mac computer’s mobile hotspot though the number varies depending on your laptop.

    The takeaway

    There you go. Turning your laptop computer into a mobile hotspot — or as a Wi-Fi travel router, for that matter — has a lot of advantages:

    • Better performance: Wi-Fi cards for a computer generally have much better Wi-Fi performance than a mobile hotspot. Your mobile Wi-Fi network will have a better range and faster speed than all mobile hotspots and most travel routers.
    • Cost-saving: When staying at a venue that charges you Internet access per device, this trick will save you some serious dough because you only need to pay for a single device — the laptop — instead of all others.
    • Less packing: You won’t need to carry along an extra piece of hardware, like a portable travel router or a mobile hotspot itself. (Sure, you need an additional Wi-Fi or Ethernet adapter, but these are very small devices.)

    By the way, you can use this setup at home, too. Turning your desktop computer into a router is an excellent and affordable way to have a well-performing wireless VR setup.

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  • Russia Demands That the World ‘Demilitarize’ Online Information

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    • A Russian ambassador accused the West of “cyber-totalitarianism” and “militarizing” the internet.
    • He complained of a “Russophobic information campaign” spreading on social media and online.
    • Russia has often promoted disinformation, which Vassily Nebenzia called “alternative views.”

    Russian diplomat Vassily Nebenzia launched a tirade against the West on Monday, accusing the world’s largest democracies of controlling information about the war in Ukraine and shutting down Russia’s “alternative views.”

    “States that call themselves a ‘community of democracies’ in fact are building a cyber-totalitarianism,” Nebenzia, Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, said at a UN Security Council briefing on worldwide technology and security.

    The diplomat denounced Ukraine for openly stating that it’s built a volunteer “IT” army to fight Russian disinformation online and to target Russian and Belarusian facilities.

    “Colleagues, you are creating uncontrollable cyber troops that will master their skills in Ukraine by attacking Russia, but will not stop at that,” he said.

    Nebenzia said the West is similarly “militarizing digital domain” and that Moscow would push back on any cyberattacks against Russia. He added that Russia demands “to demilitarize information space,” comparing a possible global online conflict to nuclear war.

    “Once again, I call you to think of the danger of dragging the world into a cyber confrontation that is no less dangerous than [the] usage of WMDs,” Nebenzia said. 

    On the other hand, multiple reports have documented an extensive Russian cyberattack campaign targeting Ukraine through malware and hacks, some of which are so destructive that they were said to be worse than Moscow anticipated.

    Nebenzia said the West chooses to ignore any “alternative viewpoint” and disregards “all inconvenient facts,” citing Russia’s false claims that a civilian massacre in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha was a “hoax.”

    Governments and established media outlets have widely called into question these claims in light of satellite photo evidence and video footage.

    Nebenzia also criticized Facebook for blocking accounts that promote Russian disinformation, which he described as content that “does not meet the West-dictated agenda.” He complained of a “Russophobic information campaign” that attacks Russia on matters of politics, sports, education, and culture.

    “Corporation Meta openly authorized at its platforms all hate speech and calls to violence against Russians,” he said.

    Russia’s recent actions appear to contradict Nebenzia’s strong statements. The Kremlin has banned most Western social media networks since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine.

    In March, the country passed a law that makes dissent — which it defined as “spreading disinformation” — punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

    At the Security Council briefing on Monday, the US and UK conversely accused Russia of trying to manipulate public opinion with false propaganda.

    US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the Russian government “continues to shut down, restrict and degrade internet connectivity, censor content, spread disinformation online, and intimidate and arrest journalists for reporting the truth about its invasion.”

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  • Anyone can use this powerful facial-recognition tool — and that’s a problem

    PimEyes’ decision to make facial-recognition software available to the general public crosses a line that technology companies are typically unwilling to traverse, and opens up endless possibilities for how it can be used and abused.

    Imagine a potential employer digging into your past, an abusive ex tracking you, or a random stranger snapping a photo of you in public and then finding you online. This is all possible through PimEyes: Though the website instructs users to search for themselves, it doesn’t stop them from uploading photos of anyone. At the same time, it doesn’t explicitly identify anyone by name, but as CNN Business discovered by using the site, that information may be just clicks away from images PimEyes pulls up.

    “Using the latest technologies, artificial intelligence and machine learning, we help you find your pictures on the Internet and defend yourself from scammers, identity thieves, or people who use your image illegally,” the website declares.

    It’s precisely this ease of access that concerns Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, who has extensively researched police use of facial-recognition technology.

    “Face recognition at its foundation is a tool of identification,” Garvie told CNN Business. “Think of any reason a person would want to conduct an identification — positive and negative — and that’s what this tool makes possible.”

    “A creepy stalking tool”

    PimEyes lets users see a limited number of small, somewhat pixelated search results at no cost, or you can pay a monthly fee, which starts at $29.99, for more extensive search results and features (such as to click through to see full-size images on the websites where PimEyes found them and to set up alerts for when PimEyes finds new pictures of faces online that its software believes match an uploaded face).
    The company offers a paid plan for businesses, too: $299.99 per month lets companies conduct unlimited searches and set up 500 alerts.

    The images come from a range of websites, including company, media and pornography sites — the last of which PimEyes told CNN Business that it includes so people can search online for any revenge porn in which they may unknowingly appear.

    Clearview AI has billions of our photos. Its entire client list was just stolen
    But while Clearview AI built its massive stockpile of faces in part by scraping images from major social networks (it was subsequently served with cease-and-desist notices by Facebook, Google, and Twitter, sued by several civil rights groups, and declared illegal in Canada), PimEyes said it does not scrape images from social media. (A Clearview AI spokesperson would not confirm whether the company currently grabs photos from social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, just saying that the company “collects only public data from the open internet.” The company’s CEO has said in the past that it has a first-amendment right in the United States to collect publicly available information.)
    Although PimEyes instructs visitors to only search for their own face, there’s no mechanism on the site to ensure it’s used this way. Several Twitter users claim to have used it in an effort to identify US Capitol rioters, for example — efforts that PimEyes told CNN Business it is aware of but that are unavoidable, despite being a violation of the site’s terms and conditions, since PimEyes can’t verify who is performing a search for a given face. The site, PimEyes noted, doesn’t identify by name those who search for faces nor those whose faces show up in search results.
    Anyone with internet access can use facial-recognition search engine PimEyes.
    There’s also no way to ensure this facial-recognition technology isn’t used to misidentify people. There are a handful of US state laws restricting the use of facial-recognition systems and city-wide bans on it, yet these rules tend to target how government and businesses might use such software, not individuals.

    PimEyes’ ease of access and the lack of enforcement of its own search rules makes it a tool primed for online stalking and surveillance, said Lucie Audibert, legal officer with London-based human rights group Privacy International.

    “In the hands of random citizens, like you or me, it becomes a creepy stalking tool where you can identify anyone on the streets or in any public space,” Audibert said.

    Some surprises

    To get a sense for what PimEyes can do and how well it works, CNN Business paid for the $29.99-per-month individual subscription, which gave me the ability to conduct 25 “premium” searches per day, see all the search results PimEyes dredged up from around the internet, and the ability to set up alerts for any new images that PimEyes comes across.

    I conducted multiple searches for my face online, using new and old photos featuring different hairstyles. In some I wore glasses; in others I did not. Sometimes, before PimEyes would conduct a search, a pop-up forced me to check two boxes saying I accepted the site’s terms of service and that I agreed to use a photo of my face to conduct the search.

    The results that were actually pictures of me (and not, say, pornographic images of similar-looking women, of which there were plenty) were mostly familiar. These included work-related headshots, still images from videos I recorded while testing gadgets years ago, and a picture of me smiling with my high school journalism teacher.

    When CNN's Rachel Metz uploaded a picture of herself to PimEyes, it showed her other pictures of her it had found online.
    There was one surprise: a photo of me dancing at a friend’s wedding in 2013. I hadn’t realized the picture was taken at the time, but that’s not what was startling. Rather, it was the fact that I’m hardly in the picture at all. On the right side of the frame, you can see part of my face, in profile.

    My eyes appear closed and I’m wearing black glasses. It’s a blurry image, but it’s definitely me.

    A false facial recognition match sent this innocent Black man to jail

    With PimEyes, I could trace a selfie to my identity with just a few clicks. As a journalist with headshots and biographies at multiple publications’ websites, it’s pretty easy to connect my face to my name online. So I tried again with the image of a friend (after first getting his consent) who works in another field and has a smaller online presence; one of the first results was from his website, which has his name in the URL.

    With their permission, I also ran several co-workers’ selfies through PimEyes to see what popped up. It revealed photos documenting bits and pieces of my colleagues’ pasts: my boss’s wedding, the adoption of another manager’s dog, the time a fellow reporter’s funny facial expression was turned into a meme when he was in college (he knew this, fortunately). In multiple cases, it only took a click or two to connect faces to names.

    Shrouded in secrecy

    I wanted to learn more about how PimEyes works, and why it’s open to anyone, as well as who’s behind it. This was much trickier than uploading my own face to the website. The website currently lists no information about who owns or runs the search engine, or how to reach them, and users must submit a form to get answers to questions or help with accounts.

    Poring over archived images of the website via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, as well as other online sources, yielded some details about the company’s past and how it has changed over time.

    The Pimeyes.com website was initially registered in March 2017, according to a domain name registration lookup conducted through ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). An “about” page on the Pimeyes website, as well as some news stories, shows it began as a Polish startup.
    An archived image of the website’s privacy policy indicated that it was registered as a business in Wroclaw, Poland, as of August 2020. This changed soon after: The website’s privacy policy currently states that PimEyes’ administrator, known as Face Recognition Solutions Ltd., is registered at an address in the Seychelles. An online search of the address — House of Francis, Room 303, Ile Du Port, Mahe, Seychelles — indicated a number of businesses appear to use the same exact address. This suggests that, while it may be registered in the archipelago nation (which is on the European Union list of tax havens), it may be operating elsewhere.
    PimEyes positions itself as a tool for finding pictures of yourself online, yet this was not always its focus. An image of the website from October 2018, for instance, indicates it instructed users to upload a photo of whomever they wanted to look for. It showed pictures of celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Rihanna, and Donald Trump as examples.
    This screengrab of an archived version of PimEyes.com, from October 2018, shows how users were able to upload a photo of whomever they wanted to look for (the website now instructs visitors to only search for their own face), and shows pictures of celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Rihanna, and Donald Trump as examples.
    In June 2020, some news articles noted how PimEyes may be used by stalkers. In one piece, PimEyes told the BBC that the website’s aim was to help individuals “fight for their own online privacy,” including finding fake profiles, leaked images, and unauthorized photo usage. At the time, it also told the BBC that it worked with police forces via a software investigation tool called Paliscope (and an archived version of the PimEyes’ website’s “Frequently Asked Questions” indicated that PimEyes marketed to law enforcement as recently as that month; though that reference was gone a few days later, a company blog post suggests PimEye’s technology can be used to “look for criminals or missing persons.”)
    In early July, the website suddenly emphasized personal privacy. “Upload your photo and find where your face image appears online. Start protecting your privacy,” PimEyes’ site said at the time.

    The shift makes sense to Garvie, who pointed out that, initially, Clearview AI was more widely available than it is now (she knows someone, she said, outside of law enforcement, who had the app on his phone).

    She thinks PimEyes more strongly resembles Russian facial-recognition software FindFace than Clearview; FindFace, which was available to consumers in Russia, gained prominence in 2016 for its ability to match up faces in user-submitted images to pictures on Russian social network Vkontakte. (The software, which was also used to identify and badger Russian sex workers, is currently available just to business and government customers.)

    Making Contact

    To learn more about how the site works, CNN Business sent a note to a generic-sounding PimEyes email address, which was listed on an old version of the website’s privacy policy. It yielded an anonymous response from someone who referred to themselves as “PimEyes Team”; they said the site had been purchased from its previous owners in 2020 (the website did indicate new owners, along with a new look, in September, but CNN Business could not verify whether or how the change in ownership occurred).

    They refused to conduct a formal interview, saying they “don’t take part in live interviews or direct interviews,” but that they would answer questions sent via email. Over multiple messages they answered a number of questions, but ignored or sidestepped others, such as why the company had switched its focus from suggesting users search for anyone to searching just for yourself.

    This new tool can tell you if your online photos are helping train facial recognition systems

    They would not say how much they paid to purchase PimEyes from its prior owners, nor why they bought it, though they did write the company is currently based in the Seychelles due to the country’s “good incorporation environment.”

    When asked where employees are actually based, they answered that PimEyes has an “international team, but we don’t want to disclose details.”

    Our emails back and forth did reveal a potential clue about their location, however, due to timestamps. The first note I sent them was timestamped at 11:58 am, PDT, on Thursday, April 8; their response, which I got the next day at 2:31 am my time, included my note, but this time the timestamp above my words read 20:58, or 8:58 pm. When it’s 11:58 am in California, it’s 8:58 pm in a number of places, including Poland. This same nine-hour time difference was evident across numerous emails.

    They confirmed that the facial-recognition search engine works similarly to other such systems, by comparing measurements between different facial features in one image (the one you upload) to those in others (in this case, ones it has found online). In order to match up the faces that users submit, PimEyes must scour the internet for images of people. PimEyes doesn’t save images from around the internet, they explained, but it does keep an index of facial-feature measurements from photos it has spotted on the web.

    A screenshot of Pimeyes' website taken in April 2021.

    This kind of AI-driven image-matching is different from what happens when you upload a picture of yourself to a site such as Google Images and conduct a search: There, the results will include pictures of similar people (for me, that means lots of dark-haired women in glasses), but Google isn’t using facial measurements in the hopes of finding you, specifically, in other pictures online.

    The person behind the PimEyes Team email would not provide a current figure for how many faces it has indexed. But according to archived images of PimEyes.com, as of August 2018, PimEyes said it had analyzed “over 30 million websites”, and in November 2019, the company claimed to have analyzed 900 million faces (Clearview AI, by comparison, claimed to have scraped over 3 billion photos from the internet as of February 2020).

    When PimEyes’ search engine finds a match between the photo a user uploads and one PimEyes has previously seen online, it can pair the measurements of the previously analyzed photo with the web address where that photo is located. The website shows you an array of all the pictures it thinks look most like your own photo.

    The search accuracy, the company claimed, is about 90%; in general, the accuracy of facial-recognition technology depends on many factors, such as the quality of face images that are fed into a system.

    Portland passes broadest facial recognition ban in the US
    The person behind the PimEyes Team email claimed the company doesn’t use photos that are uploaded by users to improve its software. PimEyes claims to delete images that are uploaded to the site after two days.

    They would not name any paying business customers, only saying that “there are no law enforcement agencies among them”.

    And while they confirmed there is no way to enforce the site’s policy of making users search only for themselves (a policy that seems contradicted, at the least, by offering its facial-recognition product to businesses), they pointed out that “any tool or service can be used against the purpose it was created for or its terms of use.”

    “It is naive to think that if our search engine didn’t exist, harassers wouldn’t break the law,” they wrote. “On the other hand — we are available to everyone, so any victim of harassment or other internet crime can check themselves using our search engine.”

    Connecting names and faces

    This accessibility is precisely what concerns Audibert, of Privacy International, and Garvie, of Georgetown. One of Audibert’s biggest concerns about PimEyes, she said, maybe even more so than with Clearview, is whose hands it could fall into. People could use it to identify others in public places, she points out, while private companies could use it to track people.

    It could also result in plenty of users misidentifying the faces that the search engine thinks closely resemble the person they’re trying to find, the consequences of which could be enormous. Police already use facial-recognition systems to track down potential suspects, even though the technology has been shown to be less accurate when identifying people of color. Several Black men, at least, have been wrongfully arrested due to this use of facial recognition.

    Garvie, who used PimEyes on an image of her own face, noticed that most of the results that were not her were of similar-looking White women in their 30s. This type of misidentification is common across facial-recognition algorithms, she said, and also makes it more likely that a person who sees those results will then make a misidentification.

    Tech companies are still helping police scan your face

    PimEyes’ technology could hurt people in other ways, too, such as by outing people who are transgender — intentionally or not. When Rachel Thorn, a professor at Kyoto Seika University, uploaded a recent photo of herself to PimEyes, she encountered other recent images of herself. There were also older images, she said, where she presented as masculine. She looks very different today, she said, but guessed that PimEyes may have picked up on similarities between facial features in a recent photo and old photos.

    “As a transgender person it was not a great feeling to see old photos of myself show up. I’m pretty sure almost any transgender person would feel the same way,” she said.

    Thorn, who studies Japanese graphic novels, known as manga, was impressed by the technology but also worried about how it could be abused. And since the site didn’t stop her from uploading anyone else’s image, she did: She looked up an acquaintance who had worked in pornography by uploading a selfie that person sent her. Sure enough, pornographic images of her friend popped up.

    “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh’,” she said. “If you wanted to find out if someone had ever done work in porn, this would do it.”

  • Ikea is finally replacing its terrible Tradfri smart home hub

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  • Internet company CEO was ‘extremely uncomfortable’ with Rodney Joffe’s task to research Trump and associates

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    A former subordinate of Rodney Joffe, the technology executive Special Counsel John Durham says worked with Michael Sussman to push the Trump-Alfa Bank allegations, said he was, “extremely uncomfortable” with the research work he was tasked with connected to then-candidate Donald Trump.

    Jared Novick, the CEO of a company called Bit Voyant, was brought to the stand by the government Thursday as part of the Sussmann trial.

    Novick testified that one of his bosses, Rodney Joffe, who Durham refers to as “Tech-Executive-1” in his filings, approached him in August 2016 with the “extremely uncommon” task of researching data associated with Donald Trump, his associates and Russia.

    “It was unique,” Novick testified. “We never before did any tasking like this.”

    SPECIAL COUNSEL JOHN DURHAM’S PROSECUTION OF MICHAEL SUSSMANN: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

    Special Counsel John Durham departs the U.S. Federal Courthouse after opening arguments in the trial of Attorney Michael Sussmann <span class="copyright">REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson</span>

    Special Counsel John Durham departs the U.S. Federal Courthouse after opening arguments in the trial of Attorney Michael Sussmann REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson

    He added: “It felt very political, the whole thing to me felt like opposition research.”

    Novick testified that Joffe sent him a PDF file with a handful of names and corresponding personal information. Among the names were Trump campaign aide Carter Page and Trump associate Richard Burt.

    The FBI obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Page over suspicion of Trump campaign ties to Russia.

    HILLARY CLINTON APPROVED DISSEMINATION OF TRUMP-RUSSIAN BANK ALLEGATIONS TO MEDIA, CAMPAIGN MANAGER TESTIFIES

    “I moved forward with the tasking, but I was extremely uncomfortable,” Novick testified.

    Novick said he assigned the work to a small group of researchers at his company and named the project “Crimson Rhino” so that he could keep it separate from the majority of the company’s employees.

    Novick added that he wanted to “do it quickly and get rid of it.”

    The mainstream media has largely avoided covering the trial of ex-Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI. <span class="copyright">REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson</span>

    The mainstream media has largely avoided covering the trial of ex-Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been charged with making a false statement to the FBI. REUTERS/Julia Nikhinson

    Sussmann, on Sept. 19, 2016, set up a meeting with then-FBI General Counsel James Baker where he brought two thumb drives of data and white papers alleging the Trump Organization was using a secret back channel to communicate with Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank in the weeks leading up to the presidential election.

    Sussmann is charged with making a false statement to the FBI. During that meeting, Sussmann allegedly told Baker he was not bringing the allegations on behalf of any specific client, but rather as a citizen concerned with national security. Durham’s team alleges they have evidence that Sussmann later billed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign for his FBI meeting.

    Sussmann has pleaded not guilty.

    EXCLUSIVE: TRUMP REACTS TO TESTIMONY THAT CLINTON SPREAD RUSSIA ALLEGATIONS: ‘WHERE DO I GET MY REPUTATION BACK?’

    Durham, in a court filing earlier this year, said that in July 2016, Joffe worked with Sussmann, a U.S. investigative firm retained by Law Firm 1 on behalf of the Clinton campaign, numerous cyber researchers and employees at multiple internet companies to “assemble the purported data and white papers.”

    “In connection with these efforts, Tech Executive-1 exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” the filing states. “Tech Executive-1 also enlisted the assistance of researchers at a U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.”

    “Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” Durham states. “In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”

    Meanwhile, Sussmann’s defense attorneys attempted to poke holes in Novick’s credibility by suggesting he had a difficult relationship with Mr. Joffe as a boss.

    Novick eventually agreed that he had a “challenging time” with Joffe.

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  • Challenges of parental responsibility in the digital age: a global perspective

    Children everywhere are gaining access to the internet – most often via a mobile phone. In many places, too, parents are feeling challenged in their competence, role and authority. Distinctively, internet access is bringing children access also to valued sources of knowledge and connection that their parents may lack. How are parents responding?

    A digital parenting divide

    Research in high income countries points to a shift away from restrictive forms of parental mediation such as banning the technology or telling their children off when a problem occurs. Instead, it seems parents are increasingly using enabling forms of mediation such as sharing some online experiences with their children and guiding them in the use of privacy settings, advice services and critical evaluation of online content and behaviour. This shift is influenced by parents’ own growing experience with and expertise in using digital media. It’s also the outcome of several years’ worth of multi-stakeholder efforts to raise parental awareness and encourage their engagement, often led by governments and child welfare organisations.

    © UNICEF/UN0147080/Shehzad NooraniPeer advocates communicate with their friends on phone in Nyalenda neighbourhood in the city of Kisumu, Kenya. Their organization, Sauti Skika, is an initiative for and by young people living with HIV, to ensure the voices of young people and adolescents living with HIV are heard.

    But in middle and low income countries, it seems that parents favour restrictive mediation. This is partly because some cultures are more authoritarian in their parenting style (especially in relation to daughters). It’s partly because, in the absence of supportive resources, anxious parents feel their only recourse is to protect their children by limiting their access. It’s also because the wider public debate has yet to embrace a conception of children as active citizens and, therefore now, also as digital citizens.

    Even talking of parents – a common target of awareness-raising actions in the global North – is not straightforward as many children in developing countries are being brought up by relatives, often grandparents. For example, in Africa and, to a lesser extent in Latin America and the Caribbean, children are much more likely to live with either one or neither of their parents than children in other regions. Factors such as migration, illness, parental death often mean that parents and caregivers are left with few resources and insufficient time to help children with their digital skills. Schools are also challenged: in the least developed countries school attendance is low, pupil/teacher ratios are high, and overcrowded classrooms and untrained teachers are commonplace. It seems fair to conclude that in many countries, children lack a supportive and/or informed adult in their lives who can teach them to navigate the internet safely, or offer support when needed.

    …the wider public debate has yet to embrace a conception of children as active citizens and, therefore now, also as digital citizens.

    New research findings

    Understanding the real constraints families and children face in the digital world is the first step towards finding effective strategies that both parents and children can use to maximise opportunities and minimise risks. We are currently tracking the activities and experiences of children and parents in the digital age as part of our research project Global Kids Online – a multinational research collaboration of the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the EU Kids Online network in partnership with researchers and UNICEF country offices from all over the world. Working within a child rights framework, the aim is to generate robust evidence that can stimulate debate and inform policy and practice regarding children’s internet use in diverse countries.

    © UNICEF/UN0139548/Gilbertson VGabriela Vlad, 17, (Left) uses her phone to speak with her mother at the dinner table at the home of her foster mother Tatiana Gribincea (right) in the village of Porumbeni on the outskirts of Chisinau in Moldova, Monday 16 October 2017. Her biological mother has gone abroad to find employment.

    In addition to asking children what they do online, how often and for how long, what skills they have and risks they face, we ask them who they turn to for support if they experience something negative online. Strikingly, the majority of children from the seven countries presented below would turn to friends first, to parents second, and rarely to teachers or other professionals. For parents this is broadly positive news. Although on average, parents’ level of digital skill is equivalent to that of a 14 year old child, as our research from Bulgaria, Montenegro and South Africa shows. What seems to count more is that children trust their parents’ ability to provide guidance and support.

    It’s notable that children in European countries are more likely to tell a parent if they experience a problem online, than in other parts of the world. Perhaps this reflects a more encouraging emphasis on enabling rather than restriction among European parents. Certainly it suggest the need for  greater investment in support and guidance of parents in the global South. More worrying is children’s apparent lack of trust in teachers and professionals. This makes us wonder if they are even available to children to the degree we would want them to be, and further, how confident children may be that these professionals are able to provide the right advice.

    Note: 9-17 year olds in all countries except 13-17 year olds in Argentina. Also, samples in Serbia and the Philippines were small pilot surveys; in South Africa a convenience sample was used; in all other countries, the sample is nationally representative. For more methodological details, see www.globalkidsonline.net/results

    How to support parents to support children?

    If parents’ primary method of protecting children is through restricting access, this can be effective in keeping children safe, but it carries costs as regards children’s opportunities online. The restrictive approach can potentially undermine children’s opportunity to build digital skills and resilience in ways that will help them face and manage risky experiences in the future. So what advice can we give parents? What are the roles and skills they need to have in the digital world? Do parenting principles and practices we used before the technological boom still apply?

    In 2007 the World Health Organization (WHO) developed a framework that examines key dimensions of parenting and parental roles that positively affect adolescent well-being:

    • Connection (building a positive, stable, emotional bond between parent and child)
    • Behaviour control (including supervision and guidance of children’s actions within a trusting relationship)
    • Respect for individuality of the child, especially as an adolescent
    • Modelling appropriate behaviour (since children identify with and emulate their parents)
    • Provision and protection (by parents and also the wider community)

     

    Ten years on, this framework translates well in the digital era. Take modelling of appropriate behaviour, for example. If the parent does not put down a phone or a tablet, will the child mimic this behaviour? If a parent uses restrictive mediation and censorship, how does this lead to respect for individuality? Ideally, parents would be confident in drawing on their available personal and cultural resources and, to some extent, the principles of positive parenting, when facing the new challenges linked to children’s internet use. Ideally, too, even if tempted to prevent or restrict children’s digital activities for fear of the harms that may result, they would be mindful that some activities may be important to their children’s present and future opportunities – to learn, gain information, work and engage in their community. So a balance must be sought, and this is indeed difficult to manage, for much will depend on the child and his or her particular circumstances.

    However, as internet use becomes more familiar, and more embedded in everyday life, parents are increasingly also digital natives. They often want to learn about the internet and what it can offer, for the benefit of themselves and their children. It is therefore important that stakeholders – from government and industry to schools and communities – make greater investments to aid parents in this effort, so that they can enable their children to learn and grow in the digital age.

     

    Sonia Livingstone OBE is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Media and Communications at London School of Economics and Political Science and Jasmina Byrne is child protection specialist with UNICEF Innocenti. Explore the UNICEF Innocenti research catalogue for new publications. Follow UNICEF Innocenti on Twitter and sign up for e-newsletters on any page of the UNICEF Innocenti website.

     

    NOTE: An earlier version of this was published as Livingstone, S., and Byrne, J. (2015) Challenges of parental responsibility in a global perspective. In Gasser, U. (Ed.), Digitally Connected: Global Perspectives on Youth and Digital Media (pp.26-29). Cambridge: Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. We are also grateful to our colleagues in the Global Kids Online project.

  • Apps You Can Use to Create NFTs on Your iPhone

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    Do you want to create NFT’s on your own? Over the last 18 months or so, digital assets have become incredibly important in popular culture. 

    NFTs have certainly penetrated the mainstream media, with several high-profile sales making headlines worldwide. In December, an anonymous artist known only as Pak created The Merge, which generated revenue of $91.8m, the largest ever art sale by a living creator. That was simply the culmination of a year of excitement, kicked off in March when Beeple sold his artwork for $69m.

    NFTs are digital assets backed by blockchain, which confirms ownership, and they’re not the only headline-grabbing online commodities. In recent months, other digital assets, such as fan tokens, have also been popular. Fan tokens work differently from NFTs; they’re still digital assets backed by blockchain, but they’re more like a cryptocurrency that rises and falls in value.

    make money with nft

    https://unsplash.com/photos/yscrM1AOEKI

    They’re aligned to sports teams, and ownership gives fans certain perks, such as being able to vote on issues at their chosen club. The sums involved are notable; soccer giants AC Milan made more than $6m from their recent release, and the value has increased quickly. Backed by the cryptocurrency Chiliz, their fan token was $ACM was worth 21 $CHZ on May 20 but rose to 35 $CHZ when they lifted the domestic title in Italy two days later.

    Whilst it can be difficult to differentiate between NFTs, digital assets and crypto, there is an element worth noting; anyone can create NFTs; the other two cannot. NFTs are perhaps the way forward if you wish to hop on the digital asset train and make a few dollars here and there. It’s not impossible to do; in fact, there are a handful of apps that can help you create your own NFTs. It is worth noting that there are few options for minting your NFT as well, although we can suggest one platform.

    NFT Creator


    There are two apps with similar names, NFT Creator! and NFT Creator. You’re looking for the one that does not have the exclamation mark if you wish to create and sell NFTs from your phone. NFT Creator has some of the best templates for creating your NFT, and you can even create custom trading cards as well. You can create a sports card, a Pokémon-style card, and even your own custom award cards with a little creativity. There’s an inbuilt marketplace for buying NFTs from other creators here.

    8bit Painter

    Many NFTs you see in the news are simple, 8bit style images, making this next app particularly interesting. You can design an image on anything from a 16×16 grid to a 160×160. You don’t have to design from scratch either; you can turn other images into pixel art. People often use two creators rather than one for truly impressive results, putting together an image in another app, then using 8bit Painter to convert it to the retro style.

    GoArt

    GoArt isn’t like the other apps; it doesn’t have a paint facility to allow you to create your NFT; it takes a photo and gives you filters to use instead. It’s lightning-quick; if you want to create an NFT from a photo in seconds, you can, and the filters are interesting. There’s a Van Gogh filter and another mimicking Picasso’s style. It operates a paid feature, where some of the better filters are only usable by exchanging coins, although you earn 30 coins just by signing up.

    If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy checking the best browsers to download for Android.

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