Mobile hotspots are a crucial tool for travelers needing to keep all their gear connected. But with the advent of 5G, Netgear’s new Nighthawk M5 5G Wi-Fi 6 Mobile Router could replace all of your home’s Wi-Fi equipment with a pocket-friendly hotspot that will provide fast Wi-Fi even when you take it on the road.

As 5G mobile networks continue their slow but steady rollout across the country, mobile internet seems like it is increasingly becoming a viable alternative for users tired of having their internet delivered through a prehistoric coaxial cable with questionable reliability. With 5G capable of delivering download speeds up to one or two gigabits/second, with a strong enough signal reaching a home, it could theoretically deliver more than enough throughput for everything from streaming 4K content to online gaming.

Netgear’s Nighthawk M5 Mobile Router includes features that are now standard on most hotspots, including a dedicated touchscreen display for accessing its settings, showing its connection status, and keeping an eye on how much data you’ve used, and your monthly limit. What other hotspots don’t have is the ability to connect to not only the next-generation 5G mobile networks, but also the next wave of Wi-Fi 6 devices which promise the fastest wireless performance and minimal bottlenecks, even with several smartphones, tablets, computers, and IoT devices all connected at the same time.

Netgear is also positioning the Nighthawk M5 as both an alternative to getting your home internet through wires, and as a reliable backup for when your cable internet or even fiber service goes on the fritz. The M5 includes a removable rechargeable battery so that when used at home, you can instead plug into an outlet. Because hotspots typically don’t have the same Wi-Fi range as larger routers or even mesh networking hardware, the mobile router also includes a gigabit ethernet port so you can connect it to a dedicated Wi-Fi router that will provide a stronger signal throughout your entire home.
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The Nighthawk M5 won’t be available until sometime in the second half of 2020 at the earliest, with pricing being revealed at that time. And it will also be dependent on a mobile plan, and a carrier who’s operating a 5G network in your area. In other words, ditching cable internet is going to be an expensive proposition when this thing arrives, but the ultimate conveniences could easily outweigh the cost.

The new year is giving scammers an easy way to forge documents, but you can protect yourself with an easy New Year's resolution: Stop abbreviating the year.

Why? This year's abbreviation is easily changeable and could be used against you. The concern is that scammers could easily manipulate a document dated "1/1/20" into "1/1/2000" or even "1/1/2021."

Writing out the full date "could possibly protect you and prevent legal issues on paperwork," according to Hamilton County, Ohio, Auditor Dusty Rhodes.

Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, says it's early in the year to cite examples, but scammers could use the method to establish an unpaid debt or to attempt to cash an old check.

"Say you agreed to make payments beginning on 1/15/20. The bad guy could theoretically establish that you began owing your obligation on 1/15/2019, and try to collect additional $$$," Rheingold wrote.

In the future, post-dating could be a problem too. For example, a check dated "1/1/20" could become "1/1/2021" next year, possibly making the uncashed check active again, Rheingold wrote. A similar method could be used for debts that are past the statute of limits.

The solution is easy: There's no harm in writing the full date. Writing the month out can also help. 
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Write this: January 15, 2020. Not this: 1/15/20.

The majority of phones sold today are enabled for 4G connectivity, but if you’re looking to get yourself a new phone with your holiday money, you would be wise to bide your time and get yourself a 5G phone.
Here are five of the best reasons why:

1. 5G networks are better than ever, and keep improving. When launched earlier this year, 5G was limited to a few of the busiest areas of the biggest cities. But now, 5G is present in many more locations than before and will soon spread further.

2. 5G phones will be far more widespread this year. It’s not just the networks that will see significant expansion this year; we also expect to see a far greater number of the devices themselves becoming available. Qualcomm has unveiled its two latest top-of-the-line processors, the Snapdragon 865 and the Snapdragon 765, and both of them have 5G enabled.

The Samsung Galaxy A90 5G is just one of a whole new wave of 5G phones hitting the market. That means there’s no option for a 4G flagship running Qualcomm this year, which is undoubtedly essential news when one considers the ubiquity of the chipsets among Android-sporting brands such as OnePlus, Sony, Motorola, Asus, and more. You’ll have a far greater choice of a 5G phone if you wait for 2020, and depending on your commitment to your favored brand, you might not even have the option to stick to 4G this year.

3. iPhones will almost certainly adopt 5G, so no need to switch to Android. It was mildly surprising that the most prominent tech brand in the world didn’t offer the option of a 5G handset last year, but they will most likely be offering multiple 5G models this coming year. What’s more, a report has indicated that 80 million 5G modems are being readied for the September launch of the iPhone 12, so there’s strong evidence that we may see the whole range enabled for 5G.

4. 5G phones will become more affordable. Also, at the Qualcomm conference, Xiaomi announced that they would release a minimum of 10 new 5G phones throughout 2020, but more crucially, that these new devices would fall in the mid-range and possibly even budget segments of the market.

Most reviewers have been impressed with Xiaomi’s new devices, even though the 5G handsets are costly. So, if Xiaomi brings out models in the mid-range with better pricing and 5G capability, it should be welcome news for the whole market.

Moreover, most industry insiders doubt that Xiaomi will be the only brand to offer mid-range devices.

5. 5G’s excellent performance means it is the future of mobile tech. The most persuasive argument in favor of 5G comes not in the form of words, but numbers. Qualcomm’s latest X55 modem promises top download speeds of 7Gbps, and upload speeds hitting 3Gbps.

The early real-world experience says that performance improvements will be eye-opening. This massive performance improvement to your daily usage would be reason enough to adopt 5G, but it’s the implications for future tech that mean you’ll want to be a part of this new revolution.

Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher of Ephesus, is credited with the quote, “The only constant in life is change.” It comes as no surprise that technology is gradually taking over all aspects of our day to day life. 
The rise of cutting-edge technology, including cloud-based computing, big data analysis, wearables, machine learnings, Internet of Things, AR/VR, and drones has been exhibiting nothing but change. Moreover, the rise of 5G technology is establishing even further growth prospects.
So, looking at the coming decade, these top 5 technologies are set to have the most significant impact and change: 

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Blockchain
• Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
• Big Data
• Internet of Things (IoT).

 
Artificial intelligence (AI)remains a hot spot, with its ever-increasing impact on numerous industries all over the world. AI is the most substantial and significant driving technology factor with its speedy execution in sectors like banking, retail, healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and defense. AI applications allow machines to learn from experience and work like humans by simulating human performance.
Whether it’s Apple’s self-driving car, Amazon’s Alexa and Echo, or Google’s Lens, the application of artificial intelligence holds the most vital prospect.
AI can impact the world economy on numerous grounds, like aiding or replacing human labor to finish the assigned work more rapidly. Consequently, it expands production, speeds up the processing of data flows, increases production and service development, thereby generating more wealth worldwide.
According to several media reports, 80% of emerging technologies will implement AI technology by 2021.
The important spheres where AI is used: 
•      Knowledge Reasoning
•      Machine Learning
•      Robotics
•      Natural Language Processing.
•      Planning 
 
Blockchainis significantly speedier and more reliable than the legacy technologies in completing a transaction and recording it securely. This is primarily due to the lack of manual processing or verification by mediators as it applies a distributed consensus.
Additionally, blockchain technology is expected to be honest and intended to deliver unaffected information. Thus, the probability of financial deficits is low, with the slightest possibilities of double counting and hacking.
Overall, the cohesive use of the technology can enable countries to attain better economic growth with streamlined day-to-day systems. Bitcoin is one of the best examples of blockchain technology use.
The important spheres where blockchain is used: 
•      Encrypted Messaging
•      Decentralized Internet
•      Distributed Cloud Storage
•      Networking Sites
•      Stock Exchange
•      Real Estate
 
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)is seeing significant new implementations due to the shift in consumer desires and business demands. With hardware possibilities and digital capabilities becoming more easily accessible and inexpensive to the ordinary person, AR/VR technologies have evolved extraordinarily well in the last few years.

Almost every major sector, including healthcare, retail, pharma, gaming, entertainment, automobiles, and construction, are utilizing the technology to interrelate between the actual world and 3D virtual objects in real-time.

The important spheres where AR/VR is used: 

• Design & Modelling
• Business Logistics
• Field Service
• Entertainment Properties
• Retail
• Medical Training

 
Big Data is turning out to be an essential component for businesses to remain aggressive and competitive in most industries. Companies are utilizing this technology to identify and calculate consumption models or enhance operational effectiveness.

Investments in big data analytics software, hardware, and services are anticipated to increase in the new decade, due to the enormous amount of structured and unstructured data generated universally. This pervasive implementation of big data analytics is a significant tailwind driving the big data market on a global basis.

Big Data technology aids in controlling vast amounts of structured and unstructured information, thereby making it more straightforward for companies to make better business decisions. Moreover, big data analytics acts as a booster for marketing strategies, thereby improving customer relationships.

Additionally, with rising cyber-threats and cyber-crimes, big data is the best answer to fight fraud in online deals.

The important spheres where big data is used: 

• Location Tracking
• Precision Medicine
• Fraud Detection & Handling
• Advertising
• Entertainment & Media.

 
Internet of Things (IoT)unites manufacturing, medical devices, vehicles, and a range of consumer and everyday products, which allows enhanced monitoring, analytics, and more.

IoT, in simple terms, implies connecting devices over the network or internet for the intent of interaction. In IoT, devices gather and distribute data that is accumulated in the cloud, thereby helping in faster analyzing information, gaining more accurate insights.

According to media reports, by 2025, the total installed base of IoT connected devices is expected to be around 75.44 billion globally. This represents a 500% increase over the last decade.
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The important spheres where IoT is used: 

• Connected Devices
• Smart Homes
• Wearables
• Smart Cities.

If it seems like all your friends have smartphones, you may be on to something. A new report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that reports on technology and media for children, found that by the age of 11, more than half of kids in the U.S. have their own smartphone. By age 12, more than two-thirds do, and by 14, teens are just as likely as adultsto own a smartphone. Some kids start much younger. Nearly 20% of 8-year-olds have a smartphone!

Now, let’s speak to the kids. So, what’s the right age? The best answer is when both you and your parents feel the time is right.

Here are some points to consider to help you and your parents make this decision.

Responsibility.Have you shown that you are generally responsible? Do you keep track of valuable belongings? Do you understand the value of money, and can you save up to buy things you want? These are all good signs that you may be ready for a phone. If not, it might be wise to wait a bit longer.

Safety.Do you travel to or from school or after-school activities without an adult? This is when phones often go from a “want” to a “need.” Sometimes parents report that they feel better knowing they can reach their children directly and that their kids can reach them, too.

Social Maturity.Do you treat your friends with kindness and respect? Do you understand the permanence of the internet, the fact that once something goes out onto the web, it can never truly be deleted? It is critically important that you have a grasp on these issues before you own a smartphone.

Bullying. We all get angry and say hurtful things we don’t mean sometimes, but when you post something on the internet that you might not mean later, or might wish you could take back. It can have real and lasting harmful effects. In the era of smartphones, there have been considerable increases in cyberbullying.

Be Smart. If you and your parents decide this is an excellent time to take that step, here are some tips for creating a healthy relationship between you and your phone.
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Parents should model good behavior! Your parents are the number one most important influence in your life, and that goes for technology use as much as anything else. If parents are glued to their phones all day, guess what? Their children probably will be, too.
On the flip side, if parents model smartphone habits like putting the phone away during meals and not texting and driving, that will go a long way toward helping kids develop similar healthy behaviors.
You and your parents should talk together about the importance of setting rules and limits around your phone use and screen time. Understanding why rules are made and set in place can help kids stick to a system.

If you’re leaving a phone or tablet in your car for some reason, you probably put it in the glovebox or out of sight under something a fair bit less valuable. That’s just common sense. But in fact, your gadget’s Bluetooth may be making them way more visible than they ever could be with the naked eye.

As Outside Magazine notes, enterprising thieves have been using Bluetooth scanner apps – particularly in otherwise deserted areas like trailheads – to quickly scan their surroundings for high-value targets. To avoid this fate, simply put your device into Airplane mode (Android, iOS), turn it all the way off or, of course, avoid having to leave it in the car in the first place.

Better yet, you can test your own preventative measures by downloading a readily available Bluetooth scanner app yourself to see if your devices are visible by this method even after you have attempted to disable them. Certain devices like wireless headphones and fitness trackers can be pretty insistent on sending out Bluetooth signals for pairing purposes, so it is worth double-checking you actually know how to disable them fully.
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Or, for a dead-simple approach that will cost you a few bucks, pick up a signal-blocking “Faraday bag” to keep in your car, so you can be sure the gadgets inside it can’t signal the outside world no matter how hard they try.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has officially launched the Contract for the Web, a set of principles designed to “fix” the internet and prevent us from sliding into a “digital dystopia,” The Guardian reports. The Contract lists nine core principles for governments, companies, and individuals to adhere to, including responsibilities to provide affordable, reliable internet access and to respect civil discourse and human dignity.

At launch, the initiative has received the backing of over 180 organizations, including tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, DuckDuckGo, and Facebook, and nonprofit groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Guardian initially reported that Amazon and Twitter were absent from the list of backers, however now Twitter’s logo appears on the Contract’s homepage. Twitter’s increasing role in political discourse was recently brought into sharp focus after it chose to ban political ads on its platform, citing the “challenges to civic discourse” that they create.

The contract’s launch comes as tech companies such as Facebook and Google have faced mounting pressure around both the amount of user data they collect and how they collect it. The Contract for the Web includes principles designed to prevent this, including a requirement for companies to respect people’s privacy and personal data. If companies do not show that they are working to support these aims, they risk being removed from the list of the project’s endorsers.

It’s not that we need a 10-year plan for the web, we need to turn the web around now,” Berners-Lee said. The Contract, which includes 72 clauses alongside its nine principles, offers a shared vision for the web that Berners-Lee’s Web Foundation wants to see built, as well as a roadmap for action. Finally, it also provides a tool to try and hold companies and governments to account.

The governments of Germany, France, and Ghana have also signed up to the Contract’s founding principles. The Contract calls on governments to ensure everyone can connect to the internet, and to keep the internet available all of the time. This latter point feels especially timely in light of the Iranian government’s recent decision to shut down the internet in an attempt to prevent protests from spreading.
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“The forces taking the web in the wrong direction have always been very strong,” Berners-Lee said, noting that it will be vital for citizens to hold governments and companies to account if the situation is to improve.

The Standing Committee of the 13th National People’s Congress in China has passed the cryptography law on Saturday, and it will be effective on January 1, 2020, according to a Chinese media report.

The announcement came one day after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s call on the country to seize opportunities in blockchain technology.

While China still bans cryptocurrency trading and its national digital currency is yet to be introduced, cryptography, as an integral underpinning of blockchain technology, could be critical to the country’s push to be more competitive in the blockchain space.

The new law aims to tackle emerging regulatory and legal challenges in commercial cryptography use-cases as they play an increasingly important role in developing the Chinese economy, according to the law’s latest draft proposal before approval.

According to the proposal:

“Clear guidelines and regulations are needed to evaluate commercial cryptography technologies used in the major fields related to the national interest as the current ‘loose’ system is not suitable for the industry anymore.”

China’s national congress said the new law will encourage research and development on commercial cryptography technologies while building up an inclusive standardized regulatory system for the market.

The Chinese congress released a draft proposal for the new law last July, soliciting public comments.

The proposal includes a range of issues from how compatible the industry standards should be with other international cryptography systems to whether companies should voluntarily verify their commercial use-cases with authorities.
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According to the Chinese congress, the new law will also encourage nationwide educational efforts, such as public exhibitions, to promote cryptography among government officials, companies, and social groups.

Want to put Microsoft’s Office software on an iOS or Android device? Soon you won't have to download individual versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to use them. 

In an announcement from its Ignite conference in Orlando, Microsoft revealed that it's beginning to publicly test a new version of the Office app that will combine the three popular apps into one primary, centralized Office app. 

Reviewers have been quite impressed with how much you can do with your phone camera from this app. It’s quite easy to turn one or many pictures into a PDF or a Word document. When scanning a table from a user manual to turn it into an Excel spreadsheet, the text recognition was spot on.

The Lens mode also has special sub-modes for whiteboard and document scanning. So, if you attend a lot of lectures or meetings, this app could make it easier to grab notes without much effort.

Plus, the app also lets you take notes, kind of like you would in Google Keep. You can jot down text, create lists, and attach images. So, even if you’re not immersed in the Microsoft Office world, the app can help you in many situations where you need to send or sign a document quickly.
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In the new app – which is available now as a public preview on Android or as a beta through Apple's iOS Test Flight program– you'll be able to create new documents, presentations or spreadsheets as well as edit and view existing documents. You'll also be able to "snap a picture of a document" and make it into an editable Word file, create and sign PDFs or "transform tables from a printed page into an Excel spreadsheet."
Microsoft's individual apps have been popular on mobile. All three rank in the top 25 productivity apps on iOS' Top Charts for the category, while each app has been downloaded over 1 billion times on Android. 

The world has been hard at work, trying to find solutions to store the 100 zettabytes of data that are expected to hit the cloud by 2023. 

Microsoft and Warner Bros, for their parts, have just demonstrated why they think they are ahead of the game – in both protecting past archives, and in storing those to come.

At Microsoft's Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella showed off a piece of quartz glass the size of a drink coaster. Within the glass was stored a 143-minute Warner Bros movie – fittingly, the film was Superman. 

The technology is the result of Microsoft Research's Project Silica, which was set up to design new storage systems for the cloud. 

Project Silica's researchers have been working on developing ultrafast laser optics, which they used to encode the entire film in glass.

Using an ultrafast pulse laser, they wrote 'voxels' inside the glass – that is, the three-dimensional equivalent of the pixels that make up an image. Each voxel, therefore, has its own orientation, depth, and size, making it a unique encoder for the movie. 

Because voxels are engraved at the nano-scale level, they can be written in multiple layers throughout the glass. A two-millimeter piece, for example, can contain more than 100 layers of voxels, making for high-density storage. 

According to Microsoft, the glass and the data it contains can resist being boiled in water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, and demagnetized. By permanently changing the structure of the glass, the laser ensures that the information is securely printed for potentially thousands of years.

Ant Rowstron, deputy lab director at Microsoft Research - Cambridge, said: "One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation."

"We really wanted something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it." 

To carry out Project Silica, Microsoft partnered with the University of Southampton in the UK, where scientists had already developed a laser-writing technology to record data back in 2016, which they claimed could have "a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature."

Peter Kazansky, who worked on the project, said at the time that this would open a new era of data archiving. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we've learned will not be forgotten," he said.

For a media company like Warner Bros, this could have huge implications. Storing its 100-year film and television archives is indeed currently causing it some headaches. 

The company keeps three copies of each asset stored in various locations around the world. It has plans in place in case an earthquake, a hurricane or a fire struck one of its storage locations. And every three to five years, it migrates its digital content to stay ahead of degradation issues.

The company's chief technology officer, Vicky Colf, said: "Imagine if a title like The Wizard of Oz or a show like Friends wasn't available for generation after generation to enjoy… That's why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously."

As intriguing as storing data on glass may seem, though, the technology is not made for users to be able to play films at home on a specially made quartz glass DVD player. 

The voxels encoded by the laser in the glass can only be read by a computer-controlled microscope that uses machine learning to decode and reconstruct the patterns that come out when polarized light is shone through the glass. 

So, the data stored in the new technology won't be information that needs to be accessed regularly. Instead, Microsoft spoke of it as 'cold data,' or archival data that companies are required to maintain but don't need to see for months or years. 

Cold data includes media archives like those held by Warner Bros, but also medical data, or legal contracts, or even urban building plans that cities have to retain.

"We are not trying to build things that you put in your house or play movies from," said Rowstron. "We are building storage that operates at the cloud scale."

In other words, Microsoft is interested in technology that exists exclusively for the cloud – something that it previously outlined in its mission statement for Project Silica, in which it said that its research was not concerned with the deployment of information outside the cloud, such as offices, homes, mobile phones or enterprise data centers. 

Microsoft cautions that there is much work ahead before physical quartz-glass archives can be used at scale. To do so, Microsoft engineers would need to speed up data encoding, as well as increase the data density.