internet (Page 14)

For some people, the New Year brings new concerns about the elderly folks in their lives. If that’s you, here’s something you should know: The internet strengthens the brains of even older people. Middle-aged and older adults with little Internet experience were able to trigger key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning after just one week of surfing the web. Use of the internet could be one of the main reasons why IQ’s are rising. But while more older adults than ever are using cell phones and computers, a technology gap still exists that threatens to turn senior citizens into second-class citizens.
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Even if you didn’t put it there! – How bad can things get? A computer virus can place porn on your computer without your knowing it, and if the police search your computer, as happened to a couple recently, they could arrest you for having child pornography.

This could be done by someone looking for a place to “stash” nasty photos (where he can retrieve them later) or by someone playing a particularly unpleasant joke. Security expert Jeremiah Grossman says, “Just because it’s there doesn’t mean the person intended for it to be there, whatever it is, child porn included.”
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And who invented the slash? – Tired of having to always type in “forward slash, forward slash” when you visit a website? Well, the scientist who created those slashes as part of web addresses now regrets that he did it that way. And to protect yourself from computer viruses, you may soon have ants in your computer.

BBC News reports that Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web 30 years ago, admits that the // in a web address were actually “unnecessary” and he could easily have designed URLs without them, but “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” BBC quotes him as saying that he had no idea that the forward slashes in every web address would cause “so much hassle.”
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If your internet connection slows down, you usually blame your system or your server. But it could also be the weather: The internet may slow down when the weather is cold.

In Wired.com, Cliff Kuang asked some engineers about this, and they replied that temperature could affect the conductivity of the copper wires in the system, since the electrical conductivity of a metal falls as the temperature rises, meaning that cold weather would slow things down (it turns out that most of the world’s cable is made out of copper). But Kuang quotes engineer Doug Webster as saying that “the infrastructure is engineered to counter those effects.”
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