Latest in technology explained

The term DDoS whistles past whenever cyber-activism rears up its head en-masse. These kind of attacks make international headlines because of multiple reasons. The issues that jumpstart those DDoS attacks are often controversial or highly political. Since a large number of regular users are affected by the attacks, it's an issue that plays with the people. Perhaps most importantly, a lot of people don't know what constitutes a DDoS attack.
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As an avid gamer, I’m surprised by the correlation between GPS-like features in modern video games and the proliferation of GPS technology in mundane life. When I was a kid, paper maps and cartography were still common; if you got lost, you suffered through it and found your way to your destination. Nowadays, we’ve got the wonders of GPS to guide us there and back again. What is GPS? How does it work?
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Haptics is the technology of touch. In the context of a virtual environment, it would mean being able to touch and feel something that literally isn't there, but that's certainly not its only use. From gaming and virtual reality to 3D modelling and making computers more accessible - virtual surgery, driving simulators, swinging a virtual sword, the texture of paper or moleskin on a touchscreen display - this is haptic technology at its most amazing, and the implications are far reaching.
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To many people, Google IS the internet. It's the default homepage and the first port of call before accessing any site. It's arguably the most important invention since the Internet itself. Without search engines, content would all be hand picked - just like newspapers and magazines. And while search engines have changed a lot since those first humble beginnings, the underlying principles are the same as they always were.
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Do you really know what your hard drive does whenever you read a file from it or write one to it? Our hard drives can now store massive amounts of data, and that massive space requires a high level of organization in order to prevent issues and maintain performance. Hard drives can be well organized through the use of file systems.
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Technology in the computer age has been plagued with unsecured features, security loopholes, and general oversights in software architecture. Flash drives can carry keyloggers. Browsers might have open backdoors. Windows constantly updates with security fixes. We have to take the good with the bad and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight. Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is one technological advancement that, too, comes with its share of drawbacks.
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With today's technology, we can expect high amounts of speed and quality with everything that we do on our computers, our smartphones, and any other recent gadgets. However, while this increase in speed and quality has a number of factors, a lot of it relates to something called bitrate. What bitrate means depends on the context in which you use it, but it's very important to know what it is.
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Network structure and management have their own lingo. Some of the terms thrown around will likely already sound familiar to you. Ethernet and Wi-Fi are largely self-obvious concepts, although it may require a little bit more effort to understand the intricacies of the different Wi-Fi standards. Knowing the meaning of these terms, and grasping the underlying concepts will help you to get a better grip on your own home or office network.
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Whether you’re using a desktop computer or a laptop, your computer’s motherboard contains an integrated battery. Unlike a standard laptop battery, the motherboard’s battery doesn’t power your computer while you're using it. Quite the opposite, actually – the battery is tiny and only active when you’re not actually using your computer.
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Over the last five or more years, there have been a number of different terms swirling around to describe computer hardware. Some of those terms include but aren’t limited to APU, CPU, and GPU. But for people who are confused about acronyms, it’s difficult to understand what a computer really has.
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Display resolutions can be a rather cryptic business, with multiple standards used to describe the same display resolution in 10 different ways. All of those technical terms tend to change based on the display's purpose (television versus computer monitor) and even your region (the meaning of HD Ready). Today, we'll help you make sense of the different terms people tend to throw around when describing display resolutions.
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Most websites that offer formerly paid software for free do so with little to no illusion of legality. However you feel about torrents of paid software and media, it’s unarguable that they are illegal in most countries. Which is why torrent sites are often harassed by law enforcement. There is one type of site that’s managed to avoid most scorn, however - abandonware. Does this mean abandonware is legal?
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If you've set up a wireless network before, you've probably read or been told to use WPA2 instead of WEP, because WEP is bad. Why is that? And what is WEP anyway? Good questions. WEP was the first standardized way of securing wireless networks. It encrypts your data – which is good – but doesn't do so well enough to stop people from eavesdropping – which is bad.
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"Open source" is a term that’s thrown around a lot these days. You may know that certain things are open source, like Linux and Android, but do you know what it entails? What is open source software? How can you tell if a program is open source? And, really, who cares? How does the open source philosophy affect you?
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Computer processors have a home. The socket. Most people ignore this piece of hardware because it has little obvious functional impact. Sockets don’t hinder or help performance they’re standardized in any given line of processors. Why should you care? If you ever intend on upgrading your processor, the socket on your motherboard will limit the upgrades you can choose from.
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