Freshmen Told to Leave Laptop at Home

Last year, 90 students quit studies at Zhejiang University in China. The recruitment office director says 60 of those students left because of "Internet addiction." The university’s director believes that the main factor in the students' Internet addiction is a dwindling appetite for learning. This year, incoming freshman received a written recommendation to come to school without laptops. Furthermore, there is no broadband access in dorms and there is a three hour network access limit in computer labs…

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Cell Phones Won't Keep Your Secrets

Trust Digital provides businesses with phone-security tools. To test their services, they bought used cell phones on eBay. Personal information on the phones had been "erased" by the previous owners, but Trust Digital was able to recover some very sensitive information, and without much difficulty. The company's chief executive said, "We found just a mountain of personal and corporate data." Experts say that giving away an old phone is commonplace. Consumers upgrade their cell phones on average about every 18 months…

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Putting Wireless Networks to the Terrorism Test

The Operation College Freedom drill at the University of California, San Diego was a "full-scale exercise is the culmination of a three-year, $4 million research project carried out by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology." The drill involved a coordinated effort by the school and local emergency and law-enforcement officials to respond to a simulated terrorist attack. They tested Wi-Fi, medical patient tracking technology, portable antennas, and a helmet-cam. At the heart of the drill was a system designed to coordinate triage and manage medical data...

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Safety Last

A detailed explanation of why Apple and Dell recalled about 6 million Sony-made lithium-ion laptop batteries. While consumers might wonder why vendors are selling batteries that have greater energy storage density than dynamite, recent history actually shows that we’ll accept almost any risk for more power. This article from the New York Times (free log-in required) will help you learn the difference between lithium-ion, nickel-cadmium, and nickel-metal-hydride batteries, and find out why Sony chose to send the potentially explosive batteries to market…

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