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Best Tech Gifts Under $50
Looking for great gifts without breaking the bank? Read on!
Now that the holidays are just around the corner and you’re rushing to get everything last minute (like me!), here are some great gadgets that won’t drain your wallet (or purse).
- Google Home Mini – only $29 and free shipping from the Google Store!
- Amazon Echo Dot – also only $29!!
- Anker Soundcore Bluetooth speaker – excellent build, excellent sound quality. Under $24.
- Amazon Fire TV Stick , $40 on Amazon.
- TPLink Wifi Range Extender, for those dead wifi zones in your house.
- JBL Clip 2 – a small and powerful water resistant speaker with incredible sound.
- Sony SRS-XB10 – see above.
Ready, set, go!! Good luck, and happy holidays from your friendly neighborhood tech team, Azuretech!
Net Neutrality on the Verge of Rollback
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Pushes for Rescinding Net Neutrality Rules
Public opinion seems to be in favor of net neutrality as a whole – 60% of people to be exact. Americans seem to support a regulated, open internet, and shouldn’t we all? Well, Ajit Pai seems to not think so. Many world leaders and companies (Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc), have already stated their opinions on net neutrality, and they overwhelmingly support it. So why take it away?
Azuretech has been following the issue closely – we wrote a few months back on this issue, and it’s one that’s close to us. ISP’s should treat all content online equally, and should not charge more depending on the type of content that you are watching.
The planned voting date for net neutrality proposed rollbacks is December 14. A delay was proposed since ATT’s win in a court battle with the FCC could mean less protections for consumers. However, the proposal was denied.
Want to read more on the subject?
Krack Wi-Fi Attack – Update everything!
If You Connect to Wifi, You’re Vulnerable to the KRACK Attack.
Recently a new WPA flaw was discovered. What does that mean? That means that if you transmit information through Wifi, your information can be obtained.
When connecting to a WiFi network, your device performs an authentication “handshake.” The KRACK attack targets the third step of this phase. That means that while you are connecting to a WiFi network, the KRACK attack tries to break your encryption. If the attack manages to break your encryption, it can spy on most, if not all, the data that you send to and from your device.
What do I need to do?
Update your Operating systems – Android, OSX, iOS, Windows… – everything. Yes, even Linux machines.
To read more, please check out PCWorld’s excellent article.
AI and Medicine – Machines Will Soon be our Doctors
AI and Deep Learning Algorithms Catching up to Humans in Medicine
I know I keep coming back to the topic of AI in this blog. It seems to be increasingly more and more relevant. We Machines will do our jobs for us, machines will replace us. They might even turn on us. We hear it all the time. Sometimes we watch movies or read books (yes, some of us still read) portraying a kind of dystopian society, where robots turn on their human creators, and we get quite some entertainment out of it.
While it doesn’t seem likely that future artificial intelligence machines may turn on us, the general consensus is that they for sure WILL replace us, maybe even as soon as in the next 50 years. Machines may become better than us in absolutely everything that we can do. That is to say that humans may not be able to do anything that a machine cannot do better, perhaps much better. This is becoming increasingly clear in the field of medicine. However, when we step out of the movie theater, back to reality, and consider those propositions, we’re dismissive or incredulous. The purpose of this article will be to give you just a few facts to push back on those assumptions. Here is some of the progress that AI and deep learning machines have made so far:
- IBM’s Watson AI can diagnose just as good as any radiologist, and some say even faster and with more accuracy.
- AI tools, when applied to cardiology, can find “skin cancers, blood clots, and infections all with unprecedented speed and accuracy,” according to Huffington Post.
- Forbes writes that “deep learning algorithms have been able to diagnose the presence or absence of tuberculosis (TB) in chest x-ray images with astonishing accuracy…better than most radiologists.”
- From diabetes, to breast cancer, to predicting heart attacks, AI is already beating humans.
As we move into a world where machine intelligence is reaching new heights, we may have to consider the idea that one day a robot might be performing surgery instead of a human being. Machines may be so much better that one day, it might be ILLEGAL for a human to perform surgery. What do you think will happen in the future? Leave your comments below!
Change the default Search Engine for Microsoft Edge
As you may know, Edge is Microsoft’s replacement for the old Internet Explorer. Edge is now the default browser for all Windows 10 computers and it uses Bing as its default search engine. If you prefer to use a different engine for all searches, let’s say Google, you can change the default search engine by following a few simple steps.
What is a Search Engine?
Google, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, Infoseek, and Yahoo are all search engines. They index millions of sites on the Web, so that Web surfers like you and me can easily find Web sites with the information we want. By creating indexes, or large databases of Web sites (based on titles, keywords, and the text in the pages), search engines can locate relevant Web sites when users enter search terms or phrases. When you are looking for something using a search engine, it is a good idea to use words like AND, OR, and NOT to specify your search. Using these boolean operators, you can usually get a list of more relevant sites.
Change default Search Engine
- Open Microsoft Edge.
- Type google.com in the URL bar and wait for the page to load.
- Click the ellipses (…) in the top-right corner, and click Settings.
- Go to the bottom of the settings menu a click on View advanced settings.
- Scroll down to Search in the address bar with and click on Change search engine.
- Choose Google Search from the list and click Set as default.
That’s it, next time you type in the search bar, Edge will use Google as the search engine. You can follow the same steps to set any other search engine you prefer as the default. If you want to learn more about using Microsoft Edge, visit https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge