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Anti-Wifi paint

Developed at the University of Tokyo, this specially designed paint could be used in future to secure home Wifi networks. Containing an aluminium-iron oxide which resonates at the same frequency as wi-fi waves, the airborne data is absorbed and blocked, preventing access beyond the boarders of your home.

The team hopes that the paint will find application over a wide variety of scenarios, security being the most prominent. In the past, users had to reply on encryption and security keys to prevent hackers from accessing their data, what the paint aims to do is removed the signal from the hands of undesireables.

Yet another application Shin-ichi Ohkoshi, project leader for the anti wifi paint, used as an example is movies.

“Our current mobile phones work at much lower frequencies, around 1.5 gigahertz. But, our material can also absorb frequencies that low, so you could block phone signals from outside and stop people’s phones ringing during the movie,” he said.

The blocking of mobile phone signals is far from the only advantage though, as Ohkoshi explains how the paint can pave the way for a better quality movies experience :

“Movie pictures are beamed on the screen by the projector at the back of the cinema. But in the future, you could use a data link that works with millimetre waves. You would have problems with interference, unless you painted the wall and ceiling of the theatre with an absorbent material like ours. In fact, we’ve had an order from an American company keen to use our ink in its movie theatre – we’ve just sent them a sample.”

However, as abundant as the creators enthusiasm for the project, skeptics are making their voices heard. Mark Jackson, security engineer at Cisco UK says that the technology is nothing new and doubts the cost efficiency of the whole idea.

“Surely the thought of having to redecorate a building in order to provide Wi-Fi security is more costly & complex than security functionality available in even the cheapest of Wi-Fi access points?”

Prevention is better than cure

Being a computer technician, I get the chance to learn a lot of patience, especially when it comes to people that are less knowledgeable than me. But there comes a point when my clients act so daft that I want to slap them. Last year, at the shop in which I worked, there was a woman who came in with complaints that her computer was full of viruses and kept crashing. avastAfter a few scans and removals, I found that the source of the virus was porn sites. When showing her where the viruses came from, she flat out denied it and said she had no idea how they got there. Well missy: twenty porn sites in your browser history says otherwise, I’m afraid.

I asked her about her anti-virus, and she said she removed it because she didn’t see why she had to keep it on – the control panel said the last time she used it was six months prior, so she uninstalled it. My patience was waning fast because she was becoming defensive, so I took a few minutes of my life to show her what viruses were capable of and how quickly they could spread. In this case, prevention is better than cure. And since I’m so kind-hearted, I thought I would share with you a few measures that I take to protect my computer.

  1. Disable Autorun. You have no idea what a difference this makes, since a lot of the viruses on the market nowadays spread onto computers via flash drives and Autorun. Disable this, now!
  2. Get a good anti-virus and firewall. I use XP’s firewall along with AVG 8.5 Free. It’s a great combo, and this protection cost me nothing. If you’re looking for free anti-virus suites, AVG, Avast!, and MalwareBytes are good places to start.
  3. firewallConfigure your firewall properly. Only allow your games access to the Internet when you plan to play online or update them. All your other programs that you have installed and connect to the Internet can be removed from the allowed list on your built-in firewall. Only AVG and Google Talk are allowed access on my computer.
  4. Get your friends to run a good anti-virus. This is especially important if you LAN regularly and share files a lot. Helping to keep their computers clean can only benefit both you and them in the long run.
  5. Make yourself another user on the computer, and change it to a limited one. Whenever you want to run a program or file, right-click it and select “Run As”, and type in the details of your account with administrative power (Vista does this well through UAC). This minimizes the control a virus can have on your computer, as they can’t do much damage without the right account name and password if they’re stuck in a limited account.

Alternatively, you could just switch to Linux or Mac OS X. Few people make viruses for these platforms because they couldn’t be bothered to attack a minority of users. Mac users suffer enough already.

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