Category: Featured News

These days, the leading devices have a broad range of form and function to provide.

It feels as though a day can’t go by without another mention of the development of a new miracle gadget, from an external battery pack iPad owners can’t live without, to a mode of transportation small enough to fit into a backpack.

With all the latest technologies, the leading gadgets for youth are more exciting than ever before.

What is possible today, and completely available to today’s teens, and even younger children, are goals that would have been considered entirely out of reach only a handful of years ago. This has brought up the latest generation with an appetite for technology that is nearly insatiable. It’s no wonder something like an external battery pack iPad devices can use to charge more than once is considered to be a vital tool. People simply cannot live without their screens and WiFi connections.

That said, there is a lot more than an external battery pack iPad users need when it comes to top gadgets.

Check out some of the latest, hottest gadgets that are appealing to young people right now:

• Creative D100 Portable Bluetooth Speakers – one thing that hasn’t changed is the love that the young generation has for music. It is only the technology used to play it that is different. These speakers allow for a full sound for music and videos, needing four AA batteries for an entirely wireless experience for 25 hours.
• Google Chromecast – this has not just become a new hit but it is now an ongoing one. This provides the opportunity to use a simple stick to stream video on any television with an HDMI port. Suddenly, any TV is a Smart TV.
• Amazon Kindle Paperwhite – this device may not have all the features offered by the Voyage, but it is often considered to be the best device Amazon has released, to date. It is light, durable and it does the trick for a very decent price. Furthermore, reading is easy in virtually any lighting because the screen brightness has been adjusted to perfection. For students, this can make a huge difference.

A new report has indicated that certain wearables and the apps needed to use them are posing a privacy risk.

Citizen Lab, in partnership with Open Effect have now released a report that has suggested that the mobile security being provided by several popular fitness trackers are actually vulnerable to potential tampering, surveillance and tracking over the long term.

These devices are quite commonplace and are used to allow a person to monitor his or her physical activity.

The report was the result of an examination of eight different fitness trackers and the mobile apps that are needed to use them. It was conducted by Citizen Lab from the University of Toronto, and the Open Effect not-for-profit research group. They looked into these applications and wearables to determine the level of mobile security and privacy they were able to provide. The trackers the researchers examined included: the Fitbit Charge HR, Jawbone Up 2, Garmin Vivosmart, Basis Peak, Mio Fuse, Xiaomi Mi Band, Withings Pulse O2 and even the Apple Watch.

The researchers looked at a range of different mobile security measures for every device they considered.

The factors included those pertaining to the collection and storage of data, as well as their transmission practices. What they determined was that every device, aside from the Apple Watch, persistently emitted uniqueIDs by way of their embedded Bluetooth radios. Those identifications could potentially expose the users of the wearables to location tracking over the long-term, even at times in which the device was not paired to a smartphone or tablet.

The report said the Apple Watch was the only one among the wearables that actually randomized its Bluetooth ID, causing it to be impossible to track that smartwatch over the long-term.

The authors of the report also pointed out that the Jawbone and Withings app was vulnerable to being exploited in order to crate fraudulent fitness records. The reason this poses a mobile security risk due to the chance that the data collected by personal fitness wearables could be used in court cases, health insurance programs and for other official reasons. Therefore, if that data has been falsified, it could create a highly undesirable risk for the users.