What Does Airplane Mode Do?

Heard the horror stories of people who go on a vacation or travel for work only to find a massive phone bill waiting for them when they get home? Sometimes the people don't even actually leave the country, but get close enough to a border that their phone connects to a cellphone tower on the other side. This happened recently when I took my family to see Niagara Falls. We were close enough to Canada, and far away enough from any cell towers on the US side that our phones connected to Rogers, a Canadian cell phone provider.

What if you don't want to turn your phone totally off, but want to ensure that you don't use the phone or data services? Maybe you're travelling abroad, going into a hospital, or boarding a plane. Simply go to the settings in your smartphone (airplane mode is for smartphones only), and, usually on the main settings screen, you'll see a little switch for Airplane Mode. Just turn it on and voila! It's like turning the phone part of your smartphone off. For iPhone users, I describe Airplane Mode as turning your iPhone into an iPod Touch.

You'll still be able to connect to wifi, but no calls, texts or voice-mails will be sent to your phone while in this mode. As soon as you turn it off, all the above mentioned things you missed will flood in, so don't worry!

Practical Tip of the Day:
When traveling, be careful which wifi networks you connect to. While most are legitimate, some may be monitored by hackers who can watch what you do and even connect to your computer through their network. If you see multiple possible networks, ask an employee of where you are which network is theirs. It's not uncommon to see fake wifi networks with seemingly proper names.

What are Internet Pirates?

Pirates of yore would sail around the world, fighting, drinking, stealing, and in general being bad people. There are still pirates today, and while some are still naval-based, others are no different than the person next to you in the grocery store. Internet pirates don't have to leave the house, and some have never even been on a boat.

"Internet pirate" is a general term for anyone who acquires and/or shares other people's works online. The most commonly pirated types of works are TV shows, movies, and music. In the late 90's, Napster became very common, and people were sharing and downloading music as often as they checked their email. Some people didn't even know what they were doing was illegal. As access to the Internet became faster, eventually people began sharing videos, though at this point Napster had been all but shut down. People simply moved on to the next file-sharing site.

While downloading copyrighted material off the internet is illegal, it is doubtful that the FBI will be knocking down your door to take your computer and lock you up. What is most common for the internet pirate who's been caught is to receive a letter in the mail asking them to pay some large sum of money to make up for perceived lost revenue for the companies who's material you've downloaded. This can be more than a little startling for people who receive these letters, as often they're young people or unwitting parents of teenagers. Sometimes these letters even go to people who haven't pirated anything, but people who left their wireless network unprotected, and a neighbor has used their network instead.

Practical Tip of the Day:
If you use a wireless router (if you do not need to plug your internet into your computer), make sure it has a secure password on it. If you leave your wireless network with either no password, or a simple password ("admin", "abc123" or "password") you leave yourself open for people to use your internet to do whatever they want with. While receiving letters to pay for music you didn't steal is on the mild end, there have also been stories of elderly people and families being accused of things as serious as sharing child pornography because someone was using their network unbeknownst to them.

What is Bluetooth?

Your phone has it, your computer has it, your car has it, it seems like just about everything nowadays has it. Bluetooth has become so ubiquitous that it seems a given for any electronic device to have it, but what is Bluetooth? I've been asked this many times, especially in how it's different from WiFi.

Hedy Lamarr. Bet you weren't expecting her in here, were you? This famous actress was actually one of the people that helped invent Bluetooth, though it wasn't called that at the time, and it certainly wasn't invented so you can control your toaster with your computer. She helped invent a way for radio signals to be sent in such a way that they couldn't be blocked or intercepted as part of the wartime effort, but the military simply filed the technology away.

Modern Bluetooth is, in the simplest terms, a way for a wireless signal to be sent in such a way that it "bounces around" various frequencies. Think of it as if you were trying to have a secret conversation over walkie-talkies. You'd hop on one channel, say a couple words, switch to another, some some more words, etc. for your whole conversation. Electronics do this using short-wavelength radio signals, and by using this technology, you can use multiple wireless devices at once with no ill effect.

Even if you have twenty Bluetooth devices turned on and working at once (you have a Bluetooth headset on your phone, wireless mouse and keyboard on your computer, wireless printer, etc.) you'll get no interference between them because they're jumping around on their signals enough that it's highly unlikely that any two objects will be using the same wavelength at the same time, and even if they do, they use it for such a short amount of time you won't notice it.

Practical Tip of the Day:

Most phones and computers that have Bluetooth capabilities have it turned on by default. Having this running if you're not using it can not only drain your battery, but can also be a security hazard. If you see the Bluetooth symbol (see right), go into your settings and turn it off until you do need it.