How to Find Free Wi-Fi Hotspots

There are places that provide free WI-FI access all over the world. If you travel abroad, you can look for an Apple store, which is easy to find in almost all the cities of the world. If you cannot find the Apple store, another option would be to look for one of the Starbucks or McDonald’s restaurants. These should be easy to locate all over the world.

Although there are many other restaurants that say they offer free Internet access, they sometimes require you to buy food or a drink from them if you want to be given free Wi-Fi access. Totally free Internet access can also be found in airports, train stations, bus stations, museums, libraries and other public places. And when these places offer Internet, the access should be 100% free.

There are also several useful apps that can help you locate the perfect hotspot. Sadly, many of these apps need and Internet connection themselves, in order to offer you the needed information. And this kind of defeats the very purpose of the app, isn’t it?

If you do not have a cellular data plan while travelling, those apps may be of no use. Surprisingly, there are some apps that work very well even when you are offline. Instabridge and WeFi Pro are just two such examples. The first one has a 3 million hotspots database, which will prove its value especially when travelling abroad. The second app has an even larger database, of more than 200 million hotspots. The WI-FI finder app is also useful when you are interested in finding hotspots near you. The app uses the GPS location, and then shows you the hotspots that are close to you on a map. The app can be installed on phones and tablets.

The Internet provider that you have at home may also have a network of hotspots in other countries, allowing you to use them while you are travelling. As an example, Comcast has transformed home routers into public hotspots that are available for its customers only. Xfinity does the same thing. According to Data Alliance’s CEO George Hardesty, the same service is available in most European countries.

There are also many free hotspots, which in reality offer you a few free minutes, and then ask you to pay if you want to continue to use the Internet. They may be an option if you want to quickly check your email, for example.

Some business will offer free Wi-Fi if you sign a loyalty program with them.  These loyalty programs are often times free, and they can be of great help, especially if you can unsubscribe from the undesired newsletters, etc.

When you are interested in free Wi-Fi access, you should also consider the coupons that provide free access. There are several well known places (malls, tech exhibitions, etc.) where one can find vouchers and coupons for all sorts of products and services, free Wi-Fi being just one of them.

Here are some of the frequently used apps that will be of great help whenever you are looking for a free hotspot.

Wi-Fi Map can identify your location, displaying the Wi-Fi hotspots in your vicinity. These places will appear on a map near you, and thus will be easy to find.

Free Wi-Fi Finder works in a similar way; it displays the hotspots around you, along with the approximate distance to them.

Osmino Wi-Fi will not only display hotspots, but also the former users’ opinions about them.

The JiWire search engine knows a lot of data about numerous countries. When you use it, you will also get a lot of info about free and paid hotspots. You can also look for a special hotspot when you enter the address, the postal code or the name of the place you are interested in visiting.

Tech News March 2016

Google Computer Wins Against Go Champion

The battle between man and machine has always attracted the public’s attention, and has stirred mixed reactions and comments. These days a Google computer has earned its fourth victory over the world’s Go champion, Lee Sedol. The man is the world champion of the most complex board game ever. He and the computer have played five times until now, and the human has lost four times.

The computer is named Alpha Go; it has proved a huge advancement in artificial intelligence. The CEO of Google DeepMind has stated that he is a little surprised by these victories, because the computer was supposed to learn from the human champion, rather than defeat him.

Will there be more games between Alpha Go and the man who is also known as the “Roger Federer of Go”? Only time will tell! This game was first played thousands of years ago in China. Each of the two players has the goal of getting larger territories of the board by placing white or black stones on it. One such game can last up to 4 hours and requires mental stamina, a lot or strategic thinking and intuition.

Artificial intelligence specialists have long dreamed about making a computer able to play and win against a champion in a Go board game. Scientists have demonstrated that there are more possible configurations on the board than atoms in the universe. The game relies a lot on intuition and feel, so it was considered to be a very difficult game to be played by a computer – so far.

Back in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue computer won over world champion Gary Kasparov in a chess tournament.

Crystals can Store Data for Billions of Years

Superman has introduced the notion of crystals that are able to store information, but it looks like it wasn’t all fiction. A group of researchers in the UK has created a way of storing data into little structures, which are present inside glass.

Scientists have stated that the data stored this way is safe and stable, being a far better modality of archiving data in comparison with the methods that have been used until now. Their small glass discs have already been used to store historic documents, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Bible. The team can be stored up to 360 terabytes of data on a single crystal, which is the equivalent of the content found on about 25,000 smartphones.

The British scientists have used lasers to encode the data into nanostructures, inside fused quartz. These structures alter the way in which the light travels through glass, allowing specially built devices to read the stored data. The storage concept is defined as 5D, because the data is stored into 5 different dimensions: height, length, width, orientation and position. Further research is needed, of course, but it looks like this new technology will become a commonly used one in the near future.