Tag: problem

Slow Wi-Fi? This Might Be the Problem

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This story is part of Home Tips, CNET’s collection of practical advice for getting the most out of your home, inside and out.

Is your internet suddenly moving super slowly? It might be due to an outdated router or a less-than-ideal router location. Your connection issues may need only an easy fix, like upgrading to a mesh network or simply restarting your modem and router. But if you’ve already attempted many of the tried-and-true methods and your internet speeds are still subpar, the issue might be something your internet service provider is intentionally doing: bandwidth throttling.

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Yes, you read that right. Your ISP could be making your Wi-Fi slower on purpose. Because of a 2019 Supreme Court decision in which the court declined to hear an appeal on net neutrality, ISPs can still legally stifle your internet, limiting your broadband if you’re streaming more TV than they want and serving slower connections to websites owned by their competitors. 

One solution to slow Wi-Fi (if it’s caused by internet throttling) is a virtual private network
. Basically, ISPs need to see your IP address to slow down your internet, and a good VPN will shield that identity — though this comes with some limitations and downsides, which I’ll discuss below. We’ll walk you through how to tell if throttling is to blame and, if not, what to do about fixing your crummy Wi-Fi. (You can also learn more about how to get free Wi-Fi anywhere in the world.) 

Read more: Best Internet Providers of 2022

Step 1

First, troubleshoot your slow internet connection

So your Wi-Fi is slow and you think your service provider is throttling your connection. Before you jump to those conclusions, it’s important to run through the usual troubleshooting list: Check that your router is centrally located in your home, reposition its antennas, double-check your network security and so on. If you want to read about more ways to optimize your Wi-Fi, check out our suggestions.

If you’ve run through the laundry list and your Wi-Fi is still chugging slowly, move on to the next step.

Screenshot by David Priest/CNET

Step 2

Test your internet speed

 

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Step 3

Find a reliable VPN

 

Screenshot by David Priest/CNET

Step 4

Compare your speed with the VPN

Next, test your internet speed somewhere like Fast.com or Speedtest.net. Compare the results with the same test when your VPN is active. The use of any VPN should cut your speed considerably, so the speed tests should show a discrepancy, with the VPN-active speed being notably slower than the VPN-inactive speed. But a VPN also hides the IP address that providers use to identify you, so if your speed test with the VPN is faster than without the VPN, that may mean your ISP is targeting your IP address for throttling.

Screenshot by David Priest/CNET

OK, this is the hard part. Even if you find out your provider is throttling your internet, there may not be

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Does Know-how Normally Want To Solve A Problem?

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Running Companion for NAR Achieve Australia and ASEA, the world’s greatest residence engineering accelerator.

If you are a business enterprise proprietor who feels new technologies must only be adopted to solve a challenge, you may be lacking out on the great alternatives it can offer to mature your organization.

In fairness, there is so a lot new technological know-how being designed these times that enterprise entrepreneurs could possibly feel they do not have the time to evaluate just about every just one for the likely price it can bring to their company. This is probably the main motive powering the tendency only to find out new systems when troubles come up.

Business enterprise homeowners may well also really feel pretty overcome in the encounter of an avalanche of new technological know-how and the daunting prospect of getting to provider its implementation into the business. Ordinarily, this is where the outdated adage of “if it ain’t broke, do not repair it” might be proffered to ward off the most up-to-date fad.

In extra recent times, the mindset seems to be firmly alongside the lines of “technology needs to address a challenge.” I think it is truly worth acknowledging that a whole lot of technologies does in truth clear up a challenge. Having said that, historically, some of the greatest know-how was implemented in advance of we certainly comprehended which issue it was solving.

This is substantially like the farmer of old who thought the only rationale to put in jogging drinking water was to place out a hearth. Or who waited for a drought to put in an irrigation technique. Positive, running drinking water can put out fires. Sure, it can also stave off drought. But in agriculture, controlled irrigation can catalyze and exponentially accelerate advancement.

In this digital period, technology can address many problems. But business enterprise entrepreneurs should really not prevent shelling out focus to the viral advancement that technological know-how may possibly be equipped to convey to their companies. Try to remember, Netflix began as a business that delivered people motion pictures by snail mail. In which would they be now if they experienced only found technology as a challenge solver rather than as a vehicle for advancement?

Some of the very best varieties of technological innovation address difficulties for enterprise house owners that they do not know they have. And these are generally difficulties that are not fully understood until eventually the technology is executed, with the reward of hindsight.

Most effective tactics for organization owners should really dictate that there is somebody within just the company dependable for examining new sorts of engineering. This individual would have a broad operational understanding of the business coupled with the willingness to understand the technological know-how and its opportunity application.

So fairly than a engineering implementation system that is a “yes” or “no” checkbox to the issue of regardless of whether it truly is “solving a dilemma,” a most effective practice checklist for assessing technological innovation really should

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Russian net users downloading VPNs by the tens of millions in problem to Putin

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RIGA, Latvia — When Russian authorities blocked hundreds of Web sites in March, Konstantin made the decision to act. The 52-calendar year-outdated organization supervisor in Moscow tore a gap in the Digital Iron Curtain, which had been erected to regulate the narrative of the war in Ukraine, with a device that allows him surf blocked internet sites and eyeball taboo news.

Konstantin turned to a digital personal community, an encrypted digital tunnel generally known as a VPN. Given that the war started in late February, VPNs have been downloaded in Russia by the hundreds of countless numbers a working day, a large surge in demand from customers that represents a immediate obstacle to President Vladimir Putin and his attempt to seal Russians off from the broader earth. By guarding the locations and identities of consumers, VPNs are now granting millions of Russians accessibility to blocked content.

Downloading just one in his Moscow condominium, Konstantin explained, introduced again memories of the 1980s in the Soviet Union, when he applied a shortwave radio to hear forbidden news of dissident arrests on Radio Liberty, which is funded by the United States.

“We didn’t know what was heading on all-around us. Which is real again now,” explained Konstantin, who, like other Russian VPN buyers, spoke on the problem that his last title be withheld for worry of govt retribution. “Many folks in Russia basically observe Tv and take in whatever the governing administration is feeding them. I desired to locate out what was seriously occurring.”

Daily downloads in Russia of the 10 most well-liked VPNs jumped from below 15,000 just just before the war to as many as 475,000 in March. As of this week, downloads were being continuing at a price of almost 300,000 a working day, in accordance to info compiled for The Washington Put up by the analytics business Apptopia, which relies on details from applications, general public information and an algorithm to occur up with estimates.

Russian customers ordinarily download multiple VPNs, but the data implies hundreds of thousands of new users per thirty day period. In early April, Russian telecom operator Yota noted that the number of VPN customers was in excess of 50 occasions as substantial as in January, in accordance to the Tass condition information services.

The World-wide-web Defense Modern society, a digital legal rights group connected with jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, launched its individual VPN company final thirty day period and attained its limit of 300,000 users in 10 times, in accordance to govt director Mikhail Klimarev. Primarily based on internal surveys, he estimates that the range of VPN buyers in Russia has risen to roughly 30 percent of the 100 million Web users in Russia. To combat Putin, “Ukraine requires Javelin and Russians need to have Internet,” Klimarev mentioned.

By accessing banned Ukrainian and Western information internet sites, Konstantin claimed, he has arrive to deeply sympathize with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a previous comic the Russian push has

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The Computers Were Never the Problem With the BCS Era

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In 2014, ESPN aired one of the first commercials for the new College Football Playoff. In it, actors playing fans for dozens of teams across the country explain why the sport’s move from the BCS to a new championship system is such a welcome development. At one point, fans of schools such as Boise State, Hawai’i, and Utah—as well as DeSean Jackson, for some reason—proudly proclaim that there are “no more computers to keep us out!” You’ll notice that they are joined by fans of the Cincinnati Bearcats; if you follow college football, you already know why that’s funny.

Ah yes, The Computers. From 1998 to 2013, college football determined which teams would play for the national championship by using a formula created by the Bowl Championship Series. This formula included rankings produced by mathematicians. The most accurate way to describe these ranking systems would be to say they were algorithms or formulas, but during the 16 seasons that they were part of the championship selection process, they were always referred to as “the computers.” (Always. Always. Always.) It was as if desktops locked away in a lab somewhere were pumping out college football takes and were convinced your team was trash. I like to picture one of those cute little 2000s-era iMacs calling in to The Paul Finebaum Show.

People hated The Computers. “If we’ve got to let a computer tell us who is the best team, we’ve got a major issue,” then–Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher said in 2012. Former Oregon coach Chip Kelly once joked that the computers must be falling asleep before his Ducks kicked off in the Pacific time zone. In 2010, Los Angeles Times columnist Chris Dufresne asked, “Who died and made the computers king?” Even President Obama said he was “fed up with these computer rankings” and called for the sport to adopt a playoff.

But our hatred for The Computers was misguided. “The system, the BCS formula, was not necessarily the issue. It was the system it fed into,” says Asher Feldman, who runs BCS Know How, a Twitter account that attempts to reverse-engineer zombie BCS standings for present-day football seasons. “Choosing just two teams at the end of the season was the biggest fault of the system overall.”

Under the new College Football Playoff format, the number of teams involved in the championship picture has doubled, from two to four. That change has been great: Two of the seven champions in the playoff era have been teams seeded fourth, and would have been excluded from competing for a title under the old two-team format. But the method of selecting playoff teams—having a committee of 13 people decide who belongs in the field—is worse than the BCS in every other way. It is less transparent, more prone to biases and conflicts of interest, and more prone to be affected by one person’s bad opinions.

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The 50-year-old problem that eludes theoretical computer science

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NP’s more challenging problems often have momentous practical applications. For these problems, an exhaustive brute-force search for a solution would likely go on for an impractically long time—geologic time—before producing an answer. If a brute-force search algorithm is the best algorithm possible, then P does not equal NP. 

And among the cognoscenti, that’s apparently the consensus, which some liken more to religious belief: P ≠ NP. Most allow only a sliver of hope that the opposite will prove true. “I’d give it a 2 to 3% chance that P equals NP,” Aaronson says. “Those are the betting odds that I’d take.”

The result published in July presented a proof of exactly that long shot. But it was only the latest in a long tradition of proofs that don’t pass muster. Within a day of publication, in a turn of events worthy of Monty Python, the paper was removed from the online journal; then it seemed to reappear briefly before disappearing permanently. It was the most recent version of a paper that the author had posted more than 60 times to the arXiv preprint server over the last decade. The journal’s editor in chief explained on Twitter that the result had been rejected, but in a case of human error, the paper’s disposition had somehow changed from “reject” to “accept” and the proof had found its way to publication. 

3. In early August, when I met Steve Cook at his office on campus, he’d neither seen nor heard of that latest P vs. NP proof snafu. Now 81, he’d only recently retired, since his memory was failing. “That’s why we have James here,” he said—his son James, 36, also a computer scientist, had joined us for my visit. Steve was in the midst of clearing out his office. A giant recycling bin stood in the middle of the room, filling up with old yellowing issues of the Journal of Symbolic Logic, a stack of super-fat Toronto telephone books waiting nearby.

Over the years, Cook has seen many proofs purporting to solve the P vs. NP problem. In 2000, after the Clay Mathematics Institute named it one of the seven unsolved “Millennium Problems” (each worth a $1 million prize), he was inundated with messages from people who thought they’d triumphed. All the results were wrong, if not plainly bogus. About half claimed to have proved that P equals NP; the other half went in the opposite direction. Not too long ago, one person claimed to have proved both.

Cook, in his 1971 paper, conjectured that P does not equal NP (he phrased it using different terminology common at the time). He’s since invested a significant if indeterminate amount of time working to establish that that’s the case. “I don’t have a good memory of toiling away,” he says, but his colleagues recall that whenever they went into the department on the weekend, Steve was there in his office. 

Unless he’s racing sailboats, Cook is not one to rush; he likes to give

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