In RetroTech: NetLingo Blog

California's pending Internet "eraser button" law gives minors a way to (partially) expunge their digital footprint.

As reported by Peter Weber, California's legislature recently passed a landmark law giving minors the legal right to scrub their Internet history clean. That means, if Gov. Jerry Brown (D) doesn't veto the bill, anyone under 18 will be able to digitally erase any Facebook harangue, indiscreet Instagram, impolitic tweet, or any other web posting that doesn't age well.

The new law will protect "the teenager who says something on the Internet that they regret five minutes later," said California Senate leader Darrell Steinberg (D) after the upper chamber cleared his bill on Aug. 30, sending it to Brown's desk.

"Kids and teenagers often self-reveal before they self-reflect," agrees James Steyer at Common Sense Media, which pushed for the California law. "It's a very important milestone."

Who would oppose such an act of humanity? After all, people can often have their juvenile criminal records expunged or sealed when they turn 18, so why not extend the same courtesy to job-seekers trying to rid Google of that embarrassing photo they sent to their boyfriend in high school?

There are some open-Internet advocates who oppose the law on the idea that regulating the Internet always had unintended consequences. "We are principally concerned that this legal uncertainty for website operators will discourage them from developing content and services tailored to younger users, and will lead popular sites and services that may appeal to minors to prohibit minors from using their services," the Center for Democracy and Technology told California lawmakers, to no avail.

More sympathetic critics of the new law also "warn that in trying to protect children, the law could unwittingly put them at risk by digging deeper into their personal lives," says Somini Sengupta in The New York Times. "To comply with the law, for example, companies would have to collect more information about their customers, including whether they are under 18 and whether they are in California."

And then there's the possibility that teenagers will come to think of the law as a sort of digital version of the Amish Rumspringa — go do whatever you want, you crazy kids, and all will be forgiven when you come to your senses. The Internet, of course, doesn't work that way.

"Before minors celebrate by temporarily posting offensive jokes or pictures, the bill wisely provides that there is no guarantee removal by the initial website ensures complete elimination of the materials from the entire web," says Travis Crabtree at eMedia Law Insider.

Not only doesn't the law require the internet companies to remove the data from their servers, Crabtree notes, it also "only applies to content actually posted by the minor and not those pictures posted by the teen's friends who have less scruples."

It's not that California couldn't fix those shortcomings. In Europe, for example, an EU electronic data protection directive lets all Europeans — not just minors — "object to the processing of any data relating to himself," says Eugene K. Chow at The Huffington Post.

So when then-Formula One chief Max Mosley discovered in 2008, on the website of Britain's News of the World, that anyone with a Internet connection could watch a covertly recorded video of his participation in what the website alleged was a "sick Nazi orgy" with multiple prostitutes, he could do something about it. Mosley had "the legal grounds to sue Google in Germany and several other countries," says Chow, and he "could even compel the Internet giant to filter out the raunchy videos."

The European Commission's proposed "right to be forgotten" law would take those privacy rights and turn them up a few big notches. The controversial proposal would essentially give all Europeans the right to demand that tech companies erase any data they hold on a petitioning individual. The European Commissioners are still trying to work out how to best balance privacy rights and free speech concerns, but if we give teenagers an internet "eraser button," why not adults, too?

For one thing, the U.S. is not Europe, says Chow at The Huffington Post:

Despite the American myths that tout the individual as the pillar of society, European privacy laws have a more deeply rooted respect for individuals as evidenced by Europe's long tradition of prioritizing people over newspapers, photographers, and more recently, tech companies.... American laws frequently prioritize free speech at the expense of individual rights.

Nobody is arguing California's SB 568 is a perfect solution to the looming problems of a generation that seems to collectively have little hesitation about posting embarrassing and career-limiting stuff online, but at least the Golden State is taking a stab at the problem.

And while a national law would have a bigger impact, what California does matters, attorney Mali Friedman tells The New York Times. "Often you need to comply with the most restrictive state as a practical matter because the Internet doesn't really have state boundaries."

So if you're an Internet firm, you "may have to reassess the cost-benefit analysis of collecting certain types of data from minors," or even whether it's worth letting them use your site or app, says Cynthia Larose at Privacy and Security Matters.

On the other hand, she adds, if you worry that, "given the types of things minors deem appropriate to post on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, our country won't be able to produce an electable candidate for president in 40 years," laws like California's internet "eraser button" will help ensure that "many more of our children could become president someday."
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This is an interview by Ultimate Spelling Bee with Erin Jansen of NetLingo :)

Long before computer jargon and “text speak” became part of the ongoing argument about spelling skills and the development of the English language, Erin Jansen saw the need to collect and document all of the terminology associated with the digital world, and the virtual world that followed. Now her site is the top-ranked resource for information on the language of the internet, of mobile chatting, and of 21st-century communication in general. We talked to Erin recently about the website, and how the English language is growing and adapting to keep up with the ongoing cyber-evolution of our world.

US: You were a pioneer in classifying and tracking the terminology associated with computers back in the mid-1990s and your website now covers vocabulary used in all aspects of the digital world, from the internet in general to blogging, texting, gaming, and marketing. What has been the biggest change in “cyberspeak” you’ve noticed over the last 15 years?

EJ: The biggest change in cyberspeak over the past 15 years has been the increasing use of acronyms and text shorthand, and specifically the use of numbers and symbols within acronyms and text shorthand. For example, 10Q means thank you; 143 means i love you; 182 means i hate you; 9 means a parent is watching; 99 means a parent is no longer watching. This kind of code has evolved rapidly into what is known as leetspeak.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes: “The digital frontier is a nurturing place where verbs and nouns are not only born, but in fact bear offspring.” —Don Altman

US: Here at Ultimate Spelling we’ve frequently discussed the topic of texting, and whether or not using abbreviations and acronyms has a negative impact on spelling skills. What’s your opinion on this?
EJ: I do not believe the use of abbreviations and acronyms while texting has a negative impact on spelling skills, it’s simply another way of talking or writing. While I don’t think this kind of shorthand is appropriate for school course work, I do think it can spur on the creative writing process. So the challenge for educators is to encourage creative writing in the first draft, but by the final paper, make sure the student is using proper grammar and spelling.

Here’s another favorite quote: “No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deemed polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.” —Benjamin Martin

US: AFAIK, UNOIT, and HTNOTH look like serious cases of misspellings, but they’re fairly common acronyms used in text messages. In general, do people use acronyms like these rather than the phrases themselves, when they’re typing out e-mail messages or other non-texting communication?
EJ: Many people use these kinds of acronyms on a regular basis while others do not, it depends on the person. I continue to receive new acronym submissions on a daily basis, and I continue to see this type of shorthand even on social networking sites, not just in email or text messages. I get the feeling that people either love acronyms and use them as often as possible, or people don’t like acronyms and use shorthand sparingly.

Another favorite quote: “A dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view, and the wrong ways into which a language has wandered … may be nearly as instructive as the right ones.” —Richard Chenevix Trench

US: The acronym WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) has been around long enough that it’s actually become a spoken vocabulary word, pronounced WIZZ-ee-wig. It’s even listed in the Oxford English Dictionary! Do you think that this illustrates the next step in the evolution of the English language?
EJ: I absolutely think that acronyms and tech talk in general illustrate the next step in the evolution of language. On a recent episode of the popular TV show “Dancing with the Stars” one of the stars was “talking in hashtags” when she said “OMG, hashtag intense” to refer to a posting she made on Twitter under “#intense” at which point the host responded “You talk in hashtags? OMG, please hashtag stop.” Acronyms and tech talk crossed over into mainstream media in the early 2000′s with the popularity of social media sites. NetLingo continues to track all of these terms as they keep evolving, and the good thing about the website as oppose to printed versions is that it is always updated and always growing. (The first NetLingo Dictionary book published in 2002 had 500 pages while the website had 5,000 pages; now in 2013 the website has 10,000 pages, it’s unrealistic to publish all of that in a book.)

A quote to help illustrate: “Telephone books are, like dictionaries, already out of date the moment they are printed.” —Ammon Shea

US: One of the sections of your website is titled “Top 50 Internet Acronyms Parents Need to Know.” What are the issues that come up between parents and kids, as far as “net lingo” is concerned?

EJ: The issues that come up between parents and kids as far as “net lingo” is concerned are primarily that parents don’t understand what kids are saying when they are texting and they don’t know what they are doing when spending time online. This is a problem because kids are often approached by strangers online. The statistics say it all: 95% of parents don’t recognize the lingo kids use to let people know that their parents are watching. One third of kids have been contacted by a stranger and half of these were considered inappropriate. 75% of youth who received an online sexual solicitation did not tell a parent. 81% of parents of online youth say that kids aren’t careful enough when giving out information about themselves online. These are unfortunate facts and it is why I try to educate parents about the lingo used online, and the need to stay engaged and set rules around online usage.

Here’s a cute joke to help illustrate: “The linguistics professor was explaining to his class that there were languages on this earth where a positive and a negative was always positive, some where this was always negative, and some where a double negative was in fact a positive, but that there was no language on earth where a double positive was a negative. To which a student at the back of the class called out, “Yeah right!” —Anonymous

Erin Jansen is the founder of NetLingo.com and author of “NetLingo The Internet Dictionary” and “NetLingo The Largest List of Text & Chat Acronyms.”

Have you ever stopped to think about the politics or economics of social media and digital sharing? Jaron Lanier has.

Stop “offering yourselves up on a platter,” said Jaron Lanier. In today’s world of social media and digital sharing, we upload, tweet, instagram, share, and “like” with abandon. But have you ever stopped to think about the politics or economics of this new world order?

Take Instagram, for example. “When photography happened on film, a company like Kodak directly employed 140,000 middle-class people,” all making money from the products it created. Today, we have Instagram: a company that recently sold for $1 billion, employs 13 people, and “makes money off content that others—that is, you—create.”

You young people ought to wake up. By buying into the digital lifestyle, “you’ve become passive little playthings of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, screwing yourselves over for their profit.” The sad thing is that this isn’t “some evil conspiracy that’s taking away your future.” You’re giving it away!

“You’re sending all your data to companies in California so that they can sell behavioral models of you to whoever pays them the most to manipulate you.” And in exchange, what do you get? A chance to promote yourself? Likes and retweets? Reputation? Goodwill? Those “informal online benefits” are great, but be warned: “You can’t retire on them.”

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For a company that for the longest time was touted to "not have a product," Google is doing plenty well, and is poised to bring us all into the new age of connectivity. The editors at Best Accounting Schools decided to research the topic; below are some key facts and figures. Click here for the infographic!

Google made $33.3 billion last year
- With 97% ($32.2 bil) coming from online ads
- Making Google Ads more valuable than Panama (GDP)[3]
- And the 31 poorest countries in the world combined
- 70% of this revenue is from adwords, which allows business to advertise by popular keywords

Most expensive keywords
- 1. Insurance: $54.31 per click
- 2. Mortgage:$47.12 per click
- 3. Attorney $47.07 per click
- 4. Loans:$44.28 per click
- 5. Credit $36.06 per click
- 6. Lawyer
- 7. Donate
- 8. Degree
- 9. hosting
- 10. Claim
- 11. Conference Call
- 12. Trading
- 13. Software
- 14. Recovery
- 15. Transfer
- 16. Gas/Electricity
- 17. Classes
- 18. Rehab
- 19. Treatment
- 20. Cord Blood

And 30% is from AdSense
- Which allows business to advertise on particular sites
- Some of the most expensive ad placements
- 1. CBS March Madness on Demand $70 cost per thousand views
- 2. Hulu $35 cost per thousand views
- 3. Aol homepage takeover $500,000-$700,000
Chances are, you'll click on a link at some point. Google wants you to stay online as long as possible.

Both Google and other acquisitions are furthering Google's cause.
Google is the lab where future projects are developed. There, several ways in which to keep you online have been developed:
Driverless cars
- 300,000 miles have been logged in Google's driverless cars, which use sensors and Google map technology to keep you on the road
- If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can be online, for work, play, Google, etc.
Google Glass
- A form of augmented reality glasses, allow you to be online all the time with an unobtrusive display within your upper visual field
The "web of things"
- Involves embedding many ordinary devices with internet connectivity
- Televisions, thermostats, refrigerators
Google Fiber
- Is busy hooking up Kansas City, Missouri, Provo, Utah, and Austin Texas, with lighting fast fiber optic internet access
- Including: 1 terabyte of Google drive storage
- and, 2 terabyte DVR service for subscribers
- That can record up to 8 tv shows at once
- Time Magazine has noted that Google does not want to enter the ISP business, but rather wants to shame existing ISPs into improving service so searches can be done more quickly
Plans for an elevator to space...
- Because what would you do out there without Google maps?

Other acquisitions by Google Include:
- YouTube
- Purchased for a--then--astounding $1.65 billion in 2006
- Youtube has proved to be plenty worth it
- As it is now the third most popular site online, with billions of ads shown yearly
- Motorola Mobility
- Purchased in 2011 for $12.5 billion
- Motorola is one of 39 Android handset producers
- Was bought primarily to "supercharge the Android ecosystem."
- Other Acquisitions include
- $676 mil for ITA software, a company merged into Google Flights
- $450 mil for Wildfire Interactive, a social network marketing engine
- $400 mil for AdMeld, an online advertising service
- $1.3 bil for Waze, a socially driven mapping technology to merge with Google Maps
- And $228 mil for slide.com, a social gaming site
- With 83.18% of searches worldwide occurring on Google, and the right people thinking about how to funnel that for the collective, and profitable, good, Google's not going anywhere. Just buckle up and enjoy the ride.

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According to Colleen Oakley, it's not just for Veronica Mars reboots. Graduating with less debt could just take a couple of clicks.

When Kelli Space graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with $200,000 of student loan debt, she panicked. Given that she had an entry-level office manager job that didn't pay much, Space knew that it was going to be tough to pay back that debt on her own.

But instead of deferring her payments — or not paying them at all, like many grads end up doing — she started a crowdfund, which is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising small amounts of money from a vast pool of people online.

"In total, I received $13,000 from strangers around the world," she says. And although that amount only made a small dent toward paying off her debt, it had a big impact on her career trajectory — the experience inspired Space and three friends to start Zero Bound, a company that helps students and graduates crowdfund their own student loan debt in exchange for community volunteering.

Space has not one but two lofty goals with Zero Bound. "We hope to use the trend of crowdfunding to not only help a generation pay off their debt, but also increase volunteerism among an age bracket that actually volunteers the least," she says. "And, to that end, I believe that crowdfunding can be a largely beneficial way to raise the funds to make that happen."

Space isn't alone in her thinking. Since 2011, crowdfunding efforts have more than tripled, and current campaigns are projected to raise more than $5.1 billion worldwide in 2013.

But what started out as a way to enable businesses and individuals to raise money for creative endeavors without relying on such traditional financing sources as banks — take the indie Veronica Mars Movie Project, which raised over five million dollars on Kickstarter in just 30 days — has morphed into a means for literally anyone to ask for money … for literally anything.

"Crowdfunding is definitely branching out into multiple areas, including personal causes," says Ellen Sperling, cofounder of crowdfunding site YouveGotFunds.com. And, by personal, we're talking about everything from surgeries to honeymoons. Why, you ask? "It's partly because the costs for many of these regular items have skyrocketed," she says. "Medical fees are through the roof, and even if you have health insurance, they don't always cover certain medications and procedures, like fertility treatments."

The same applies to financing higher education. "Why would college students want to graduate owing $150,000-plus in loans," Sperling says, "if they have family, friends and possibly community members who can help, enabling them to start their careers in a better place?"

Brad Wyman, chief creative officer of FundAnything.com, calls this new trend of personal crowdfunding a "virtual barn raising." It's the online version of your own community rallying around you to support you when you need it the most.

Take James and Adena Reimer, a Canadian couple who started a campaign on FundAnything.com when James, who'd been battling cystic fibrosis and bromchiolitis obliterans, needed a second lung transplant. They were hoping to raise $10,000 to "pay for medical bills that weren't being covered by my home province," says James, 29. "We also had other expenses, like plane tickets to fly my mom out to help, and emergency taxi trips to the hospital."

They ended up raising a whopping $43,000 — and were overcome with the outpouring of support. "If it wasn't for crowdfunding, we'd probably have to take out a loan or beg family members," says James. "It was a huge blessing!"

The Kujawas are using crowdfunding to help finance IVF.

Couples are also turning to crowdfunding to help make their dreams of having kids come true. Nate and Christy Kujawa of Spokane, Wash., had been trying to get pregnant for about four years with no success. After multiple doctor visits, Christy received a devastating double diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis and Crohn's disease — and then Nate learned that he had multiple sclerosis. Physicians told them that they had a two percent chance of conceiving naturally, but a 95 percent chance with IVF.

The only problem? It's an expensive solution.

So they turned to the Internet. "I got the idea from a client of mine," says Christy, 31. "We were talking about how expensive IVF was, and she suggested I start a crowdfund. I actually knew a few people who had done funding for cancer treatment, and to help replace things due to a house fire, but no one specifically for IVF." To date, the Kujawas have already raised one quarter of their $12,000 goal — and they say that the response has been overwhelming.

A hand up or a handout? Most people cringe at the thought of asking for financial support, and tend to proceed with caution when asking friends or family for money — even for worthy causes. So what makes doing it online so much more acceptable?

"It's a lot less uncomfortable to ask someone to check out your campaign than to put your hand out," says Wyman. "And for life events, such as a wedding, look at it this way: It's similar to registering for gifts at a store, except now the couple can ‘register' for something that's more meaningful than china. And unlike just giving cash, guests know that their contributions are going toward a couple's real goal."

"People just want to help others. It's a strong emotion that drives the crowdfunding industry as a whole." According to Sperling, crowdfunding isn't just benefiting those raising the funds, either — it's giving everyone a chance to give back. "Sometimes people just want to help others," she says. "It's a strong emotion that drives the crowdfunding industry as a whole."

Crowdfunding 101: A primer for success
Before you jump on a crowdfunding bandwagon yourself, Wyman says that there are a few things you should know when it comes to creating a good campaign:

1. Set a realistic financial goal. If potential contributors don't think that you'll be able to reach your goal, they'll think twice about contributing to your campaign.

2. Craft a smart elevator pitch. You should be able to explain your cause in two to three concise sentences. And before you share that pitch with potential donors, practice it on your friends and family.

3. Be your best marketing team. Tell everyone you know that you've launched a campaign, and invite them to visit. And be sure to consistently update the campaign, so there's a reason for people to keep on visiting your site.

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This is a guest post written by Charlotte Kertrestel, do enjoy!

“I wandered lonely as a cloud”...“texting on my new iPhone 5”. Sound familiar? Ok, so perhaps not the second line. I’m sure when Wordsworth wrote the lines of ‘Daffodils’, he imagined his sister, Dorothy, roaming through green pastures and trickling streams, marvelling at the wonders of the natural world. But now it seems that while modern poets might be getting their inspiration from alternative sources, they are also recording their innermost thoughts not with traditional pen and ink that the likes of Coleridge and Oscar Wilde, but with their mobile phones.

Not long ago I witnessed a friend recounting a rather unfortunate date that she had experienced the previous week. To top it off, she told me, with a particularly cringing look on her face, he wrote her a heartfelt love poem. Or rather he WhatsApped the said lyrical masterpiece.

Once upon a time, when mobile phones were a new and exciting phenomenon, users developed what we all will be familiar with as ‘text speak’; a new language whereby all words from the English dictionary were contracted and dissected, with letters changed for numbers, and numbers for words. The aim of this wasn’t to increase the challenge of having to decipher a text message before you could make sense of what was being said, but was ultimately due to the limited number of characters that could be sent in one message. Back in the day, you could only write 160 characters to limit a message to one single text. After all, this was before the days of unlimited text packages, when it cost you at least 10p to tell your mum what you wanted for tea, or to warn your friends that you were running late. It simply wasn’t feasible to demonstrate your finest vocabulary from the English language when a simple ‘C U l8r’ would suffice.

I for one am a firm hater of text speak- or should I say ‘txt spk’?- mainly because I’m not always brilliant at breaking the undecipherable code that some text messages can become. But I also hate it because of the fact that I actually value real words. In fact, I’ll admit that I’ve even gone as far as dumping a boyfriend due to his inability to compose a fully-fledged text message using full words that feature in the Oxford dictionary. Heartless, I know.

But while I may prefer to read a text message or email which reads as fluidly as a novel, it would seem that others are willing to celebrate works written in text speak. Back in 2001, the Guardian newspaper launched a nation-wide poetry competition especially targeted at mobile phone users. The competition limited entrants to using only one text message within which they had to compose a poem in either plain or shorthand English. The winning poem, written by a Hetty Hughes, won the prize. Courtesy of the Guardian newspaper, the poem goes as follows:

txtin iz messin,
mi headn'me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she's african

Texting has changed a lot since 2001, however. With the influx of mobile phone developments over the past ten years, the majority of users now benefit from having access to unlimited text messages though pay-monthly tariffs. Also, with all smartphones featuring a QWERTY keyboard, whether physical or touchscreen, there really is no excuse not to type text messages out in full, plain English. Because of this, it’s now easier than ever to use your mobile phone to do what you would otherwise use a computer, or even a pen and paper for: to write. Whether you are sitting on the bus when you suddenly get a wave of inspiration, or whether you’re lying awake at night, pining over a lost love, the mobile phone seems to be the modern instrument to record your masterpieces.

That said, there has been a recent drop in the popularity of mobile phone poetry. Perhaps when the 160 character limit was taken away, the challenge of producing a text-style poem deemed became pointless for mobile poets. Though that is not to say that writing poetry using your smartphone is entirely a dying trend; with today’s smartphones offering users a multitude of functions, from texting, emailing and messaging on social media platforms, it is probable that modern poets are still writing pieces on their phones, but just not in the traditional text message format. In fact, Twitter poems have become the new phenomenon for modern smartphone era. With a 140 character limit, many users are typing out their ideas and emotions in tweets on the social media site, presenting their poems to the world. This can surely only be a good thing: poetry has so often been considered an art for the professionals, or for those who hide away their words on scraps of paper in bottom drawers. With the help of smartphones, poetry has now become accessible to all budding writers, or interested readers, with a simply touch of a button. For an example of Twitter poems, check out @TwitterPoetry.

Smartphones have not only enabled the pubic to write and read poetry by amateurs, though. There are numerous apps available for download which enable poetry enthusiasts to read the famous, or not so famous, words of, say, Carol Anne Duffy, Rupert Brooke, or even Edgar Allan Poe. The Poetry Foundation has released an app for both iOS and Android devices, which gives readers access to thousands of poems. Whether you’re a Literature student studying Shakespeare, or just Joe Blogs who enjoys reading good poems, the free app can make poetry accessible, in more ways than one.

So next time you’re feeling creative, you don’t necessarily have to reach for a notepad. Browse, type, tweet; with smartphone technology, the message can be firmly put out there: poetry doesn’t have to be boring.
Brought to you by NetLingo: Improve Your Internet IQ
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The animated map, from an anonymous researcher, is beautiful, mesmerizing — and made using highly illegal means, according to Peter Weber. Behold, the internet. In about eight seconds, you can watch a whole day's worth of internet activity around the world, with the higher activity in reds and yellows and the wave shape showing where it's day and night.

The map was put together by an anonymous researcher in a self-styled "Internet Census 2012." Why isn't he or she taking credit for this remarkable feat of cyber-cartography? The data came from infecting 420,000 computers with automated, web-crawling botnets — and "hacking into 420,000 computers is highly illegal," says Adam Clark Estes at Vice.

What are we actually seeing, and how sketchy is its provenance? The researcher, using the 420,000 infected devices, tried to figure out how many of the world's 3.6 billion IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses are active; roughly speaking, he got responses from 1.2 billion devices around the world. The map shows the average usage of each device each half hour.

The map isn't totally comprehensive: His botnet, called Carna (after "the Roman goddess for the protection of inner organs and health"), only infected Linux-based devices with some user name–password combination of "root," "admin," or nothing. Also, the world is slowly switching to IPv6, and Carna doesn't measure those devices — in fact, he says, "with a growing number of IPv6 hosts on the internet, 2012 may have been the last time a census like this was possible." At the same time, "this looks pretty accurate," HD Moore, who used ethical and legal means to conduct a similar survey of smaller scope but larger timeframe, tells Ars Technica.

That said, it's a snapshot of 2012, with a limited shelf life. "With cheap smartphones taking off in Africa and $20 tablets popping up in India, the world is becoming more connected by the minute," says Vice's Estes. "So in a few years' time that confetti-colored map of the world above will look less like a chart of privilege and more like an acid trip of progress."

As for the ethics of this census, let's call it "interesting, amoral, and illegal," says Infosecurity Magazine.
The [botnet] binaries he developed and deployed — it's difficult to call them malware since they had no mal-intent; but it's difficult not to call them malware since they were installed without invitation — were designed to do no harm, to run at the lowest possible priority, and included a watchdog to self-destruct if anything went wrong. He also included a readme file with "a contact email address to provide feedback for security researchers, ISPs and law enforcement who may notice the project." [Infosecurity]

And if we're being charitable, you could argue that he performed a public service by highlighting how poorly protected our computers, routers, and other internet-connected devices are. Here's a "crude physical analogy" for what the researcher did, says Michael Lee at ZDNet: By himself, he would have been like "a burglar who walks from house to house in a neighborhood, checking to see whether anyone has forgotten to put a lock on their door."

With an opportunistic attack, given enough "neighborhoods" and enough time, one could potentially gain an insight into how poorly protected people are. However, with the burglar being a single person, doing so would take them a prohibitively long time — unless, theoretically, they were able to recruit vulnerable households and send them to different neighborhoods to do the same.... The Carna botnet... highlighted just how many people left their metaphorical front doors unlocked by using default passwords and user logins. [ZDNet]

Still, if this researcher were caught in the U.S., he'd "likely be slapped with one violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for every computer breached and face something like 50 consecutive life sentences for the sum total," says Vice's Estes. "(I'm being sightly facetious here but only slightly.)" So why take that risk? To see if it could be done, basically.

Building and running a gigantic botnet and then watching it as it scans nothing less than the whole internet at rates of billions of IPs per hour over and over again is really as much fun as it sounds like. I did not want to ask myself for the rest of my life how much fun it could have been or if the infrastructure I imagined in my head would have worked as expected. I saw the chance to really work on an internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time. [Internet Census 2012]

Wow, according to an article by Chris Gayomali, 80 percent of one survey's participants say we're all becoming jerks. I have to say, over the years I've seen the problem getting worse. Let's see what he found out...

Hello, Internet user! Have you witnessed anyone being mean on a website today? Chances are you have!

According to a new survey from corporate training advisers VitalSmarts, nearly 80 percent of 3,000 respondents believe that people are becoming increasingly rude on the Internet. What's more disturbing, though, is that those same folks doing the finger-wagging say they have "no qualms" about being big ol' jerkfaces themselves when they're hurling insults in comment sections or getting into shouting matches on Facebook.

Other sad-face statistics from the survey include:

* Two in five users have severed contact with a one-time pal due to a digital altercation
* One in five people try to avoid former friends IRL that they've had an online argument with

How do otherwise decent human beings with hearts and stuff suddenly transform into ALL-CAPS USING JERKS not-nice-people when they're behind a computer screen? One probable answer, says VitalSmarts co-chairman Joseph Grenny, is that a lack of peer pressure in the digital realm means people feel like they can get away with being rude. Here's what Grenny recommends doing if you want your pixelated approximation to reflect a kinder, gentler you (and really, who doesn't?):

He said three rules that could improve conversations online were to avoid monologues, replace lazy, judgmental words, and cut personal attacks particularly when emotions were high.

In other words, yeah, that 800-word knee-jerk manifesto you were going to leave on your pal's Facebook status probably isn't the best idea in the world. We can change this! The next time something you read online makes you angry (probably in the next two minutes?), close your eyes, take a deep breath, and step away from the keyboard (or just close the tab). There. That wasn't so bad, was it?

So, let's all take it upon ourselves to not be jerks on the Internet. It's the hot new thing going forward in 2013. We can do this, you guys.

Try: "filetype:xls site:za confidential"

The National Security Agency in May of 2013 declassified a hefty 643-page research manual called Untangling the Web: A Guide to Internet Research that, at least at first, doesn't appear all that interesting. That is, except for one section on page 73: "Google Hacking."

"Say you're a cyberspy for the NSA and you want sensitive inside information on companies in South Africa," explains Kim Zetter at Wired. "What do you do?"

Well, you could type the following advanced search into Google — "filetype:xls site:za confidential" — to uncover a trove of seemingly private spreadsheets. How about an Excel file containing Russian passwords? Try: "filetype:xls site:ru login."

These are just two examples of the numerous private files that are inadvertently uploaded to the Internet, and can be accessed if you know the right Google search terms.






















Pretty neat, huh? Declassified information being what it is, though, some of the search tips can appear a little dated.

And even if keyboard espionage isn't really your thing, the document contains a number of practical tips anyone can use to become a better Googler:

* Adding a tilde (~) immediately before a term will search for its synonyms. For example: "Scary ~animals" will also search for "scary creatures," etc.

* Repeating a word will help you find more relevant hits. For example a search for "java coffee coffee coffee" will cut down on the results about the programming language.

* You can use Google wildcard (*) to replace a term in a query if you don't know exactly what you're searching for. For example: "Sacramento is the * of California."

Take a look if you're interested over here. (Via Wired)

Don't underestimate the emotional pain of going from "In a Relationship" to "Single" says Emily Shire, oh man, is she right. Are you a deleter, a keeper, or a selective disposer? Either way, technology is messing with your personal relationships.

Before you gleefully change your status to "in a relationship" and post photos with your new love for all of Facebook to see, consider this: A new study suggests that photos, posts on Facebook, and other digital reminders of an ex-love may prolong the pain of a break-up. Corina Sas of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and Steve Whitaker of University of California Santa Cruz have researched how having to "dispos[e] of digital possessions" — posts, blog entries, videos, photos, even songs — hinders people's ability to move on after a relationship.

The authors interviewed 24 people aged 19 to 34 about their digital-breakup habits and found that they fell into three categories: Deleters, who immediately erase all texts, untag all photos, and defriend their exes; keepers, who hold onto everything and continue to follow (let's be real... stalk) their exes on Facebook; selective disposers, who hang onto just a few special physical and digital possessions and are "more adaptive" (healthier). Unfortunately, only four of those interviewed fell into that last category.

The other two approaches come with their own emotional turmoil that is exacerbated by social media. For the deleters, their actions are often impulsive. How many of us have sat with our laptops open and a glass of Merlot and quickly de-friended an ex on Facebook or erased their texts? This is "beneficial on a short-term basis," say the authors. However, "deleters sometimes regret failing to save mementos symbolizing a chapter in their lives." Moreover, total deletion isn't even always an option on Facebook. As Nick Collins at The Telegraph writes "pictures and messages posted on social networks are not so easy to erase, especially if they have been posted online by someone else."

For the keepers, it's extra hard to say goodbye to an old boyfriend or girlfriend. One participant admitted: "I try to get his information through social networks in a quiet way." According to the authors, keepers' behavior "leads the romantic attachment to persist, which prolongs the grief process." Facebook, in particular, is "very problematic," Sas told Today. "The other person is just a click away. There's almost this continual contact which is very compelling." While we can cut people out of photographs, donate exes' sweaters to charity (or burn them), and even delete phone numbers, finding the most up-to-date info on old flames is just a matter of one tempting search on Facebook. Furthermore, since there is such an abundance of digital memories in 21st century relationships, Sas adds that locating and erasing them all is "very, very emotionally taxing."

So, what are the impulsive and weak-willed Facebook users to do? The authors suggest the creation of "Pandora's Box" software that "scours online profiles for any trace of a former loved one and stores them in one place." Then, people can later erase or keep whichever digital possessions they choose... when they're in a better state of mind.

"Deleting, defriending, and signing out of an account can be done quietly and with dignity," writes Daisy Buchanan at The Guardian. "And when you're newly single, preserving your dignity should be your top priority."
See also: cyberimmortality cyberspace cybersuicide cybersoul digital footprint digital estate management service

Gigabyte-per-second download speeds? Yes, please, says Chris Gayomali. If the ability to download every season of Game of Thrones in a few seconds is the kind of thing that blows your hair back, you're in luck. Samsung has reportedly been hard at work building a lightning-fast "5G" antenna that would make gigabytes-per-second file-transfers on your phone a legitimate possibility. Here's what you need to know about it:

What is 5G exactly?
Wireless networks like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile rely on spectrum bands to transfer information through the air. The latest and fastest cellular standard in the U.S., 4G, operates in the upper 700 MHz spectrum.

Samsung says it's built an antenna that can transfer data at a rate of up to 1.056 Gbps using the 28 GHz spectrum band. Yes, that means over a gigabyte of data per second — "several hundred times faster" than current 4G networks, notes Mashable.

Translation: Web pages that boot up instantly. Or streaming movies in glorious HD without so much as a hiccup.

(N.B.: 5G as an official standard hasn't been established yet, but Samsung is presumably using it here to characterize whatever high-speed network comes after 4G.)

How does it work?
The technology relies on an array transceiver using 64 different antenna elements. According to Samsung, it's kind of like how "increased water flow requires a wider pipe." So far, the new antenna works for distances up to 2 kilometers, or a little over a mile, and could theoretically be implemented in antenna towers nationwide.

What would a new high-speed network entail?
Hopefully, a 5G network will require fewer ugly cell towers adorning city skylines :-)

Buildings, physical geography like hills and mountains, and even atmospheric disturbances like rain or snow can interfere with a network's signal. That's one of the many reasons why cell towers are built high up. But Samsung's breakthrough reportedly eliminates "atmospheric attenuation," or basically when radio signals get absorbed by rain and snow.

In addition, it's believed that the key to building faster networks — especially indoors — lies in putting a larger number of smaller stations close to where users live, Jens Zander, professor and dean at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, tells PC World.

So can I expect blazing-fast speeds on my phone?
Theoretically, yes. In actuality, well... we'll just have to see. Matt Peckham at TIME notes that just because the upper threshold for speed exists doesn't mean phone- and tablet-owners will be able to reach it:

The trouble's not that my 4G smart phone or tablet connection isn't fast enough (in theory) to instantly stream high quality videos and music — even a 3G connection's capable of competently handling services like Netflix or Spotify, after all — it's that these connections often live down to worst-case expectations because the towers are simply overcrowded.

The reason cell service providers are putting the kibosh on unlimited data plans (and raising usage costs for their real bugaboo, data tethering) has as much to do with crowd control as scraping a little extra from our purses. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: The faster you make mobile communication technology, the more likely people are to use it and the more likely the network’s going to choke.

When is 5G coming?
Samsung says the antenna tech will be ready to commercialize seven years down the road, or around 2020. If we're lucky, maybe Game of Thrones will even be done by then.

The lovely, bouncy word ogooglebar means "something unable to be found on a search engine." And according to Arika Okrent, Google doesn't like it.

The Swedish Language Council is the semi-official authority on matters pertaining to Swedish language use. In addition to issuing recommendations on spelling and grammar, it puts out an annual list of new Swedish words. The list tends toward the playful, covering the same type of coinages that various organizations nominate for "word of the year" in the English speaking world (YOLO, hashtag, fiscal cliff). The Swedes' 2012 list included 40 new words, including "henifiera" — a word for the practice of replacing the gendered "he" and "she" pronouns in Swedish (han and hon) with the neutral "hen."

But more interestingly, for the first time ever, a word has been removed from the list. Today, Language Council director Ann Cederberg announced that they will be removing the word "ogooglebar" (ungoogleable) — thanks to pressure from Google, which objected to the council's definition of the word as "something unable to be found on a search engine." Rather than give in to the company's demands to change the definition to refer to a Google search rather than any old web search, the council has decided to drop the word entirely.

Cederberg makes clear, however, that this doesn't mean the word is gone from the language. "Who has authority over language? We do, the language users. We decide together which words should exist and how they should be defined, used and spelled. Language is the result of an ongoing democratic process. We all participate in deciding which words to let into the language by choosing the words we use. If we want 'ogooglebar' in the language we will use the word, and it is our use that will determine the meaning — not the pressure of a multinational company."

She also points out that anyone who now googles "ogooglebar" will not only find the original Language Council definition, but also all of the surrounding coverage about the decision to take the word off the list. All of it is now part of the history of the word and its usage, on record online for anyone curious about the meaning of this lovely, bouncy word, no matter which search engine they might be using.

It all seems to date back to a 19th-century French book. It's not all rainbows and butterflies, you know. Or rainbows and unicorns. Or butterflies and unicorns. But when it comes to referring to impossibly perfect conditions where everyone's happy and nothing goes wrong, we're living in a golden age of RBUs.

A Google News search for just the past week brings up almost 500 hits for rainbows and unicorns or rainbows and butterflies. On this Google Ngram Viewer graph below, you can see that both expressions, as well as butterflies and rainbows, are on the rise, with rainbows and unicorns in particular shooting steadily up since 2003.

Rainbows and butterflies came together first. The earliest attestation I've found is from an 1864 book by Jenny d' Hericourt (translated from French) titled A Woman's Philosophy of Woman, where on pages 191 and 192 we read:

...if [women] were free and happy they would be less eager for illusions and cajoleries and it would no longer be necessary in writing to them to place rainbows and butterflies' wings under contribution…

It's butterfly wings instead of entire butterflies, but the sentiment seems the same. The phrase also occurs in William S. Lord's 1897 poem Jingle and Jangle, which lists some things that the pleasant sound of a jingling bell brings to mind:

Sunshine and sugar and honey and bees
Rainbows and butterflies wings,
Bird songs and brook songs and wide spreading trees,
Of joy little Jingle bell sings.

Butterflies and rainbows also appears in the late 19th century, in an 1896 editorial that scornfully refers to the idea of moving the U.S. to a dual gold-and-silver standard as "chasing free silver butterflies and rainbows."

Pairings of rainbows with butterflies (not just butterflies' wings) continue to appear on into the 20th century, often as the objects of chasing, before the steady rise in the graph that began in the 1970s. Since then, "rainbows and butterflies" has been the title of a 1983 song by Billy Swan, the title of two books of poetry, and part of the lyrics of Maroon 5's 2005 song "She Will Be Loved."

In the 1980s, unicorns made their entry, at around the same time that Hasbro began marketing its My Little Pony line of toys, which included both a Rainbow Ponies and a Unicorn Ponies collection. However, I can't claim that this event was the you-got-your-chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter moment for rainbows and unicorns; it may be that an increasing popularity of unicorns was responsible for both phenomena. A 2010 post on the Zandl Marketing Group's blog puts the increasing popularity of rainbows and unicorns in the context of the mainstreaming of gay cultural symbols. In any case, in the mid-80s we begin to see examples like this one from 1984:

The only calendars left in the stores just before the holidays are those with unicorns and rainbows on them.

Although unicorns arrived late to the party, they've hit it off so well with rainbows that for some, it's not enough just to have the two words conjoined by and. In the past few years, unicorns that fart rainbows seem to have become their own meme. For an even tighter linkage, there's Lady Rainicorn, a half-rainbow, half-unicorn character in Cartoon Network's Adventure Time series.

These days, unicorns sometimes get together with butterflies to the exclusion of rainbows. There aren't enough examples to have been captured in the Google Ngram corpus, but Google Books has a 1996 example of butterflies and unicorns in Skywriting, by Margarita Engle:

I would take the alligators out of its rivers and the scorpions out of its soil, replacing them with butterflies and unicorns.

In the other order, "Unicorns and Butterflies" is the name of not one but two blogs, each begun sometime in the last two years.

Some people prefer not to choose between unicorns and butterflies with their rainbows. The "Rainbows and Butterflies and Unicorns" Facebook page doesn't. And in the 2008 movie Horton Hears a Who, a child character takes that earlier scatological unicorn-rainbow connection, reverses its direction, and brings in the butterflies, telling of an imaginary world where "there are unicorns who eat rainbows and poop butterflies!"

Other words to appear in RBU contexts include smiles, sunshine, balloons, bunnies, kittens, and lollipops. In a 1981 monologue, Steve Martin declares that he believes in "rainbows and puppy dogs and fairy tales." Three-syllable nouns, it seems, tend to be favored for rainbow collocations; specifically, three-syllable nouns consisting of an unstressed syllable sandwiched between two stressed syllables: BUTTerflies, Unicorns, LOLlipops, PUPpydogs, FAIRy tales. This kind of three-syllable string is known in poetry circles as a cretic.

So if you'd like to enrich the language with some new rainbow-cretic collocations, I offer my suggestion: Rainbows and boogeymen and heart attacks.

Mankind's quest to live among the stars gets a little more realistic with the advent of 3-D printing.

If humanity's longtime dream of a moon colony is ever going to be achieved, its architects will have to deal with the fundamental logistical problem of having to haul boatloads of building materials into outer space — an expensive and time-consuming endeavor that, quite simply, isn't feasible considering the financial troubles NASA is currently facing.

So... what then? The answer, say skyward-looking engineers, is to harvest available materials from the moon itself. The European Space Agency recently revealed plans to use a 3-D printer to build the complex shapes and pieces of equipment that would make up an inhabitable space base.

3-D printing, lest you forget, is a technique that allows users to "print" three-dimensional objects layer-by-layer. Usually, the printers employ plastic in place of ink, but a diverse range of materials like metal, clay, and yes, even chocolate can be used to print toys, furniture, or whatever else can be sketched out with AutoCAD, software for computer-assisted design and drafting. More recently, 3-D printers have been the subject of intense scrutiny, with several media outlets reporting that people can theoretically build operational handguns and rifles at home if they download the correct plans.

Now, a team of researchers from the architecture firm Foster + Partners is exploring the possibility of using portable 3-D printers to convert lunar material into a moon base. Working with a UK-based company called Monolite, researchers were able to chemically mold sand-like material together with a special kind of binding salt that forms into a sturdy, stone-hard solid. "Our current printer builds at a rate of around 2 m per hour," Monolite founder Enrico Dini tells Discovery News, "while our next-generation design should attain 3.5 m per hour, completing an entire building in a week." (Take a look at the base and the machine here.)

This, however, isn't the first time 3-D printing has been tapped to possibly build a moon base. Last year, NASA challenged researchers at Washington State University to develop a technique to build smooth, cylindrical shapes for a future space habitat.

Three-dimensional printers make manufacturing possible at home. Could they spell the end of mass production?

What is 3-D printing?
It’s a revolutionary manufacturing process in which the design for physical objects, from toys to jewelry to machine parts, can be digitally transmitted to a device that makes them out of plastic, metal, or ceramic materials. Once the stuff of science fiction, 3-D printers have rapidly evolved in recent years, becoming smaller, faster, and cheaper. A basic, microwave-size 3-D printer costs less than $1,000, making almost anyone a potential manufacturer. Tonight Show host Jay Leno uses a $30,000 device to print hard-to-find parts for his collection of classic cars. “It’s a bit like when I was a kid and I watched The Jetsons and they’d walk up to a machine and press a button and get a steak dinner,” Leno said. “But instead of a steak dinner, you’re getting an old car part.”

How do 3-D printers work?
Just as a traditional ink-jet printer sprays ink onto a page line by line, modern 3-D devices deposit material onto a surface layer by layer, slowly building up a shape. The process begins with a designer using computer software to create a virtual 3-D model of an object, such as a toy car. Another program slices that model into thin horizontal sections and instructs the printer to lay down an exact replica of each slice. Some printers use a computer-controlled heated nozzle that moves back and forth across a print platform, setting down a layer of melted material. Others use a laser or electron beam to fuse powdered plastic or metal into the required shape. After each layer is completed, the printing platform is lowered by a fraction of a millimeter and the next layer is added, until the object is completed.

What’s the advantage of this technology?
It makes it easier and cheaper for ordinary people to get into the business of making things. Inventors can print a model of their latest creation in a few hours, then tweak it and print again, instead of waiting weeks for a prototype to emerge from a factory. Injection molding, which requires toolmakers to build metal casts into which heated plastic is poured, is only cost-efficient for large-scale production. With 3-D printing, the cost per unit stays the same whether you manufacture one part or one million. “I can cost-effectively make a cellphone cover that is unique to every customer,” said Ryan Wicker, an engineer at the University of Texas at El Paso. “I could build 100 different ones just as cost-effectively as building them all the same.”

What are people printing now?
MyRobotNation.com lets customers design their own toy robot, which is manufactured on a 3-D printer, and the online retailer Shapeways.com sells everything from printed jewelry to desk toys. But the technology isn’t being used just to build novelties. Danish firm Widex prints hearing aids perfectly tailored to the wearer’s ear canal, and San Francisco’s Bespoke Innovations is experimenting with printing custom-fitted prosthetic limbs. Aerospace firms like Boeing and EADS are starting to print complex aircraft parts in single pieces rather than multiple sections. By doing away with bolts and screws that previously held components together, 3-D printing has reduced the weight of certain parts by up to 30 percent, saving fuel costs, said Boeing design engineer Michael Hayes. Eventually, Boeing thinks it might be able to print an entire aircraft wing. “That’s where the industry is trying to go,” said Hayes.

What more could 3-D printing do?
A possible next step is for virtually every home to have its own printer. “Once that happens, it will change everything,” said Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, which makes imaging software used by designers, architects, and engineers. “See something on Amazon you like? Instead of placing an order and waiting 24 hours for your FedEx package, just hit print and get it in minutes.” Most experts, though, think the Jetsons era remains far off. The desktop 3-D printers available on the market now can only extrude plastic, limiting the objects they can produce. And even if you owned an advanced machine capable of creating whatever you wanted, you’d need a large stockpile of different materials. If your microwave breaks and you want to print a replacement part, “what are the chances that your 3-D printer is going to have the right material?” said industry analyst Terry Wohlers.

How might people use 3-D printers in the future?
Instead of fiddling around at home, we’re likely to turn to manufacturing hubs with specialist 3-D printing machines, “rather like when people go to specialist shops to get higher quality photos printed,” said Richard Hague, an expert on 3-D printing at Loughborough University in the U.K. Once introduced on an industrial scale, 3-D printing could have a profound economic impact. Companies would no longer need to keep huge warehouses filled with goods, as products could be printed locally on demand. And 3-D printing could compel American manufacturers to repatriate production now done abroad. “There is nothing to be gained by going overseas,” said Bespoke Innovations co-founder Scott Summit, “except for higher shipping charges.”

Download, print, aim, fire
Forget background checks and waiting periods. If you have a 3-D printer, you might soon be able to build a gun in your own home. That’s the goal of a group called Defense Distributed, which wants to create downloadable blueprints anyone could use to print a fully functioning firearm. They’re not there yet, but late last year the project’s leader, University of Texas law student Cody Wilson, announced that the group had successfully fired six shots from a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle built with several printed plastic parts. The gun then fell apart. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) is urging Congress to renew the Undetectable Firearms Act—which bans the production of guns that don’t show up on metal detectors—before it expires at the end of 2013. “When the [act] was last renewed in 2003, a gun made by a 3-D printer was like a Star Trek episode,” he said. “But now we know it’s real.”

Vanessa Van Edwards' 6-step roadmap to taking the "workation" of your dreams is an inspiration! Check it out...

"I take a sip of chilled Sauvignon Blanc while gazing at the sprawling vineyards below my balcony. With the sun on my face, my husband and I dig into some fresh fruit from the local farmers' market — crisp pears, figs and goat cheese.

A warm breeze flutters the gauzy fabric of my sundress as we open our laptops to start the workday. It's 1:00 PM in Santa Cruz, Chile, 9:00 AM on the West Coast in the U.S. — and day 17 of our "workation."

Six years ago, my husband (then boyfriend) and I set out to find a way to develop our careers while traveling the world — and without breaking the bank.

People told us we were crazy.

During some of our low points — power outages in China, freak storms in Belgium and lost luggage in South America — we thought that they might be right. But the highlights, such as working from a cruise ship that was sailing through Chilean fjords, have made what we have dubbed our "workations" worth the effort.

To date, we've taken our virtual office to 24 locations, turning the process of traveling while working into a science. Whether you're an independent entrepreneur like me or you hold down a regular nine-to-five (the way my husband does as a marketing manager for an education company), you, too, can see the high-rises of Shanghai, the peaks of Patagonia or the beaches in Singapore — all while achieving your career goals.

The Career Benefits of Workations

Before you decide that taking a workation would be the equivalent of committing job suicide, consider these facts:

* Research has found that multi-cultural experiences and exotic surroundings generate more inspired and creative work.

* Workations decrease stress, which increases productivity, and leads to fewer sick days. Studies show that people with high levels of stress spend nearly 50 percent more on health expenses.

* A study in the Harvard Business Review found that when employees take just one day off per week, they report greater job satisfaction, more open communication with team members and better work-life balance, compared to regular employees.

As long as you do it right, a workation could very well improve your performance. Here are six of my personal tips to help get you on the road to work-travel bliss.

1. Take stock of your job
It's true that workations best lend themselves to certain professions, especially ones that require a lot of computer work. So surgeons or chefs probably won't be able to pull off a workation regularly, if at all.

But if you do have a job that can be done mostly by computer or phone, you should try to fit workations — even just one every year or two — into your life. As for work tasks that need to be done in person, most can be accomplished virtually on a temporary basis, such as face-to-face meetings via Skype or conference calls conducted using speakerphone.

For example, my husband is on work video chat from nine to five, so his team can send questions any time — and ask to see the view from wherever in the world we're working.

2. Prepare before talking to your boss
First, try to schedule a workation for times that work best with your office schedule, such as a slow month. Or look at tacking a workation onto a work conference or some other event that requires travel, so you can spend a few extra days workationing before or after the work trip.

Once you pinpoint a good time, draft a plan to make your workation go as smoothly as possible. It should account for any necessary meetings, time zone differences and your ability to stay in touch. If needed, plan to also work during the hours that you normally spend commuting. And try to propose the idea of a workation to your manager right after you've delivered on an important goal — no boss will grant a workation to an employee who isn't performing well.

3. Choose a vacation-worthy destination
Now for the fun part. If you aren't tied to a specific location due to a work event, then pick a destination that excites you.

Our home base is Portland, Oregon, and my husband and I structure our workations based on locations with the best weather. During the winter we'll travel to the Southern Hemisphere where it's summer, such as South America, Australia and New Zealand. And we spend summers in the United States, Europe or Asia.

Our general schedule is to spend four to six weeks at home, regrouping and conducting in-person work, and then head on a two- to four-week workation. This allows us to conduct necessary face-to-face business, and get out of town.

4. Organize communication methods
Technology is essential for seamless workations, so make sure that your destination has speedy Internet access. And coordinate with your office on which technologies you will need to use to keep in touch, like attending meetings via video (Google offers free video chat) and conducting conference calls on Skype.

If you're in a different time zone, designate working hours each day — and set boundaries with colleagues by letting them know when you will be online.

5. Travel affordably
Workations don't need to break the bank. Consider swapping your apartment with a fellow traveler to save on hotel costs, or check out Airbnb.com and VRBO.com, which feature furnished, short-term apartments and homes for rent.

You can also rent out your own home to cover housing costs and earn extra travel money. (Some cities have made short-term renting illegal, so just be sure to research whether regulations in your cities make this a viable option for you.)

My husband and I pay about $1,200 in monthly housing expenses. However, thanks to the short-term-rental market rates in our Portland neighborhood, we can charge up to $3,200 per month or $108 a night — which covers our rent and gives us an extra $2,000 to spend on flights and other travel costs.

6. Balance work with vacation
Be sure to spend evenings and time on the weekends away from the computer, so you actually get refreshed by your new surroundings. If you are in a different time zone, designate certain working hours each day — and set boundaries with colleagues by letting them know when you will be online.

Although workations can help you feel rejuvenated, it's also important to take full work-free vacations, which are essential for our minds and bodies to rest."