How to Keep Your Devices’ Batteries Alive As Long As Possible

Love them or hate them, batteries power everything you hold dear, or at least everything inside your phone. You might have a brand new iPhone with a fully charged battery or a dying iPhone 6, whose battery is so degraded it requires a replacement from Apple. All batteries degrade eventually, but you can take some preventative steps to keep them in good health for as long as possible.

To keep it operating nominally, you’ll need to occasionally participate in some time-consuming activities, or go against your habits and beliefs as to how you should charge (or discharge) a battery. For the most part, batteries can take care of themselves and combat our bad habits as long as you monitor a few factors. Here’s what you should look into when determining the health of your battery, and how to keep it full of electrons until it’s time for a replacement.

Extreme Temperature Isn’t Good

Not too hot, not too cool: a battery at the extreme ends of the weather spectrum is an inefficient one. You should try to keep your battery’s temperature between 5 to 45 °C (41 to 113 °F). Heat causes a battery to speed up its chemical reactions, which translates to a battery that drains faster than it should.

A cold battery is equally inhibited by the frigid weather, and has a lower capacity compared to a room temperature battery. One more thing: avoid charging your battery in below freezing temperatures, as you could permanently damage its capacity.

Unplugging and Discharging

Every battery has a lifespan, measured in the number of cycles. A cycle is complete every time the battery is fully recharged, whether all at once or over the course of a few days. A battery charged from 80% to 100% every day will take five days to complete one full charging cycle. Going from completely dead to fully charged is another charging cycle.

In general, you shouldn’t allow your battery to fall to dangerously low levels, and should start charging your devices when they fall below 20% to avoid placing stress on a battery by charging it from such a low level (charging from extremely low levels ages the battery and reduces cycle count). If you want, you can unplug your device after it’s fully charged, though most devices automatically cease charging when their battery is full, negating the worry of degrading the battery.

Charging a battery also means you’re expending a charge cycle, so the fewer times you charge it, and the less you charge all at once, the longer it will last. That means battery saving measures like Power Save mode on your devices should be considered when you’re looking to maximize your time up and running.

Monitoring Your Laptop Battery

macOS: Monitoring your battery on the Mac is easy, with the right app. If you’d rather not install any new software, you can look at your Mac’s system information and find the information you need to determine the health of your battery.

1. Hold the Option key and click the Apple menu icon. Choose System Information.
2. Under the Hardware section of the System Information window, select Power. The current cycle count is listed under the Battery Information section.

Apple has a list of maximum cycle counts for each laptop so you can see how close you are to the limit, when battery life starts to degrade.

Alternately, you could install a more visually pleasing app like Battery Health. The free app offers a simple and colorful view of your battery’s performance and discharge history. You can also view the time spent plugged in or running on battery power to get a better idea (and eventually alter) your charging habits

Windows 10: To see how your battery is faring in your Windows 10 laptop, you can go one of two ways. First, you can use Windows 10 and the command line to generate a battery report, which will detail our battery’s usage history. You can see its cycle count, maximum capacity, current capacity, and usage time to determine whether the lifespan you’re getting is in line with the lifespan advertised.

Don’t feel like going into the command line? Download a battery analyzer app like Battery X, which presents your battery health in a clean and simple interface, much different than the HTML battery report Windows 10 generates.

Monitoring Your Smartphone Battery

iOS: Apple, thanks to its unpopular decision to throttle iPhones with older batteries, is updating its battery management service in the upcoming iOS 11.3 software update. You’ll be able to see the health of your battery as a percentage, and determine whether or not you’re due for a replacement.

Android: It’s easy to see what’s draining your battery in Android. You can take a look inside Android’s battery settings to see which service or app is using all of your juice, and adjust your habits accordingly.

You can also look into enabling Android Doze, which essentially stops Android apps from constantly draining your battery life with requests for location data, notifications, and other unseen actions. Want more information on your battery health? Try GSam Battery Monitor, which will display a wealth of data about your battery, including its capacity, cycle count, usage time, and which apps are using the majority of your juice.

5 Cyber Security Tips for Doctor Offices

A staggering 83 percent of physicians recently told AMA researchers that their practices have experienced a cyberattack of some type. The 1,300 physicians surveyed also said not enough cybersecurity support is coming from the government that will hold them accountable for a patient information breach.

The larger the practice, the more likely that specialized staff and resources will be available, but even the smallest medical practice must appropriately address HIPAA requirements. Done right, the risk analysis will go beyond limiting legal exposure. It can also help with meeting Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) requirements.

5 steps, but never “one and done”

HIPAA requirements point to five basic steps in conducting the analysis.

Identify the scope. This includes combining an understanding of the administrative, technical and physical security requirements with a complete inventory of all the devices in your practice that create, receive, maintain or transmit ePHI. The computers and servers that comprise the practice’s electronic health record system are obvious items, but others may not be. Modern photocopiers, for example, contain hard drives that retain images of everything scanned. Be sure to list all portable equipment storing ePHI.

Assess the risk. The purpose here is to identify and document potential vulnerabilities and to assess current security measures. Expect to conduct internal discussions—for example, with the office manager—and to seek external guidance on the current known risks and precautions concerning ePHI. The practice’s legal counsel, government agencies and professional associations are potential sources of information.  

Evaluate the risk. Not all risks carry the same weight. It depends on how likely something unwanted is to happen and the anticipated impact. The webinar provides a grid that helps users rate risk—medium, high, critical—based on likelihood of an occurrence and severity of impact.

For example, if the loss of an unencrypted laptop is judged probable given a practice’s operations (perhaps the practice that conducts patient home visits), and the anticipated impact is severe because of the risk of disclosure of ePHI (such as information about the patients being visited that day), then the risk is considered critical. That risk can be ameliorated with laptop encryption. Risks must also be ranked.

Create a plan to address the risk. “Once you rank your different risks, you want to create a work plan to address those risks,’’ Hoffman said. That will require documentation—for example, work plans, the responsible staff member or contractor, budgets, and target dates.

Periodic review and updates to the risk analysis. A general rule of thumb is once a year, given that MIPS is on an annual timetable.  “A true risk analysis isn’t a one-and-done deal, it is an ongoing process, especially as practices adopt new and evolving technologies” said Hoffman.

Is Your Android Battery Healthy? Here's How to Check

Saving battery life is an important concern for most Android users. But beyond conserving juice in day-to-day use, have you ever thought about preserving the overall life of your phone’s battery?

Over time, batteries wear out, as we’ve seen recently with the iPhone slowdown case. They can’t hold a charge like they did when new, so you get less usage even when they’re fully charged. Thus, you might wish to check your phone’s battery health and get some help preserving it.

Thankfully, while you can’t do this natively in Android, there’s an app that makes it easy.

For this task, you’ll want to download the free app Accubattery. It’s not the only battery monitor on Android, but it’s a great one for the job.

Once installed, the app will walk you through a brief introduction to what it does, including research on battery lifespan. They’ve found that by only charging your battery to a maximum of 80 percent (instead of 100 percent), you can increase its longevity by quite a bit.

Eventually, you’ll hit a slider where you can set a charge alarm. The app recommends setting this at 80%, but you can select a different level if you like. After this, it performs a quick calibration and you’re ready to go.

To get results, you’ll need to use your device as normal for a while. After some time, Accubattery will collect information about your phone’s battery (and your usage) and display stats in the app. This will appear after just a day or two of use, but you’ll get better results after using it for weeks and months.

Inside the app, you’ll see information about how long your battery will last on the Discharging tab. This also includes details about your average battery usage, usage per app, and more.

Use the Charging tab to see how quickly your device charges, and the Health tab to review the wear on your battery and see how it compares to a brand-new one.

What is 802.11ax Wi-Fi, and what will it mean for 802.11ac

Each new Wi-Fi standard has brought significant improvements in performance, with the most recent, 802.11ac, offering an impressive theoretical maximum rate of 1.3Gbps.  Unfortunately, these gains have not been enough to keep pace with demand, leading to that exasperated cry heard across airports, malls, hotels, stadiums, homes and offices: “Why is the wireless so slow?”

The IEEE is taking another crack at boosting Wi-Fi performance with a new standard called 802.11ax or High-Efficiency Wireless, which promises a fourfold increase in average throughput per user.

802.11ax is designed specifically for high-density public environments, like trains, stadiums and airports. But it also will be beneficial in Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, in heavy-usage homes, in apartment buildings and in offices that use bandwidth-hogging applications like videoconferencing.

802.11ax is also designed for cellular data offloading. In this scenario, the cellular network offloads wireless traffic to a complementary Wi-Fi network in cases where local cell reception is poor or in situations where the cell network is being taxed.

Excitement surrounding the new standard is high. Even though the 802.11ax is not expected to be finalized until early 2019, the vendor community is chomping at the bit. Pre-standard chipsets have been shipping since last year and the first 802.11ax routers are currently hitting the market.  In a typical Wi-Fi deployment scenario, early adopters are comfortable using pre-standard products, which readily win certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance after they fully comply with the standard with a firmware upgrade.

What problem is 802.11ax trying to solve?

The fundamental problems with Wi-Fi are that bandwidth is shared among endpoint devices, access points can have overlapping coverage areas, especially in dense deployments, and end users can be moving between access points.

The current solution, based on a technology from the old shared Ethernet days called Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA), requires endpoints to listen for an all-clear signal before transmitting. In the event of interference, congestion or collision, the endpoint goes into a back-off procedure, waits for the all-clear, then transmits.

In a crowded stadium, a busy airport or a packed train with hundreds, even thousands, of end users attempting to stream video at the same time, the system loses efficiency and performance suffers.

The good news is that 802.11ax promises improved performance, extended coverage and longer battery life.  802.11ax can deliver a single stream at 3.5Gbps, and with new multiplexing technology borrowed from the world of LTE cellular, can deliver four simultaneous streams to a single endpoint for a total theoretical bandwidth of an astounding 14Gbps.

How does 802.11ax work?

The 802.11ax standard takes a variety of well-understood wireless techniques and combines them in a way that achieves a significant advance over previous standards, yet maintains backward compatibility with 802.11ac and 802.11n.

802.11ax delivers a nearly 40 percent increase in pure throughput thanks to higher order QAM modulation, which allows for more data to be transmitted per packet. It also achieves more efficient spectrum utilization.  For example, 802.11ax creates broader channels and splits those channels into narrower sub-channels. This increases the total number of available channels, making it easier for endpoints to find a clear path to the access point.

When it comes to downloads from the access point to the end user, early Wi-Fi standards only permitted one transmission at a time per access point. The Wave 2 version of 802.11ac began using Multi-User, Multi-Input, Multiple Output (MU-MIMO), which allowed access points to send up to four streams simultaneously. 802.11ax allows for eight simultaneous streams and makes use of explicit beamforming technology to aim those streams more accurately at the receiver’s antenna.

Even more importantly, 802.11ax piggybacks on MU-MIMO with an LTE cellular base station technology called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). This allows each MU-MIMO stream to be split in four additional streams, boosting the effective bandwidth per user by four times.

The way Network World columnist Zeus Kerrevala explains 802.11ax, early Wi-Fi was like a long line of customers in a bank waiting for one teller. MU-MIMO meant four tellers serving four lines of customers. OFDMA means each teller can simultaneously serve four customers.

How is 802.11ax different from 802.11ac?

802.11ac operates in the 5Ghz range only, while 802.11ax operates in both the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz ranges, thus creating more available channels. For example, early chipsets support a total of 12 channels, eight in the 5Ghz and four in the 2.4Ghz range.

With 802.11ac, MU-MIMO is limited to downlink transmissions only. 802.11ax creates full-duplex MU-MIMO so that with downlink MU-MIMO an access point may transmit concurrently to multiple receivers and with uplink MU-MIMO an endpoint may simultaneously receive from multiple transmitters.  

802.11ax supports up to eight MU-MIMO transmissions at a time, up from four with 802.11ac. OFDMA is new with 802.11ax, as are several other technologies, like trigger-based random access, dynamic fragmentation and spatial frequency re-use, all aimed at improving efficiency.

Finally, 802.11ax introduces a technology called “target wake time” to improve wake and sleep efficiency on smartphones and other mobile devices. This technology is expected to make a significant improvement in battery life.

When will we see 802.11ax products and adoption?

Quantenna Communications was first out of the gate, announcing the first 802.11ax silicon in October 2016.  The chipset supports eight 5GHz streams and four 2.4 GHz streams. In January 2017, Quantenna added a second chipset to its portfolio with support for four streams in both bands.

Other Wi-Fi chipset vendors have followed suit. Qualcomm announced their first 802.11ax silicon in early 2017, followed by Broadcom and Marvell.

The first 802.11ax router was introduced by Asus last August. Using Broadcom silicon, the Asus router has 4×4 MIMO in both bands and achieves a maximum throughput of 1.1Gbps on 2.4 GHz and 4.8 Gbps on 5 GHz.

Huawei has announced an 802.11ax access point that uses 8×8 MIMO and is based on Qualcomm hardware. And in January, Aerohive Networks announced its first family of 802.11ax access points based on Broadcom chipsets. These are expected to start shipping mid-2018.

The IEEE approved 802.11n in 2007 and 802.11ac in 2013, so they’re sticking with the six-year interval when it comes to 802.11ax. A draft 802.11ax standard is expected to be published in the first quarter of 2018, with the final standard wrapping up in Q1 2019.

Interim Wi-Fi certification of 802.11ax gear by the Wi-Fi Alliance will begin in the fourth quarter of this year, with volume production of 802.11ax products expected to ramp up next year.

In terms of mass adoption, we’re probably talking 2020, but forward-thinking IT execs, especially those running high-density Wi-Fi networks, should launch 802.11ax pilot projects this year.

Equifax Identifies 2.4 Million More Affected by Massive Hack

The company's forensic investigation revealed the new identities on top of the 146 million affected in the attack that exposed victims' personal details, including names, birth dates and social security numbers.

"This is not about newly discovered stolen data," said Paulino do Rego Barros, who took over as interim chief executive last year at the scandal-hit credit agency.

"It's about sifting through the previously identified stolen data, analyzing other information in our databases that was not taken by the attackers, and making connections that enabled us to identify additional individuals."

Equifax said the newly identified consumers were not previously informed because their social security numbers -- which appeared to be the focus of the hackers -- were not stolen together with their partial driver's license information.

Equifax said it would notify these consumers and will offer identity theft protection and credit file monitoring services.

The Atlanta-based company, which tracks consumer financial data to help establish credit ratings, is now facing state and federal investigations as well as class-action lawsuits over the breach.

While the breach was not the largest in history, it has been considered among the most damaging because of the sensitive information held by Equifax and the potential for that data to be used in identity theft or other crimes.