Protect Your WiFi Signal With Paint

A colleague of mine moved to a new house over the holidays. For first two weeks in her new home, she was miserable as miserable can be. Why? Because her ISP took forever to provide her service. Imagine her delight when, one morning, she turned her laptop on and found that she was getting a WiFi signal that was unsecured – open for anyone to use. That was, perhaps, her best Christmas gift ever!

Amusing as that anecdote may be, it is not a laughing matter. Walk around the city – whether you are talking about residential areas or commercial areas – and you will most likely detect WiFi signals left and right. While some of them may be secure, many of them can be accessed pretty easily. And if you are even slightly paranoid about who makes use of your bandwidth, then you can understand how serious this issue can be.

Enter the paint that can block WiFi signals.

No it is not something out of a futuristic movie – there really is paint that you can use to protect your WiFi signal from those with malicious intent, or even those who just want to use your WiFi for free. Researchers from the University of Tokyo have come up with a paint containing aluminum-iron oxide. This compound blocks frequencies up to 182GHz, definitely including WiFi signals. Currently, there are other paints available that block lower frequencies not including WiFi signals.

With this new development, you can merely paint the walls of your house or office to further contain WiFi signals. The best thing about it? It’s fairly cheap at about £10 per kilogram.

SE C905: The REAL Deal

Ever since camera phones came into existence, users have been looking for the “real” deal – meaning, a phone that can actually replace your digital camera. In spite of the rapid advances in technology, however, there has not really been a camera phone that can be described as the perfect digital camera at the same time.

Indeed, even the resolution is not an accurate gauge of the phone camera’s performance. Take my new Nokia E63 phone, for example. It has a 2 megapixel camera but the picture just blows. Compare that to my SE W810i – a model which was released 3 or so years ago – which has the same resolution and I still get much better pictures with the latter.

With Sony Ericsson’s new C905, however, it seems that we are as close as we can get to the perfect camera phone. Its 8 megapixel camera, combined with a xenon flash, is perhaps the best that the manufacturer has ever made. I have not had the chance to use one myself but according to CNET, the camera is good even with low light – and we know how phone cameras can be notoriously bad in low light.

More than the camera, though, the C905 is also packed with other features. Being WiFI-enabled, the camera can function as a mini-Internet machine while you are on the go. And if you need GPS features, this baby can give you that as well. Other features are standard with SE phones – mp3 player and the like.

Of course, all these things come at a price – £491.84 or thereabouts. Pricey, huh? But it’s probably worth it.