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This is probably around 1988. I was working at South Coast Community Newspapers (in Santa Barbara, California). Note the landline phone, calculator, use of an actual ball-point pen and tiny Mac. Wow.

The IoT revolution comes with many benefits. Chief among these is how inexpensive IoT devices can be. But reaping the benefits of IoT requires that those devices also be small and energy efficient, enabling a great many of them to be deployed. Some of them must also be efficiently battery-powered, which means minimizing on-board processing capabilities.

Many IoT devices are small, inexpensive and good at one or a small number of tasks, including the collection of sensor or location data. They should also be good at offloading that data for further processing. And that's where the power of MEC and 5G come in for the future of IoT.

IoT devices can generate tons of data. Two of the benefits of IoT devices are low power consumption and low cost. By enabling low-latency processing of this data at the edge instead of on the devices or in the cloud, IoT solutions can remain flexible, and the devices themselves can:

• Remain inexpensive.

• Operate with minimal maintenance.

• Use smaller, cheaper and long-lasting batteries.

Ultimately, all that means the whole operation can be made more cost-effective. Here’s everything you need to know.

Because in the near future you won't be able to. 

A makeup commercial in Japan shows three models -- two of them are CGI, and the other one pretends to be a robot for a living. Can you tell which is real and which are fake? 

When you absolutely positively have to understand how pandemics work. 

Amira picked up this delicious beverage at a local market here in Oaxaca. It's called Tejate and it's made with corn and chocolate.

Locals were drinking this stuff long before the Spanish arrived in the New World.

That stuff on top is made with flor de cacao, which is a local tree. It's really delicious, and has the consistency of butter and the taste of very mild chocolate.

I had it for the first time, and now I'm a huge fan.

While exploring Mayan ruins and lost cities in the jungles of Guatemala, I emerged from a dense forest one day in search of something truly elusive: a Wi-Fi network.

The year was 2006. I was with my wife and two sons on the trip of a lifetime, going from one Mayan site to another across five countries over six weeks. I wasn’t on vacation. I worked during the entire trip. At the time, I was writing a weekly opinion column for Computerworld, with consulting work on the side.

I decided as an experiment to tell neither my editor nor my clients that I would be traveling. I wanted to conduct an experiment — to see if they would even notice that I was abroad. (Spoiler: They didn’t.)

With a deadline imminent, I really needed that internet connection. After trudging through a forest from the village where we were staying to a small town rumored to have a hotel, I found it: a run-down building with “Hotel” hand-painted on it, with a metal table and two chairs beside the structure more or less in the dirt road. More importantly, I checked my phone and there it was: Wi-Fi! (In that place in those days, Wi-Fi was rare, but if you could find it, there was never a password involved.) I sat down, logged in, sent my column and breathed a sigh of relief.

Sweltering in the Central American humidity and swatting away mosquitos, I didn’t know at the time that I was living in the future.

Amazon’s working on a robot.

Details about Amazon's home robot project leaked recently. What we learned is that the project, code-named Vesta, is in the "late-prototype stage."

The robot will be "powered" by Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and will feature cameras, a screen and a small compartment for carrying things. It might also come with a camera on the end of a retractable pole for helping users find stuff under the bed.

The company has more than 800 employees working on it.

The publication Insider has seen an internal Vesta document and has spoken to six anonymous sources directly involved in the program.

The robot may cost more than $1,000. Amazon is reportedly considering rolling it out, so to speak, in a limited, invitation-only beta.

The robot is being developed in Amazon's Silicon Valley R&D organization, called Lab126, which also developed the Kindle line, Amazon Echo and other successful Amazon consumer products, plus the Fire Phone.

The Fire Phone was a horrible product and a bad idea. And the company is haunted by its failure.

Amazon staff are reportedly worried about its prospects for success. Sources complained about "shifting strategies and delayed launch dates" and wondered whether Vesta will be a hit.

They’re right to be nervous. Here’s why Amazon’s Vesta is very unlikely to be successful.

The rise of the cloud didn’t free us from concerns over who stores our data. Where matters, and major cloud providers and big data monopolies host a huge percentage of the world’s data. Thousands of organizations that store and manage personal, business and government data use big-name cloud providers. Smartphone platform companies house and process terabytes of the data that flows through mobile networks. Social networks house and control the data on billions of people worldwide — certainly the personal data of effectively all employees in your company.

And, that creates challenges, too. For example, cyber criminals and state-sponsored threat actors find data held in a central hub a tempting target. It’s time for a wider conversation among security specialists and industry leaders about how to better protect this data. Let’s take a look at the risks and challenges of a big data monopoly.