Whether at school or work, remembering old things and learning new information can become a challenge as people these days are under tremendous pressure to perform, perform, and perform. Stress is not good for our brains — but puzzles and games can help.  We may not realize, as we go through life, our body is not the only thing that needs exercise — our brain needs exercise too. Here are mental brain puzzles and exercise games that can help to boost your brain.

In today’s world, concentrating has become harder with so many distractions.

The concentration situation has become worse with easy access to tech and devices. Technology can either inspire us to acquire our full potential or it can lead us down the rabbit hole.

What can you possibly do to improve your concentration?

What if you are having trouble remembering things or doing more tasks at a time? Now, this does not mean that you need to dash to your nearest therapist to increase mental stimulation. You are not alone with exactly this issue. But there is help.

The good news is that by simply changing habits and adopting a healthy lifestyle sooner than later you can keep your mind sharp. As well as many brain games puzzles and exercises can help to boost your level of concentration in a very short period.

The question is why should one prioritize their brain health?

Maintaining a strong mind is much like staying in shape and prioritizing your brain health from the beginning can have cumulative effects as you age. You need to understand that it is never too early to focus on brain health, engage in an active lifestyle, perform physical exercise, try brain puzzles and socialize that can build your brain’s cognitive reserve.

How to keep our brain active?

They say that you can’t teach an old dog a new trick, but when it comes to the human brain this is simply not true. With the right stimulation, the human brain has an astonishing ability to adapt, change, and react in ever-changing ways. Even if you have been facing problems with recall and visualization, there are ways to mitigate it, which involves practicing memory games that can help your mind stay sharp.

Still, confused? Let the game begin, we have some tips for you to improve retention and boost your brain:

 ●     Try out something new

If you are doing things you are already good at, no matter how intellectually demanding they are, it is not doing anything to boost your brain. When it comes to learning a new skill, not only it is fun and interesting but it also helps to strengthen the brain connection.

Find out, is there something you always wanted to do? Take a new hobby or treat yourself to something you enjoy. Perhaps you would be interested in exploring foreign culture, learning a language, or a software program? You now have one more reason to learn that new skill you always wanted to.

Any mentally stimulating activity, it can be brain puzzles or new things that mental dexterity, as well as efforts, will allow your brain to think of new patterns, thus ensuring it is always expanding and staying sharp. Though keep in mind, the activity needs to be unfamiliar and out of your comfort zone.

 ●     Don’t skip on brain-boosting activities like brain puzzles

Chances are probably pretty good that you have at least heard, or even tried, some of the many brain puzzles or brain training games that are out there. Whether you are putting together a 100 piece image of Mickey Mouse or simply trying out a crossword puzzle, different parts of the brain will be exercised depending on what kind of brain puzzles you choose as it would demand full and close attention.

Among all the brain puzzles or brain training games available online and offline, Jigsaw puzzles are a fantastic tool for engaging short term memory as it recruits multiple cognitive abilities. Since the brain has to sort through a series of visuals, shapes, and colors when putting together a jigsaw puzzle to get it assembled into a visual picture.

 ●     Keep your brain fired up with physical exercise

While mental brain puzzles are important for brain health, it does not mean that you never need to break a sweat. Exercising is as good to the mind, as it is to the body. Exercise enhances the release of helpful brain chemicals and reduces stress hormones. Therefore, a good run or workout at the gym can make a big difference in neuroplasticity by boosting growth factors and stimulating new neuronal connections.

Some useful tips to exercise your brain:

1. Aerobic exercise is particularly good for the brain as it helps to relieve anxiety and depression. In general, something as simple as a walk can help clear your head and put things in perspective.

2. Exercising in the morning before you start your day makes a big difference. Not to mention, the magic it works when it comes to burning those calories and clearing out the sleep fog when you wake up.

3. Regular physical activities can help you get past mental fatigue and can increase the size of your hippocampus, the part of your brain responsible for learning and verbal recalling, particularly beneficial for brain building.

Just keep in mind that there is no wrong time to take care of your brain, and there exist so many options to choose from when it comes to exercising the brain. From brain puzzles to fitness to something creative or new, choose what appeals to you and get going.

 Can brain puzzles really help you improve the way your brain functions?

You’ve probably seen ads for brain training programs promising to make you smarter in just a few minutes of the day. But can all these games and just clicking away at animations help? The simple answer is — yes.

These puzzles or games are designed with the ultimate goal of improving performance while challenging the mental abilities of a person.

Can you solve a riddle in less than 20 seconds? No? Then puzzles for your brain are a fun way of challenging yourself mentally and strengthening your brain health and performance.

The puzzles or exercises should be new, novel, and challenging.

For instance, if you start to notice the crossword puzzles too easy you have lost the challenge aspect of it. Try a different level, switch up the games you play to include, reading, word searches, and sudoku to activate the different areas of your brain.

 Wrapping Up

Brain exercises can be an appealing shortcut scheme to get smart quickly. But improving or maintaining cognition is not going to be quick and easy. It requires a lifetime of active work — or at least an extended period of gaining knowledge, cognitive challenge, and learning.

Along with the games consider other activities that might be as cognitively stimulating, if your sole motive is to obtain cognitive benefits.

The post Mental Brain Puzzles Exercise Games – Which Can Help to Boost Your Brain appeared first on ReadWrite.

Getting a robocall from a telemarketing agency is deemed normal these days. But hey! is it really normal or even legal? Telemarketing isn’t illegal but is definitely annoying. When was the last time did you got a call from a telemarketer? Possibly, today, a few hours ago or maybe a few minutes ago. But how do robocallers get your phone number?

According to a report, around 26.3 billion robocalls were made to the US-registered phone numbers last year. The month of August alone saw 4.2 billion robocalls. The numbers are an eye-opener. A robocall blocking app Hiya revealed that the volumes are increasing month-on-month and will continue to see record highs year after year.

Last year, 2019, more than 44% of the calls you answered were robocalls. Will the calls this year be a similar waste of time?

Have you ever wondered how robocallers get your phone number?

1. Through a mobile carrier.

The first and foremost way a robocaller can get hands-on your phone number is through a mobile carrier directly. Mobile carriers have allegedly involved in selling location data along with other details like numbers and addresses of their customers to third-party companies.

No matter which mobile service provider you are associated with — the chances of a data leak is estimated to be high. Some were reported to be involved in selling location data to third-party agencies for their vested interests, including Sprint, Verizon and AT&T.

2. Terms of Service dialog box.

Remember you clicked on ‘I agree’ when prompted to read Terms of Service, exactly where the game begins. Nobody bothers to read the terms even when you know that you might end up compromising your privacy. Apple’s Terms of Service document contains more than 20k words. No wonder users skip reading it and instantly accept terms.

This blind acceptance of terms mentioned in the document leads to data sharing wherein data can be your phone number, address, location, gender, age or anything you unwittingly provide.

3. Data accumulating firms.

There are companies working in the backdrop dedicatedly for the collection of data. They collect user’s information from social media websites, public forums, comment boxes and other freely available websites to build a comprehensive user profile. The collected data is then stored in a streamlined fashion based on age, location and more to sell out to businesses across the globe.

4. Credit reporting companies.

Companies like Equifax, Experian and TransUnion offer services like fraud prevention and credit monitoring. These companies aggregate data from millions of individuals and businesses about their spending, debt and more financials.

The data, thus collected, is sold to insurance and loan providers, banks, credit card companies and even employers who intend to do background checks on new hires.

5. Contests and competitions.

How often you end up filling up a registration form at a contest in expectation of winning a brand new car or a new smartphone or winning a five-star hotel stay deal? Contests like such lure people to sign up and provide details like phone numbers, addresses, names, etc.

Entertaining such ads on the web or offline (say in a shopping mall) can result in never-ending robocalls. Ensure to go through Terms of Service. Also, don’t forget to inquire about the company’s authenticity hosting such a contest or competition.

6. Charities.

Another profound way of robocallers getting hands on your phone number is through charity functions. It has been found that charities share donor’s personal information with other likewise foundations or even sell details to third-party telemarketing firms.

From next time, please make sure to read the privacy policy of the foundation before providing them your details. It is better to make a distance from charity funding organizations that do not have a privacy policy.

7. Emergency services.

Calling an emergency service like 800, 900 or 888 can also get your details in the hands of telemarketers. The regulating body uses ANI (Automatic Number Identification) to identify and store your number in their database. It is completely legal and authorized by the Federal Communications Commission.

The phone numbers, thus collected, serve basis for complete information collection including name, address, age and more. The data is then sold to third-party institutions dealing in telemarketing services.

How to avoid robocallers?

There is very little that you can do to avoid robocallers completely. However, doing your bit can make a difference.

Here’s what you can do.

– Register for a “Do Not Call List.”

Doing this will only help you bypass sales calls but calls like political, informational, surveys, charitable and debt collection will still ring.

– Know what your voter registration distribution policy says.

As per rules, political parties cannot call cellphones without prior permission and consent, however, this does not apply to landlines. Different states have different rules about how a voter’s information will be used by the political party.

Some states even allow voters to opt-out of sharing phone numbers from the voter registration lists shared with the political parties. Also, there are several schemes in place that help keep voter information safe and confidential.

– Do not fall for lucrative offers.

Stay updated and research proactively before entering into a contest or sweepstake. Regardless of what’s on offer, do not participate especially when you know that your privacy is at stake. Be practical, how often does one win a car or lottery?

– Quick privacy policy check.

Try to take out time to read the charity organization’s privacy policy before shelling out your details at the donor camp. Do your homework well in advance.

– Do not put out contact details on public platforms.

It is advised to not share your phone number anywhere on the Internet – on any public platform, forum or social media. Data aggregators, while working behind the scenes, collect information available on public domains to sell it all to a telemarketing company.

Although it is illegal to collect information by such means, companies do collect it and read the privacy policy while using any security, gallery vault and private photo vault app.

– Get an alternate number.

This will help you keep your primary and personal contact safe. Even though you end up signing up for a contest or a service, you won’t have to deal with telemarketing calls on your personal number.

– Robocall blocker.

With a robocall blocker, you can stop incoming calls from unknown callers. You can ask unknown callers to send you a whitelist request. You can create a whitelist for your circle so that their call doesn’t get dropped.

There are plenty of options available in the market, explore a bit to find the best fit.

The post How Robocallers Get Your Phone Number? appeared first on ReadWrite.

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the hottest technologies in the era of digital transformation, connecting everything to the Internet. It is the core technology behind smart homes, self-driving cars, smart utility meters, and smart cities. But there are nine main security challenges for the future of the internet of things (IoT).

The number of IoT devices is rapidly increasing over the last few years. According to an analyst firm Gartner, there will be more than 26 billion connected devices around the world by 2020, up from just 6 billion in 2016.

While IoT devices bring effective communication between devices, automate things, save time and cost and have numerous benefits, there is one thing still concerning the users—iot security. There have been specific incidents which have made the IoT devices challenging to trust.

Several smart TVs and cash machines have been hacked, which is negatively impacting the trust of not only consumers but also enterprises. Having said that, let’s have a deep dive into the most critical security challenges for the future of the Internet of Things (IoT).

1. Outdated hardware and software.

Since the IoT devices are being used increasingly, the manufacturers of these devices are focusing on building new ones and not paying enough attention to security.
A majority of these devices don’t get enough updates, whereas some of them never get a single one. What this means is that these products are secure at the time of purchase but becomes vulnerable to attacks when the hackers find some bugs or security issues.
When these issues are not fixed by releasing regular updates for hardware and software, the devices remain vulnerable to attacks. For every little thing connected to the Internet, the regular updates are a must-have. Not having updates can lead to data breach of not only customers but also of the companies that manufacture them.

2. Use of weak and default credentials.

Many IoT companies are selling devices and providing consumers default credentials with them — like an admin username. Hackers need just the username and password to attack the device. When they know the username, they carry out brute-force attacks to infect the devices.
The Mirai botnet attack is an example that was carried out because the devices were using default credentials. Consumers should be changing the default credentials as soon as they get the device, but most of the manufacturers don’t say anything in the instruction guides about making that change. Not making an update in the instruction guides leaves all of the devices open to attack.

3. Malware and ransomware.

The rapid rise in the development of IoT products will make cyberattack permutations unpredictable. Cybercriminals have become advanced today — and they lock out the consumers from using their own device.

For example, an IoT-enabled camera that captures confidential information from home or the work office — and the system is hacked. The attackers will encrypt the webcam system and not allow consumers to access any information. Since the system contains personal data, they can ask consumers to pay a hefty amount to recover their data. When this occurs, it’s called ransomware.

4. Predicting and preventing attacks.

Cybercriminals are proactively finding out new techniques for security threats. In such a scenario, there is a need for not only finding the vulnerabilities and fixing them as they occur but also learning to predict and prevent new threats.

The challenge of security seems to be a long-term challenge for the security of connected devices. Modern cloud services make use of threat intelligence for predicting security issues. Other such techniques include AI-powered monitoring and analytics tools. However, it is complex to adapt these techniques in IoT because the connected devices need processing of data instantly.

5. Difficult to find if a device is affected.

Although it is not really possible to guarantee 100% security from security threats and breaches, the thing with IoT devices is that most of the users don’t get to know if their device is hacked.

When there is a large scale of IoT devices, it becomes difficult to monitor all of them even for the service providers. It is because an IoT device needs apps, services, and protocols for communication. Since the number of devices is increasing significantly, the number of things to be managed is increasing even more.

Hence, many devices keep on operating without the users knowing that they have been hacked.

6. Data protection and security challenges.

In this interconnected world, the protection of data has become really difficult because it gets transferred between multiple devices within a few seconds. One moment, it is stored in mobile, the next minute it is on the web, and then the cloud.

All this data is transferred or transmitted over the internet, which can lead to data leak. Not all the devices through which data is being transmitted or received are secure. Once the data gets leaked, hackers can sell it to other companies that violate the rights for data privacy and security.

Furthermore, even if the data doesn’t get leaked from the consumer side, the service providers might not be compliant with regulations and laws. This can also lead to security incidents.

7. Use of autonomous systems for data management.

From data collection and networking point-of-view, the amount of data generated from connected devices will be too high to handle.

It will undoubtedly need the use of AI tools and automation. IoT admins and network experts will have to set new rules so that traffic patterns can be detected easily.

However, use of such tools will be a little risky because even a slightest of mistakes while configuring can cause an outage. This is critical for large enterprises in healthcare, financial services, power, and transportation industries.

8. Home security.

Today, more and more homes and offices are getting smart with IoT connectivity. The big builders and developers are powering the apartments and the entire building with IoT devices. While home automation is a good thing, but not everyone is aware of the best practices that should be taken care of for IoT security.
Even if the IP addresses get exposed, this can lead to exposure of residential address and other contact details of the consumer. Attackers or interested parties can use this information for evil purposes. This leaves smart homes at potential risk.

9. Security of autonomous vehicles.

Just like homes, the self-driving vehicles or the ones that make use of IoT services, are also at risk. Smart vehicles can be hijacked by skilled hackers from remote locations. Once they get access, they can control the car, which can be very risky for passengers.

Wrapping up

Undoubtedly, IoT is a technology that should be called a boon. But since it connects all the things to the Internet, the things become vulnerable to some sort of security threats. Big companies and cybersecurity researchers are giving their best to make things perfect for the consumers, but there is still a lot to be done.

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