The digital divide between developing and developed countries is widening, warns the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in its Information Economy Report 2009: Trends and Outlook in Turbulent Times.

While the big questions in Silicon Valley – What’s the next Twitter? What do teens really do online? – seem to mark the end of Web 2.0 and its entrance into whatever comes next, many in the world still do not have access to the resource that makes it all possible, broadband.

For developed countries like Finland, broadband access is becoming a right; in developing countries, it remains a luxury . . . if even that attainable.

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Most of the time when you read about RFID, it’s about business applications like payments or another step in building the internet of things.

But Guard RFID Solutions is using RFID for something more valuable than spending your money or communicating with your possessions: protecting you loved ones in hospital settings. More specifically, babies and elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia, what are called “wandering risk patients.”

Guard RIFD’s SafeGuard monitors senior patients’ whereabouts, using RFID chips and existing wifi or Ethernet networks. Sensors indicate to hospital staff when a patient is wandering towards an area that could be dangerous for them. TotGuard is a similar solution, but for infant and pediatric security.

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Researchers at Florida State University are trying to encourage technology designers to bridge a digital divide that does not get as much attention as others – the technology gap that “threatens to turn senior citizens into second-class citizens.”

“The technology gap is a problem because technology, particularly computer and Internet technology, is becoming ubiquitous, and full participation in society becomes more difficult for those without such access,” said Neil Charness, professor of psychology at FSU.

This technology gap can lead to a reduced quality of life or limit the ability of older adults to live independently.

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Many families are caring for aging parents and grandparents whose mental faculties are becoming more fragile as they age.

Maybe a little googling can help.

According to a UCLA study, doing something as apparently simple as an internet search can slow or reverse mental conditions related to age, such as dementia.

“The study results are encouraging that emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults,” said the study’s author, Gary Small.

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The new Military Network Protocol will avoid the structural security downfalls of TCP/IP of the Internet that we currently use. This protocol lacks a general purpose mechanism for ensuring the authenticity or privacy of the data as it moves in the network, as the TCP/IP Guide defines in its IP Security Protocols section. The lack of security embedded in our contemporary Internet is of note since it was formed as Arpanet, a distributed network for the military some decades ago, as today’s Register points out.

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Earlier this week, Finland became the first country to make broadband access a legal right, following in the footsteps of France, which declared internet access a legal right earlier this year.

Internet access has definitely become a fundamental human need in some cases. Seventy-five percent of UK teens say they can’t live without it, according to a House of Commons report entitled Life Support: Young people’s needs in a digital age, commissioned by online charity YouthNet and released yesterday.

The report’s most interesting finding – and one that corresponds nicely with the Virgin study we published a few days ago – is that 45 percent of teens are the most happy when online. To turn that figure around, that’s almost half of people aged 16 to 24 who are less happy in the physical world than they are on the internet, which is kind of frightening.

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Last night I was watching the Dolphins beat the Jets at a sports bar across the street from the Moscone Center, a part of San Francisco totally overrun at the moment by the Oracle Open World convention, an event that annually competes with Burning Man to be the largest temporary city in the world.

At the table next to me, one of the conference-goers repeated one of the most popular meatworld memes, saying how great it was to get away from the internet during a week at Yosemite. After which, he related his Facebook adventures for the rest of the evening.

Is it really liberating to be away from the internet? Not really, according to Virgin Media and The Future Laboratory in a survey whose results have spun wildly out of control.

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The best source of traffic is Facebook.

The social networking site’s users are the most loyal referred visitors, according to an analysis of 33 million September internet users by the ad network Chitika.

More than twenty percent of Facebook users loyal are loyal visitors. For the purpose of the study, users were considered loyal if they visited a referred site four or more times per week.

Digg and Yahoo! were second to Facebook, with 16 percent of each site’s users considered loyal.

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Another way to read paper-free, Vook.com offers novels and other virtual books from publisher Simon & Schuster. Instead of using one of the dedicated electronic book viewer devices available, Vooks are used either on a computer or on an Apple App Store-enabled device.

Four Vooks were released Thursday: two fiction and two non-fiction, with written, video and social elements working together to give a more immersive experience to the “reader.” The reason for this multimedia hybrid, says the New York Times, is that some publishers believe that modern readers crave something different.

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For the last six or so months I’ve been running on the assumption that social networks were replacing email.

Like most every opinion I have, this belief turned out to be completely unfounded and untrue.

Researchers at Nielsen believed the same thing and created a study to test this hypothesis. And their early findings show that the opposite is true:the more people use social media, the more time they spend on email, too.

The email use of high and medium social media consumers has jumped between April 2008 and 2009. In fact, the email use of high social media consumers has more than doubled in that time, increasing more than 100 minutes a month to just under 190 minutes in April 2009.

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