THE BYTE

Welcome to the BYTE, where we serve up the latest home and tech news from the last week for you to sink your teeth into.

This week we’re taking a BYTE out of new numbers showing a welcome shift for the home market, an internet shut-down, smart homes under attack, vacation homes changing the renting game, and a new way to display art. Dig in!

Generally

Shop Til You Drop

Realtor.com conducted a survey in September on the active home shoppers in the market. Big take-a-ways? First time buyers accounted for 52% which is up from 33% last year.

Tell Me More

The top goals for home ownership were the same across the age groups: privacy, family needs, and asset accumulation. The first time buyers percentage was dominated by the older millennials (age 25-34). This may be what we’ve all been waiting for…millennials buying homes. Most of these shoppers are looking to buy within the next 7 months. Could 2017 be the long awaited year of the millennials buyer? 

Dyn And Dash

System Overload

Over the weekend Dyn, a DNS provider, saw outages from several “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks. In simpler terms their system was overloaded with so much traffic from fake IP addresses it caused several major sites to go down, Spotify, Twitter, Soundcloud, and Airbnb just to name a few. No one has taken credit for the attack but it was the first attack like this on this large a scale. Now everyone: Dyn, Homeland Security, and Dyn’s competitors, are working together to figure who was behind the attack and how they did it.

Take Notes

A Little Less Home Security Please

The Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t quite safe, yet. People are concerned about the security of these devices because they are extremely easy to hack and few of them need a password of any kind. The focus so far has been on ease of use and not at all on securing the technologies so the IP addresses can be hacked. The concepts are here to stay and security will only improve, but it may be time to do a little more research before buying that smart home camera.

Airing It Out

Airbnb is getting so popular now that people are worried it is affecting rent prices and home/apartment availability. They might not be wrong. Initial studies show that especially in big cities with dense Airbnb listings the rent is higher and the availability is lower than usual. A lot of factors play into housing, so it is hard to say, this early on, if this is directly a result of Airbnb’s popularity or if they just play a small role in it. However with more home sharing happening every day the marketplace could start to change pretty quickly.

Motion Pictures

E02 is the latest in thin video displays for hanging art on your wall. With the screen being very thin, crisp, and even dims when the lights are out in the room, you can display gifs, cinemographs, and basically any digital art seamlessly in your house. If you are a true art connoisseur you can subscribe to their Art Club and they will put museum worthy art work on the wall.

Totally Unrelated

Your Wildest Dreams Finally Came True

With Girl Scouts cookie season quickly approaching we will see an added bonus this year, Girl Scout cookie cereal. These hit the stores in January so be ready to stock up.