Tag: small business news

Vaccine passports are coming. Here’s why they’re controversial

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Vaccine passports—proof that you’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19—are at this point an inevitability. Countries including Seychelles, Cyprus, Georgia, Romania, Poland, Iceland, and Estonia will require travelers to have a COVID-19 vaccination to enter. Now, lots of tech companies are working on building apps that certify a traveler is vaccinated. But there are a few problems with vaccine passports, and the World Health Organization has voiced its distaste for the concept. The main concern is that vaccine distribution is not globally equitable and vaccine passports could create social stratification. “At the present time the use of certification of vaccination as a requirement for travel is not advised because quite simply vaccination is just not available enough around the world and is not available certainly on an equitable basis,” said Michael Ryan, head of the WHO’s health-emergencies program, at a press conference. The organization says that it thinks providing vaccinated people with an official certification is valuable for public health purposes, but that vaccination should not entitle a person to more freedoms than an unvaccinated person. This is particularly true, the WHO notes, because there is no proof that any of the COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission of COVID-19 Read More …

The CDC’s program to track vaccine effectiveness over time leaves out 60 million Americans

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The digital divide can be deadly. That has been the stark lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has revealed how decades of underinvestment in digital infrastructure have left millions of Americans cut off from help during COVID-19. This has prevented many from finding vaccine appointments, it has thwarted efforts to release contact-tracing apps, and now it’s undermining the safety of the vaccine. The COVID-19 vaccines have been widely heralded as incredibly safe and effective, far exceeding even the most optimistic hopes for how quickly and effectively we could develop the jab. But given the historic speed with which the vaccines were rolled out, more data is needed. This is why the CDC developed v-safe , a long-term vaccine surveillance program. Post-injection surveillance is crucial, not only to monitor for side effects (which are quite rare and mild), but also to remind users about their second dose and monitor how long the vaccines remain effective. The problem is that the CDC made a crucial error, one that could undermine v-safe and lead to blind spots in the data it collects. You see, v-safe requires a smartphone. That may not sound like a big hurdle, but the truth is that at least one in five Americans lacks access to a smartphone. Read More …

Microsoft Edge’s vertical tabs are the best reason yet to ditch Chrome

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For the last two decades, we’ve been putting our browser tabs in the wrong place, and the latest version of Microsoft Edge proves it. Last week, Edge added support for vertical tabs, transforming the traditional tab row at the top of the browser into a column that runs down the left side. To make the switch, you just tap the little square icon on the far-left side of the tab row. Switching back is easy enough—just hit the same icon at the top of the sidebar—but if you’re an Edge user, I strongly suggest resisting the urge. Like any big user interface change, vertical tabs take some getting used to. But if you stick with it for a couple of weeks, as I’ve been doing through Edge’s beta version, you may soon realize that the sidebar is where your tabs should have been all along. Making the most of vertical tabs The best thing about vertical tabs is that you can comfortably fit more of them on the screen. Running Edge on a 24-inch, 1440p monitor, I can only load seven tabs in horizontal mode before Edge starts shrinking them down and cutting off page titles. Switching to vertical mode lets me view 26 tabs at the same time without shrinking down page titles at all. Even if you have more tabs than can fit on the screen, Edge lets you scroll up or down the list with your mouse or touchpad, just like you’d scroll through a web page. As Lifehacker’ s David Murphy points out , vertical tabs get even more useful when you combine them with Tab Groups, a still-experimental feature that you can find by typing edge://flags into your address bar and then entering “Tab Groups” in the search field. You should see options for “Tab Groups,” “Tab Groups Auto Create,” and “Tab Groups Collapse.” I suggest setting all three to “Enabled.” Once you’ve done that, right-click any tab and select “Add tab to a new group.” You can then color-code the group, give it a name, and drag other tabs into it. Clicking on the tab name or color will collapse or expand the group, and Edge will occasionally create some groups of its own, usually when you open several tabs from the same site. Although I’ve mentioned Tab Groups before, I never used it much with horizontal tabs because it didn’t do much to prevent clutter. With the extra space afforded by vertical tabs, those groups finally have room to breathe. To be clear, Microsoft didn’t invent the vertical tab menu. Opera popularized the concept years ago but abandoned it after rebuilding its browser around Google’s source code. (Some users still cling to the old version of Opera specifically for its vertical tab support .) Vivaldi, which was created by one of Opera’s founders , lets users reposition the tab bar to the right, left, or bottom edge of the browser Read More …

4 little-known Kindle tricks to elevate your e-book experience

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Whether you’re using one of the Kindle apps or a dedicated Kindle reader to enjoy your e-books, you’d be forgiven for not looking too closely at many of the platform’s available features beyond flipping pages backward and forward. But there are a handful of cool, useful, but otherwise under-promoted little tricks you might find handy. Let’s take a look. Lend to a friend Many of the Kindle books you own can be digitally lent out to someone else for 14 days, which is a really fun way to share a good read with a friend. The process feels a little clunky the first time through but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be flinging books to your friends and family without worrying about dog-eared pages or battered bindings. Use this link to see all the Kindle books you currently own and click the three-dot button in the Actions column next to a book you want to lend out. If the book is available to lend, you’ll see a “Loan this title” link that, when clicked, will let you send the book to other people else via their email address. A recipient then has seven days to accept the book and 14 days to read it, during which time you won’t be able to access it yourself. The book will be returned to you during the 14-day window if your recipient finishes it early or automatically once the time expires. And choose your recipient wisely: Any given book can only be lent once, so make sure to use your newfound powers sparingly. Send non-Kindle content to your Kindle That 50-page work proposal that you don’t feel like reading on your laptop? You can read it on the eye-friendly e-ink screen of a Kindle reader instead (or via one of the Kindle apps, if you’re so inclined). Each of your Kindle devices and apps has a unique email address that you can use to send yourself Word documents, web pages, images, and PDFs. To find the email address for your device or app, visit your Devices page on Amazon’s site and then choose your Kindle devices or your Kindle apps to view their respective @kindle.com email addresses. But wait! There’s more. You can also sling stuff to your Kindle devices and apps directly from the Chrome web browser, by using a dedicated desktop app for Mac and PC, or from an Android device to a Kindle reader. Visit Amazon’s Send to Kindle page for more details and instructions Read More …

Watch a TV news report on the wacky Apple II knockoffs of the 1980s

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Back in the 1980s, a lot of people wanted to own an Apple II, the first blockbuster product from the company cofounded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. But certain electronics manufacturers based in Taiwan hoped that some folks would be willing to settle for a Pineapple. Or an Orange or a Banana. In early 1985, The New Tech Times , a public TV show about consumer electronics, turned its attention to the scourge of imitation Apple IIs, which stole Apple’s ROM software and then built a cheap computer around it. Here’s the segment—introduced by New Tech Times host Mort Grim and with Hall and Oates’ Yacht Rock anthem “Private Eyes” on the soundtrack: Some of the rouge machines came in cheesy knockoffs of industrial designer Jerry Manock’s iconic Apple II case; others apparently stuffed ripoffs of Apple’s innards into whatever case the pirates had handy. The bad guys also helped themselves to Apple’s documentation, making crude edits where necessary. (I love the bit in the report showing the manual for the Golden II, whose pirated manual claimed the Golden had been invented by Steve Wozniak himself.) You’ve got to assume that at least some U.S. purchasers were aware they were buying a computer of questionable origin. They presumably paid well under the asking price for a real Apple IIe, which cost around $1,500 at the time with two floppy disk drives and a green-screen display. Even if purchasers knew the computers weren’t from Apple, that wouldn’t have made the situation any more tolerable for the company. As the segment reports, it worked closely with the feds to try and shut down the distribution channels that let the fakes into the U.S Read More …