Innholdsfortegnelse for #459 i Techlife News

Many Americans are wary of flying because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Driving is one alternative to minimize your exposure to large crowds and still get an opportunity to see some sights this summer. You can also further reduce your social contact on a road trip by driving a vehicle with an exceptionally long range. A typical gasoline-powered vehicle can make it about 300-400 miles before needing to stop for gas. Experts have evaluated four vehicles with significantly greater-than-average EPA-estimated ranges. Each vehicle represents a specific category: truck, SUV, sedan and electric vehicle. The EPA calculates range by multiplying a vehicle’s combined mpg estimate — it’s a mix of both city and highway driving — with its gas tank capacity. A vehicle that gets 20 mpg combined and has a 20-gallon…

As parents nationwide prepare to help their children with more distance learning, a small but quickly growing number are deciding to take matters entirely into their own hands and begin homeschooling. Some are worried their districts are unable to offer a strong virtual learning program. For others who may have been considering homeschooling, concerns for their family’s health amid the coronavirus and the on-again, off-again planning for in-person instruction are leading them to part ways with school systems. Mindy Kroesche, a freelance writer and editor from Lincoln, Nebraska, had been leaning toward homeschooling her 12-year-old son, who has autism and ADHD diagnoses that made middle school a challenge. But she always felt her 10-year-old daughter was “built for school.” Now with the pandemic raging, she is pulling them both out…

Tribune Publishing Company, which owns some of the most storied newspapers in American journalism, said that it is closing the newsrooms at five of them, including New York’s Daily News and The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. The company said the newspapers — including the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the Carroll County Times in Maryland — will continue to be published with employees working from home as they have been during the coronavirus pandemic. Employees were told they would be working at home until at least January 2021. “As we progress through the pandemic and as needs change, we will reconsider our need for physical offices,” a spokesperson for the Chicago-based company, Max Reinsdorf, said via email. “We will keep employees informed of…

Microsoft is back to selling smartphones for the first time since it abandoned its mobile business more than four years ago. The company began taking orders Wednesday for the Surface Duo, a new dual-screen Android device that costs $1,399 and begins shipping in September. The high-priced gadget is designed to impress, but is also arriving during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with unemployment in double digits and budget-wary consumers spending more time at home to avoid the coronavirus pandemic. Microsoft is pitching the Duo as a more useful tool than a conventional smartphone, since it enables users to multitask with two separate apps or web pages at a time. CEO Satya Nadella, for instance, uses one screen to take notes and the other to read a book…

Parents have weighed in on reopening schools. Teachers have weighed in. Public health experts, too, along with cities, states and President Donald Trump. But what about the kids themselves? As the grown-ups fret, kindergartners to high schoolers faced with a range of scenarios for virtual and in-person classes are expressing both fear and glee over leaving home to learn. Many said they’re most worried about fellow students breaking the rules on wearing masks and keeping their distance, especially in areas that are hot spots for the coronavirus. “We’ll be home in a month,” said a skeptical Peter Klamka, an eighth-grader in Las Vegas, in a county that logged 95% of new coronavirus cases reported in Nevada early last week. The 13-year-old will return to his private school in about three…

For more than a century, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden,” first published in 1911, has endured. It remains one of the great classics of children’s literature, a book that deftly combines the dreams and nightmares of childhood. Its balance of dark and light, death and rebirth is still powerfully moving in its rare harmony. Mark Mundan’s adaptation, which STX Films will release on-demand Friday, struggles to burrow into the interiors of its characters. It’s sluggish at times and too withdrawn for such a vibrant tale. But it stays nevertheless in tune with the spirit of Burnett’s book, and by the time it reaches its late crescendo, this “Secret Garden” blooms nevertheless. “The Secret Garden” has been adapted many times before but only once as a major movie, in 1993.…

For three decades, Kelly Flint flourished as a corporate travel agent, sending everyone from business titans to oil riggers around the planet. Then came the worst pandemic in a century, leaving her jobless and marooned in an uncertain economy. Furloughed since March, Flint has dipped into her retirement account to pay her bills, frustrated that her $600 weekly emergency federal aid payments have expired. She yearns, too, for an end to the twin disasters that now dominate her life: recession and pandemic. “I don’t deal well with the unknowns,” she says. “I never have.” Across America are legions of Kelly Flints, women and men who don’t know when they’ll receive another paycheck — or if. The coronavirus outbreak and resulting economic upheaval have thrown millions of lives into disarray. Industries…

A federal appeals court has overturned an antitrust ruling against Qualcomm, dismissing arguments that it unlawfully squeezed out cellphone chip rivals and charged excessive royalties to manufacturers such as Apple. The 3-judge panel unanimously sided with the San Diego chipmaker in tossing out a district court’s earlier ruling on a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. It’s a victory for Qualcomm, since the earlier ruling could have undercut its business by threatening its ability to extract big royalties from phone makers. “Anticompetitive behavior is illegal under federal antitrust law. Hypercompetitive behavior is not,” said the opinion from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which described the earlier ruling as going beyond the scope of antitrust law. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California, ruled in May…

The coronavirus hasn’t stopped the world’s smallest theater. “Theatre for One,” where one audience member sees one short play performed by a single actor in a portable theater, has now gone online. “The experience is unique to Theatre for One. And in that sense, I think it’s still a venue and a space. It’s a space designed specifically for this interaction, now designed online,” said two-time Tony-winning scenic designer Christine Jones, who conceived and leads the project. In response to both the COVID-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement, the company will feature microplays all written and directed by Black, indigenous and women of color. A selection of the tiny plays will be performed every Thursday for a six-week run starting later this month, with each actor delivering up…

Beginning this week, U.S. Facebook users who post about voting may start seeing an addendum to their messages -- labels directing readers to authoritative information about the upcoming presidential election. It’s the social network’s latest step to to combat election-related misinformation on its platform as the Nov. 3 election nears — one in which many voters may be submitting ballots by mail for the first time. Facebook began adding similar links to posts about in-person and mail-in balloting by federal politicians, including President Donald Trump, in July. These labels will link to a new voter information hub similar to one about COVID-19 that Facebook says has been seen by billions of users around the world. The labels will read, “Visit the Voting Information Center for election resources and official updates.”…

For the first time, Airbnb is taking legal action against a guest for violating its ban on unauthorized parties. The San Francisco-based home sharing company said Wednesday it is initiating legal proceedings against a guest who held an unauthorized party at a home in Sacramento County, California, last weekend. Three people were shot and wounded at the party. Airbnb wouldn’t release the guest’s name but said it has removed the guest from its platform. The company has been trying to clean up its image — promising to verify all of its listings, for example, and taking a harder line on parties — as it prepares for an initial public offering of its stock. The IPO, which was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, could still take place later this year. Airbnb…

The Albuquerque Journal and the Santa Fe New Mexican newspapers are partnering to print both publications at the The New Mexican’s production facility in Santa Fe in a cost-cutting move. The state’s two largest newspapers made the announcement Tuesday, saying discussions about consolidation have been ongoing for years as more media corporations combine printing operations to reduce costs. Officials with the family-owned newspapers said in a statement that the change will not affect the size or content of either newspaper and that subscribers and advertisers should not be impacted. The two newsrooms will remain separate and maintain independent operations, but the change will result in as many as 70 layoffs at the Journal‘s printing facility in Albuquerque. William P. Lang, president of the Journal, said the financial savings from the…

Five months on from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and policymakers and public health officials have decided it’s time to return to the classroom. Around the world, schools and colleges are preparing for a new semester, and though environments may be different, one thing is clear: teachers and students will be depending on technology more than ever. LEARNING IN TIMES OF THE CORONAVIRUS Over the past few months, teaching bodies and school administrators have been fiercely debating the safety of reopening schools in the United States. And it’s a similar picture in other countries. In April, an eye-watering 1.5 billion students around the world were sent home from school for an early summer break, and whilst some have been trialing new ways of learning, others have pulled the plug…

Chinese tech giant Huawei is running out of processor chips to make smartphones due to U.S. sanctions and will be forced to stop production of its own most advanced chips, a company executive says, in a sign of growing damage to Huawei’s business from American pressure. Huawei Technologies Ltd., one of the biggest producers of smartphones and network equipment, is at the center of U.S.-Chinese tension over technology and security. The feud has spread to include the popular Chinese-owned video app TikTok and China-based messaging service WeChat. Washington cut off Huawei’s access to U.S. components and technology including Google’s music and other smartphone services last year. Those penalties were tightened in May when the White House barred vendors worldwide from using U.S. technology to produce components for Huawei. Production of…

Watching Mark Rylance play a man of basic decency getting swallowed up by an evil world — and a sadistic Johnny Depp — in “Waiting for the Barbarians,” I absent-mindedly jotted down in my notes: “Nobody does basic decency like Mark Rylance.” Then I remembered: Nobody quite does INdecency like Rylance, either. Watch him play a villain, a creep, or maybe a scheming Shakespearean king, and you’ll be chilled to the bone. Comedy or tragedy, prose or verse, stage or screen: This is simply an actor who couldn’t strike a false note if he tried. And if he seems perfectly cast as the purposely nondescript Magistrate in “Barbarians,” a visually striking but frustratingly slow-moving film based on the award-winning novel by J.M. Coetzee, it’s perhaps because, well, he’s well cast…

Tesla will split its stock for the first time in its history so more investors can afford to buy a stake in the electric car pioneer following a meteoric rise in its market value. The five-for-one stock split announced this week won’t change how much Tesla’s business is worth, but will automatically reduce the price of its shares by 80% when it’s completed on Aug. 31. The sharp drop in price per shares creates a wider universe of potential investors and also often has the psychological effect of making it seem as if a stock is on sale. Those factors often spark rallies after a split is announced. For instance, Apple’s stock price has surged by 14% since the iPhone maker disclosed a four-for-one split less than two weeks ago.…

The U.S. Treasury Department has fined Capital One $80 million for careless network security practices that enabled a hack that accessed the personal information of 106 million of the bank’s credit card holders. The Comptroller of the Currency said in a consent order that Capital One failed in 2105 to establish effective risk management when it migrated information technology operations to a cloud-based service. It said the bank’s own internal audit failed to identify “numerous weaknesses” in its management the cloud environment and “engaged in unsafe or unsound practices that were part of a pattern of misconduct.” The consent order said Capital One has committed to fixing the problem. In an emailed statement, the company said it has in the year since the breach “invested significant additional resources into further…

The use of facial recognition technology by British police has violated human rights and data protection laws, a court said, in a decision praised as a victory against invasive practices by the authorities. In a case trumpeted as the first of its kind, Britain’s Court of Appeal ruled in the case of civil rights campaigner Ed Bridges, who argued that South Wales Police caused him “distress” by scanning his face as he shopped in 2017 and as he attended a peaceful anti-arms protest in 2018. The appeals judges ruled that the way the system was being used during tests was unlawful. The decision does not necessarily mean that facial recognition cannot be used at all, but that authorities should take greater care in how they deploy it. The judges said…

AMC Theatres, the nation’s largest movie theater chain, will reopen in the U.S. on Aug. 20 with retro ticket prices of 15 cents per movie. AMC Entertainment, which owns the chain, said Thursday that it expects to open the doors to more than 100 cinemas — or about a sixth of its nationwide locations — on Aug. 20 with throwback pricing for a day. AMC theaters have reopened in numerous international countries but have remained shuttered in the U.S. since March. The chain touted the reopening as “Movies in 2020 at 1920 Prices.” After several false starts due to a summer rise in coronavirus cases throughout much of the U.S., widespread moviegoing is currently set to resume in late August. Regal Cinemas, the second largest chain, is to reopen some…

Walt Disney World and the union for its actors and singers reached an agreement on Wednesday that will allow them to return to work, more than a month after they said they were locked out of the reopening of the theme park resort for publicly demanding coronavirus tests. Disney agreed to have a state-run drive-thru COVID-19 testing site for workers and the public at the Florida theme park resort. That decision encouraged Actor’s Equity Association to sign a memorandum of understanding allowing the actors, singers and stage managers to return to their jobs. “We have been consistent that testing is an important part of ensuring a safe workplace for Equity performers, and today, I’m pleased to see that Disney World has agreed,” Kate Shindle, president of Actors’ Equity Association, said…

Racked with anxiety, Lauren Shell needed to talk to her cancer doctor. But she lives at least an hour away and it was the middle of her workday. It was also the middle of a pandemic. Enter telemedicine. The 34-year-old Leominster, Massachusetts, resident arranged a quick video visit through the app Zoom in May with her doctor in Boston. He reassured her that he was confident in their treatment plan, and the chances of her breast cancer returning were low. “It was really great to be able to talk to him about what I was feeling,” she said. She felt comforted afterward “knowing that I wasn’t alone.” This is how doctors and health care researchers envision telemedicine evolving after the COVID-19 pandemic fades. They see the practice — which has…

School officials nationwide should improve mental health resources, monitor student social media accounts and improve physical security measures, according to a Justice Department report on school safety released this week. The report, compiled by the department’s School Safety Working Group, examined what the panel believes are the 10 most essential actions that officials can take to prevent mass shootings and other attacks in schools across the U.S. School administrators around the nation are grappling with whether to resume in-person classes and restructuring to increase social distancing and other measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. But they also must balance those changes with security measures and protocols that have been put in place in recent years to prevent violence. Among the report’s key findings is the need for a comprehensive…

New York’s mass transit agency wants Apple to come up with a better way for iPhone users to unlock their phones without taking off their masks, as it seeks to guard against the spread of the coronavirus in buses and subways. In a letter to CEO Tim Cook, Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Patrick Foye said riders have been seen removing their masks to unlock their phones using face-recognition technology, despite a recent update by Apple that simplifies the unlock process for people wearing masks. Previously, an iPhone user wearing a mask would have to wait a few seconds as face recognition software tried to identify them before they eventually could enter a passcode. In response to the pandemic, Apple’s iOS 13.5, released in May, automatically presents the passcode field after…

Brace yourself for what’s expected to be the first U.S. presidential election conducted mostly by mail. It could be messy. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, voting by mail in a contactless and socially distant way seems like a no-brainer. States have made the option widely available -- only 10 now require voters to provide an excuse beyond fear of COVID-19 when requesting a ballot by mail --and some three in four Americans are expected to embrace the option for the Nov. 3 presidential election, up from one in four in the 2018 contest. But running a vote-by-mail election is surprisingly complicated, and there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong. Validating and counting a deluge of posted ballots in an open and accountable way presents a major challenge, one…

Android phones will be used to sense earthquakes around the world and may one day be able to provide global warnings, with the first mass alert system unveiled this week in California, Google announced. Google, which helped develop Android, worked with California and the U.S. Geological Survey to build the quake alerts into all phones that run the commonplace mobile operating system. Android users who have enabled location services and are near a quake of magnitude 4.5 or greater will receive a full-screen earthquake warning telling them to drop to the floor and seek cover. The screen also will provide estimates of the quake’s magnitude and distance from the user. The alert is based on the projected shaking at a particular location and a certain level of intensity. Depending on…

The Pentagon plans to free up a big chunk of its military airwaves in the U.S. for high-speed internet service, part of a broader push to get ahead of China in the deployment of 5G wireless technology. The Trump administration announced that it has identified radio spectrum used for radar defense systems that can be shared with commercial telecommunications providers without compromising national security. 5G is a new technical standard for the “fifth generation” of wireless networks that promises faster speeds; less lag, or “latency,” when connecting to the network; and the ability to connect many devices to the internet without bogging it down. 5G networks will ideally be better able to handle more users, lots of sensors and heavy traffic. But a June report by the Congressional Research Service…

Japanese technology giant SoftBank Group Corp.’s said that its profit rose 12% in April-June from a year earlier as its investments added to its coffers, including sales of its shares in U.S. carrier T-Mobile. Tokyo-based SoftBank reported a fiscal first quarter profit of 1.2 trillion yen ($11.5 billion), up from 1.1 trillion yen in the previous fiscal year. Quarterly sales inched down 2% to 1.45 trillion yen ($13.7 billion). SoftBank, whose group includes the carrier that introduced the iPhone to Japan, said it has been shoring up its cash reserves. Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said the company already has raised in several months nearly all the 4.5 trillion yen ($41 billion) it had promised in March to attain within a year. But he acknowledged worries about a second or third…