Daily Crunch: Google publishes coronavirus mobility reports

Google uses its ad-tracking data to provide a glimpse at how the world is responding to coronavirus, the CDC changes its tune on face masks and Apple accidentally reveals that AirTags are coming. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 3, 2020.

1. Google is now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, feeding off users’ location history

Google is giving the world a clearer look of exactly how much it knows about people everywhere — using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to repackage its persistent tracking of where users go and what they do as a public good in the midst of a pandemic.

In a blog post, the tech giant announced the publication of what it’s calling COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, an in-house analysis of the much more granular location data it maps and tracks to fuel its ad-targeting, product development and wider commercial strategy, now used to showcase aggregated changes in population movements around the world.

2. CDC is expected to tell Americans to wear cloth masks, save medical masks for health workers

On Thursday, the White House said that it will likely adjust previous guidelines that discouraged non-health workers from wearing face masks. The change would be issued as “guidance” from the CDC, but according to President Trump, it will not be mandatory.

3. Apple accidentally confirms the existence of an unreleased product, AirTags

In a video tutorial about resetting an iPhone to factory settings, at around the 1:43 mark, you can see an option for “Enable Offline Finding” is shown, and beneath that, the text references AirTags by name. AirTags are believed to be small tracking tiles with Bluetooth connectivity that can be used to find lost items — just like Tile.

4. In the wake of COVID-19, UK puts up £20M in grants to develop resilience tech for critical industries

The idea is to introduce new technologies and processes that will support existing businesses and organizations, not to use the funding to build new startups from scratch.

5. The pendulum will swing away from founder friendly venture raises

TechCrunch recently spoke with a half-dozen venture capitalists, asking after how their world has changed and how they are approaching dealmaking in the new reality. One common note was that startup valuations are declining. And past valuation adjustments, there’s going to be more change. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. SpaceX’s latest Starship prototype fails under pressure testing

That headline might sound familiar: SpaceX’s first prototype, the Mk1, was also destroyed during pressure testing of its fuel tank, and the next full-scale prototype under development, SN1, was also destroyed during a pressure test in late February.

7. 27 TV show recommendations from TechCrunch while you’re stuck at home

I didn’t manage to get my recommendations to Matt Burns in time (sorry Matt!), but I will say that Star Trek — whether it’s the original series or the latest spinoff, “Picard” — is the best comfort viewing, now more than ever.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Aarogya Setu - How India's COVID-19 Proximity Alerts Work?

The Government of India has developed a mobile tracker app - Aarogya Setu - as part of their efforts to contain the spread of Corona virus in this country of 1.3 billion people. The app is available for both iPhone and Android phones.

The Aarogya Setu app has already gone viral in India with more than a million downloads in a single day.

The app has three parts:

1. It contains a chat bot that guides you through a self-assessment test if you exhibit any COVID-19 symptoms.
2. The app provides quick access to emergency phone numbers of health centers that are dealing with COVID-19 patients.
3. The app will automatically alert you if you ever come near (or have crossed paths earlier) to a person who has tested COVID-19 positive.

Proximity Alerts for COVID-19 - How the app works?

The proximity alert feature in Aarogya Setu is the reason why people are so interested in this app but how does this work?

This morning, a person who returned from Dubai about two weeks ago, tested positive for Coronavirus and the authorities have taken him to the hospital. Their residence is less than a mile from our home and I was expecting some sort of alert in the tracker app but none so far.

So I dug a bit deeper into how the app works and here’s what I found:

When a user installs the app, it uses Bluetooth to detect any nearby phones that could also be running the Aaryogya Setu app. While the actual algorithm is a secret, the app likely keeps a record of all devices that have ever been near to you. If the owner of any of these nearby phones is later found to be infected, the app will alert you.

Thus more and more people have to install the app, with Bluetooth and location turned on, for the proximity alerts to really work.

I am not aware of the internal working of the app but I think it would have been even more effective if it made use of GPS data as well. Let me explain.

When the app is continuously scanning the location of its users, it has a fairly accurate overview of who has been where in recent days. If a COVID-19 positive case is detected, his path can be traced and others users who have crossed through those geographic regions can be alerted though the app.

It's OK to feel overwhelmed. Here's what to do next | Elizabeth Gilbert

It's OK to feel overwhelmed. Here's what to do next | Elizabeth Gilbert

If you're feeling anxious or fearful during the coronavirus pandemic, you're not alone. Offering hope and understanding, author Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on how to stay present, accept grief when it comes and trust in the strength of the human spirit. "Resilience is our shared genetic inheritance," she says. (This virtual conversation is part of the TED Connects series, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and head of curation Helen Walters. Recorded April 2, 2020)

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

OctoML raises $15M to make optimizing ML models easier

OctoML, a startup founded by the team behind the Apache TVM machine learning compiler stack project, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A round led by Amplify, with participation from Madrone Ventures, which led its $3.9 million seed round. The core idea behind OctoML and TVM is to use machine learning to optimize machine learning models so they can more efficiently run on different types of hardware.

“There’s been quite a bit of progress in creating machine learning models,” OctoML CEO and University of Washington professor Luis Ceze told me.” But a lot of the pain has moved to once you have a model, how do you actually make good use of it in the edge and in the clouds?”

That’s where the TVM project comes in, which was launched by Ceze and his collaborators at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. It’s now an Apache incubating project and because it’s seen quite a bit of usage and support from major companies like AWS, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, Xilinx and others, the team decided to form a commercial venture around it, which became OctoML. Today, even Amazon Alexa’s wake word detection is powered by TVM.

Ceze described TVM as a modern operating system for machine learning models. “A machine learning model is not code, it doesn’t have instructions, it has numbers that describe its statistical modeling,” he said. “There’s quite a few challenges in making it run efficiently on a given hardware platform because there’s literally billions and billions of ways in which you can map a model to specific hardware targets. Picking the right one that performs well is a significant task that typically requires human intuition.”

And that’s where OctoML and its “Octomizer” SaaS product, which it also announced, today come in. Users can upload their model to the service and it will automatically optimize, benchmark and package it for the hardware you specify and in the format you want. For more advanced users, there’s also the option to add the service’s API to their CI/CD pipelines. These optimized models run significantly faster because they can now fully leverage the hardware they run on, but what many businesses will maybe care about even more is that these more efficient models also cost them less to run in the cloud, or that they are able to use cheaper hardware with less performance to get the same results. For some use cases, TVM already results in 80x performance gains.

Currently, the OctoML team consists of about 20 engineers. With this new funding, the company plans to expand its team. Those hires will mostly be engineers, but Ceze also stressed that he wants to hire an evangelist, which makes sense, given the company’s open-source heritage. He also noted that while the Octomizer is a good start, the real goal here is to build a more fully featured MLOps platform. “OctoML’s mission is to build the world’s best platform that automates MLOps,” he said.

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Google is now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, feeding off users’ location history

Google is giving the world a clearer glimpse of exactly how much it knows about people everywhere — using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to repackage its persistent tracking of where users go and what they do as a public good in the midst of a pandemic.

In a blog post today the tech giant announced the publication of what it’s branding ‘COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports‘. Aka an in-house analysis of the much more granular location data it maps and tracks to fuel its ad-targeting, product development and wider commercial strategy to showcase aggregated changes in population movements around the world.

The coronavirus pandemic has generated a worldwide scramble for tools and data to inform government responses. In the EU, for example, the European Commission has been leaning on telcos to hand over anonymized and aggregated location data to model the spread of COVID-19.

Google’s data dump looks intended to dangle a similar idea of public policy utility while providing an eyeball-grabbing public snapshot of mobility shifts via data pulled off of its global user-base.

In terms of actual utility for policymakers, Google’s suggestions are pretty vague. The reports could help government and public health officials “understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings”, it writes.

“Similarly, persistent visits to transportation hubs might indicate the need to add additional buses or trains in order to allow people who need to travel room to spread out for social distancing,” it goes on. “Ultimately, understanding not only whether people are traveling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of communities.”

The location data Google is making public is similarly fuzzy — to avoid inviting a privacy storm — with the company writing it’s using “the same world-class anonymization technology that we use in our products every day”, as it puts it.

“For these reports, we use differential privacy, which adds artificial noise to our datasets enabling high quality results without identifying any individual person,” Google writes. “The insights are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default.”

“In Google Maps, we use aggregated, anonymized data showing how busy certain types of places are—helping identify when a local business tends to be the most crowded. We have heard from public health officials that this same type of aggregated, anonymized data could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19,” it adds, tacitly linking an existing offering in Google Maps to a coronavirus-busting cause.

The reports consist of per country, or per state, downloads (with 131 countries covered initially), further broken down into regions/counties — with Google offering an analysis of how community mobility has changed vs a baseline average before COVID-19 arrived to change everything.

So, for example, a March 29 report for the whole of the US shows a 47 per cent drop in retail and recreation activity vs the pre-CV period; a 22% drop in grocery & pharmacy; and a 19% drop in visits to parks and beaches, per Google’s data.

While the same date report for California shows a considerably greater drop in the latter (down 38% compared to the regional baseline); and slightly bigger decreases in both retail and recreation activity (down 50%) and grocery & pharmacy (-24%).

Google says it’s using “aggregated, anonymized data to chart movement trends over time by geography, across different high-level categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential”. The trends are displayed over several weeks, with the most recent information representing 48-to-72 hours prior, it adds.

The company says it’s not publishing the “absolute number of visits” as a privacy step, adding: “To protect people’s privacy, no personally identifiable information, like an individual’s location, contacts or movement, is made available at any point.”

Google’s location mobility report for Italy, which remains the European country hardest hit by the virus, illustrates the extent of the change from lockdown measures applied to the population — with retail & recreation dropping 94% vs Google’s baseline; grocery & pharmacy down 85%; and a 90% drop in trips to parks and beaches.

The same report shows an 87% drop in activity at transit stations; a 63% drop in activity at workplaces; and an increase of almost a quarter (24%) of activity in residential locations — as many Italians stay at home, instead of commuting to work.

It’s a similar story in Spain — another country hard-hit by COVID-19. Though Google’s data for France suggests instructions to stay-at-home may not be being quite as keenly observed by its users there, with only an 18% increase in activity at residential locations and a 56% drop in activity at workplaces. (Perhaps because the pandemic has so far had a less severe impact on France, although numbers of confirmed cases and deaths continue to rise across the region.)

While policymakers have been scrambling for data and tools to inform their responses to COVID-19, privacy experts and civil liberties campaigners have rushed to voice concerns about the impacts of such data-fuelled efforts on individual rights, while also querying the wider utility of some of this tracking.

And yes, the disclaimer is very broad. I'd say, this is largely a PR move.

Apart from this, Google must be held accountable for its many other secondary data uses. And Google/Alphabet is far too powerful, which must be addressed at several levels, soon. https://t.co/oksJgQAPAY

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) April 3, 2020

Contacts tracing is another area where apps are fast being touted as a potential solution to get the West out of economically crushing population lockdowns — opening up the possibility of people’s mobile devices becoming a tool to enforce lockdowns, as has happened in China.

“Large-scale collection of personal data can quickly lead to mass surveillance,” is the succinct warning of a trio of academics from London’s Imperial College’s Computational Privacy Group, who have compiled their privacy concerns vis-a-vis COVID-19 contacts tracing apps into a set of eight questions app developers should be asking.

Discussing Google’s release of mobile location data for a COVID-19 cause, the head of the group, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, gave a general thumbs up to the steps it’s taken to shrink privacy risks. Although he also called for Google to provide more detail about the technical processes it’s using in order that external researchers can better assess the robustness of the claimed privacy protections. Such scrutiny is of pressing importance with so much coronavirus-related data grabbing going on right now, he argues.

“It is all aggregated; they normalize to a specific set of dates; they threshold when there are too few people and on top of this they add noise to make — according to them — the data differentially private. So from a pure anonymization perspective it’s good work,” de Montjoye told TechCrunch, discussing the technical side of Google’s release of location data. “Those are three of the big ‘levers’ that you can use to limit risk. And I think it’s well done.”

“But — especially in times like this when there’s a lot of people using data — I think what we would have liked is more details. There’s a lot of assumptions on thresholding, on how do you apply differential privacy, right?… What kind of assumptions are you making?” he added, querying how much noise Google is adding to the data, for example. “It would be good to have a bit more detail on how they applied [differential privacy]… Especially in times like this it is good to be… overly transparent.”

While Google’s mobility data release might appear to overlap in purpose with the Commission’s call for EU telco metadata for COVID-19 tracking, de Montjoye points out there are likely to be key differences based on the different data sources.

“It’s always a trade off between the two,” he says. “It’s basically telco data would probably be less fine-grained, because GPS is much more precise spatially and you might have more data points per person per day with GPS than what you get with mobile phone but on the other hand the carrier/telco data is much more representative — it’s not only smartphone, and it’s not only people who have latitude on, it’s everyone in the country, including non smartphone.”

There may be country specific questions that could be better addressed by working with a local carrier, he also suggested. (The Commission has said it’s intending to have one carrier per EU Member State providing anonymized and aggregated metadata.)

On the topical question of whether location data can ever be truly anonymized, de Montjoye — an expert in data reidentification — gave a “yes and no” response, arguing that original location data is “probably really, really hard to anonymize”.

“Can you process this data and make the aggregate results anonymous? Probably, probably, probably yes — it always depends. But then it also means that the original data exists… Then it’s mostly a question of the controls you have in place to ensure the process that leads to generating those aggregates does not contain privacy risks,” he added.

Perhaps a bigger question related to Google’s location data dump is around the issue of legal consent to be tracking people in the first place.

While the tech giant claims the data is based on opt-ins to location tracking the company was fined $57M by France’s data watchdog last year for a lack of transparency over how it uses people’s data.

Then, earlier this year, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) — now the lead privacy regulator for Google in Europe — confirmed a formal probe of the company’s location tracking activity, following a 2018 complaint by EU consumers groups which accuses Google of using manipulative tactics in order to keep tracking web users’ locations for ad-targeting purposes.

“The issues raised within the concerns relate to the legality of Google’s processing of location data and the transparency surrounding that processing,” said the DPC in a statement in February, announcing the investigation.

The legal questions hanging over Google’s consent to track people likely explains the repeat references in its blog post to people choosing to opt in and having the ability to clear their Location History via settings. (“Users who have Location History turned on can choose to turn the setting off at any time from their Google Account, and can always delete Location History data directly from their Timeline,” it writes in one example.)

In addition to offering up coronavirus mobility porn reports — which Google specifies it will continue to do throughout the crisis — the company says it’s collaborating with “select epidemiologists working on COVID-19 with updates to an existing aggregate, anonymized dataset that can be used to better understand and forecast the pandemic”.

“Data of this type has helped researchers look into predicting epidemics, plan urban and transit infrastructure, and understand people’s mobility and responses to conflict and natural disasters,” it adds.

Read Full Article

Google is now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, feeding off users’ location history

Google is giving the world a clearer glimpse of exactly how much it knows about people everywhere — using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to repackage its persistent tracking of where users go and what they do as a public good in the midst of a pandemic.

In a blog post today the tech giant announced the publication of what it’s branding ‘COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports‘. Aka an in-house analysis of the much more granular location data it maps and tracks to fuel its ad-targeting, product development and wider commercial strategy to showcase aggregated changes in population movements around the world.

The coronavirus pandemic has generated a worldwide scramble for tools and data to inform government responses. In the EU, for example, the European Commission has been leaning on telcos to hand over anonymized and aggregated location data to model the spread of COVID-19.

Google’s data dump looks intended to dangle a similar idea of public policy utility while providing an eyeball-grabbing public snapshot of mobility shifts via data pulled off of its global user-base.

In terms of actual utility for policymakers, Google’s suggestions are pretty vague. The reports could help government and public health officials “understand changes in essential trips that can shape recommendations on business hours or inform delivery service offerings”, it writes.

“Similarly, persistent visits to transportation hubs might indicate the need to add additional buses or trains in order to allow people who need to travel room to spread out for social distancing,” it goes on. “Ultimately, understanding not only whether people are traveling, but also trends in destinations, can help officials design guidance to protect public health and essential needs of communities.”

The location data Google is making public is similarly fuzzy — to avoid inviting a privacy storm — with the company writing it’s using “the same world-class anonymization technology that we use in our products every day”, as it puts it.

“For these reports, we use differential privacy, which adds artificial noise to our datasets enabling high quality results without identifying any individual person,” Google writes. “The insights are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default.”

“In Google Maps, we use aggregated, anonymized data showing how busy certain types of places are—helping identify when a local business tends to be the most crowded. We have heard from public health officials that this same type of aggregated, anonymized data could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19,” it adds, tacitly linking an existing offering in Google Maps to a coronavirus-busting cause.

The reports consist of per country, or per state, downloads (with 131 countries covered initially), further broken down into regions/counties — with Google offering an analysis of how community mobility has changed vs a baseline average before COVID-19 arrived to change everything.

So, for example, a March 29 report for the whole of the US shows a 47 per cent drop in retail and recreation activity vs the pre-CV period; a 22% drop in grocery & pharmacy; and a 19% drop in visits to parks and beaches, per Google’s data.

While the same date report for California shows a considerably greater drop in the latter (down 38% compared to the regional baseline); and slightly bigger decreases in both retail and recreation activity (down 50%) and grocery & pharmacy (-24%).

Google says it’s using “aggregated, anonymized data to chart movement trends over time by geography, across different high-level categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential”. The trends are displayed over several weeks, with the most recent information representing 48-to-72 hours prior, it adds.

The company says it’s not publishing the “absolute number of visits” as a privacy step, adding: “To protect people’s privacy, no personally identifiable information, like an individual’s location, contacts or movement, is made available at any point.”

Google’s location mobility report for Italy, which remains the European country hardest hit by the virus, illustrates the extent of the change from lockdown measures applied to the population — with retail & recreation dropping 94% vs Google’s baseline; grocery & pharmacy down 85%; and a 90% drop in trips to parks and beaches.

The same report shows an 87% drop in activity at transit stations; a 63% drop in activity at workplaces; and an increase of almost a quarter (24%) of activity in residential locations — as many Italians stay at home, instead of commuting to work.

It’s a similar story in Spain — another country hard-hit by COVID-19. Though Google’s data for France suggests instructions to stay-at-home may not be being quite as keenly observed by its users there, with only an 18% increase in activity at residential locations and a 56% drop in activity at workplaces. (Perhaps because the pandemic has so far had a less severe impact on France, although numbers of confirmed cases and deaths continue to rise across the region.)

While policymakers have been scrambling for data and tools to inform their responses to COVID-19, privacy experts and civil liberties campaigners have rushed to voice concerns about the impacts of such data-fuelled efforts on individual rights, while also querying the wider utility of some of this tracking.

And yes, the disclaimer is very broad. I'd say, this is largely a PR move.

Apart from this, Google must be held accountable for its many other secondary data uses. And Google/Alphabet is far too powerful, which must be addressed at several levels, soon. https://t.co/oksJgQAPAY

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) April 3, 2020

Contacts tracing is another area where apps are fast being touted as a potential solution to get the West out of economically crushing population lockdowns — opening up the possibility of people’s mobile devices becoming a tool to enforce lockdowns, as has happened in China.

“Large-scale collection of personal data can quickly lead to mass surveillance,” is the succinct warning of a trio of academics from London’s Imperial College’s Computational Privacy Group, who have compiled their privacy concerns vis-a-vis COVID-19 contacts tracing apps into a set of eight questions app developers should be asking.

Discussing Google’s release of mobile location data for a COVID-19 cause, the head of the group, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, gave a general thumbs up to the steps it’s taken to shrink privacy risks. Although he also called for Google to provide more detail about the technical processes it’s using in order that external researchers can better assess the robustness of the claimed privacy protections. Such scrutiny is of pressing importance with so much coronavirus-related data grabbing going on right now, he argues.

“It is all aggregated; they normalize to a specific set of dates; they threshold when there are too few people and on top of this they add noise to make — according to them — the data differentially private. So from a pure anonymization perspective it’s good work,” de Montjoye told TechCrunch, discussing the technical side of Google’s release of location data. “Those are three of the big ‘levers’ that you can use to limit risk. And I think it’s well done.”

“But — especially in times like this when there’s a lot of people using data — I think what we would have liked is more details. There’s a lot of assumptions on thresholding, on how do you apply differential privacy, right?… What kind of assumptions are you making?” he added, querying how much noise Google is adding to the data, for example. “It would be good to have a bit more detail on how they applied [differential privacy]… Especially in times like this it is good to be… overly transparent.”

While Google’s mobility data release might appear to overlap in purpose with the Commission’s call for EU telco metadata for COVID-19 tracking, de Montjoye points out there are likely to be key differences based on the different data sources.

“It’s always a trade off between the two,” he says. “It’s basically telco data would probably be less fine-grained, because GPS is much more precise spatially and you might have more data points per person per day with GPS than what you get with mobile phone but on the other hand the carrier/telco data is much more representative — it’s not only smartphone, and it’s not only people who have latitude on, it’s everyone in the country, including non smartphone.”

There may be country specific questions that could be better addressed by working with a local carrier, he also suggested. (The Commission has said it’s intending to have one carrier per EU Member State providing anonymized and aggregated metadata.)

On the topical question of whether location data can ever be truly anonymized, de Montjoye — an expert in data reidentification — gave a “yes and no” response, arguing that original location data is “probably really, really hard to anonymize”.

“Can you process this data and make the aggregate results anonymous? Probably, probably, probably yes — it always depends. But then it also means that the original data exists… Then it’s mostly a question of the controls you have in place to ensure the process that leads to generating those aggregates does not contain privacy risks,” he added.

Perhaps a bigger question related to Google’s location data dump is around the issue of legal consent to be tracking people in the first place.

While the tech giant claims the data is based on opt-ins to location tracking the company was fined $57M by France’s data watchdog last year for a lack of transparency over how it uses people’s data.

Then, earlier this year, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) — now the lead privacy regulator for Google in Europe — confirmed a formal probe of the company’s location tracking activity, following a 2018 complaint by EU consumers groups which accuses Google of using manipulative tactics in order to keep tracking web users’ locations for ad-targeting purposes.

“The issues raised within the concerns relate to the legality of Google’s processing of location data and the transparency surrounding that processing,” said the DPC in a statement in February, announcing the investigation.

The legal questions hanging over Google’s consent to track people likely explains the repeat references in its blog post to people choosing to opt in and having the ability to clear their Location History via settings. (“Users who have Location History turned on can choose to turn the setting off at any time from their Google Account, and can always delete Location History data directly from their Timeline,” it writes in one example.)

In addition to offering up coronavirus mobility porn reports — which Google specifies it will continue to do throughout the crisis — the company says it’s collaborating with “select epidemiologists working on COVID-19 with updates to an existing aggregate, anonymized dataset that can be used to better understand and forecast the pandemic”.

“Data of this type has helped researchers look into predicting epidemics, plan urban and transit infrastructure, and understand people’s mobility and responses to conflict and natural disasters,” it adds.

Read Full Article

Coronavirus COVID-19: 15 Sites You Can Trust for Reliable Information

In times of crisis, misinformation and disinformation take advantage of panic—something we’re seeing with the sheer amount of fake news around the coronavirus pandemic. But with a medical crisis like this, false information can prove deadly.

Considering that there’s so much unreliable information on the virus and its resulting disease, how do you know what to trust? We’ve rounded up the best online tools for reliable and trustworthy information on the coronavirus pandemic and COVID-19.

1. Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Map and Dashboard

The coronavirus map from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University is one of the first, most reliable, and up-to-date sources for information on the spread of the coronavirus.

The map tracks the number of cases, deaths, and recoveries for regions and countries around the world. It also has a total global roundup of confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries—updated frequently with the newest numbers.

2. World Health Organization Coronavirus Website

While the World Health Organization (WHO) doesn’t always have the latest numbers on the coronavirus spread, it has reliable information regarding preventive measures, new research, travel advice, and frequently asked questions.

The website acts as a hub for global developments in the pandemic, as well as updates on the latest developments and statements from the organization.

3. CDC Coronavirus Portal

The COVID-19 website from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the most relevant for Americans—providing information on what to do if you are sick and links to the latest statements from the White House.

The website also provides information on the spread of the coronavirus across US states. However, even non-Americans can find useful information on the website, such as symptoms and information about at-risk groups.

4. WHO Coronavirus Myth Busters Microsite

While the general WHO website is useful for coronavirus information, the organization also runs a “myth busters” microsite. The site dispels myths and fake news unfolding during this crisis.

The website rounds up common misconceptions around how and when the virus spreads, preventative measures, and other areas of popular misinformation. It even has a specific section dedicated to when and how to use masks.

5. Google Fact Check Tools for COVID-19

Fake news around coronavirus and COVID-19 is rife. Not only is there disinformation regarding treatments and the spread of the virus, but also fake news stories around events, government actions, and community responses.

Google’s Fact Check Tools website has been around for some time, but you can use it for coronavirus fact checks specifically. The tool rounds up fake news from different sources, including social media, and provides a fact-checking analysis from reputable organizations.

6. UN Coronavirus Website

The coronavirus website for the United Nations is another international source for information on the pandemic. Rather than only focusing on the health-related aspects of the pandemic, the website also documents its effect on vulnerable groups and nations.

The site includes tips for life under lockdown, as well as information about the UN’s global efforts to help those living in poverty or hard-hit nations.

7. NHS Coronavirus Information Hub

For those living in the UK, the website for the National Health Service (NHS) provides not only provides information on how to stop the spread of the virus but also outlines lockdown rules.

The NHS site also provides relevant contact numbers for those experiencing symptoms of the virus, as well as advice for those needing non-COVID-related medical advice.

8. European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

For those living in the European Union, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) provides updates from the region’s health agency. The website rounds up the latest developments regarding the coronavirus pandemic, with both global and regional data.

Like other health agency websites, the ECDC site provides FAQ answers, infographics, and facts around the virus and the disease it causes.

9. National Institutes of Health (NIH) COVID-19 Website

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is based in the US, but provides globally relevant information. What sets the site apart from those listed above is that it also provides resources for those working at schools, within the community, or in healthcare.

Meanwhile, other useful resources include CDC posters and videos explaining the virus.

10. WHO Health Alert on WhatsApp

To help reach more people, especially those who don’t have a consistent connection to the internet, the World Health Organization launched the WHO Health Alert service on WhatsApp.

The service lets you text the WHO account for updates on global case numbers, advice for protecting yourself, tips for coping with lockdown, and more. It even provides a roundup of the top myths included on the WHO Myth Busters portal.

You can add the service as a contact on WhatsApp and text “hi” to get started.

11. IFCN COVID-19 Fact-Checking Page

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) has created the #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance to debunk myths and fake news about the pandemic. The service is useful for users across the world, using fact checkers based in 45 countries around the world.

Another benefit of the site is its language variety. Articles are available in 15 languages, making it far more accessible to people outside of Western countries where English isn’t widely spoken.

12. First Draft Coronavirus Resources

While the First Draft coronavirus hub is primarily for reporters, it is a useful tool for anyone who wants to learn how to fact-check and find reliable information on COVID-19. The website includes links to verification tools, a misinformation database, a reading list, and links to reliable sources.

The website also publishes useful articles and guides, such as how to double-check coronavirus information.

13. US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Coronavirus Site

The FDA coronavirus website covers a lot of the same information as other health websites, but also research and studies regarding potential treatments. At the time of writing, no medications or treatments have been approved for COVID-19.

However, if treatments are found and approved, this is one of the first places you’ll see reliable information regarding this.

14. National Government Official Hubs

Most countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic will have their own local website providing information on the pandemic.

For regions we have not covered already in this list, there are a number of national websites people can use to get official information.

These include:

• Canada: Public Health Agency of Canada
• India: Government of India COVID-19 Website
• South Africa: COVID-19 South African Resource Portal
• China: National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China
• Japan: Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
• South Korea: South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare
• Australia: Australian Government Website
• Mexico: Government of Mexico Coronavirus Site

15. WhatsApp Fact-Checking Organizations

In an effort to combat fake news, WhatsApp has listed various fact-checking organization accounts on its service. These services allow you forward information received on WhatsApp (or other stories and links) to the relevant local organization.

Depending on the level of automation, the organizations will respond with their fact-checking report. For example, Africa Check’s bot will respond with any available fact checks or forward your tip onto the organization.

How to Avoid Coronavirus Fake News and Misinformation

Besides relying on trustworthy sources of information, there are a few other things you can do to avoid fake news and misinformation around the coronavirus pandemic.

A few tips include:

• Verify the source and context of videos and photos that claim to show lockdown or pandemic circumstances. Decontexualized media is often shared to spread misinformation. For example, images of hospital beds outdoors after an earthquake in Croatia were shared by accounts claiming that they were current images from Italy’s coronavirus pandemic.
• Only read news stories from trusted and verified news organizations that issue retractions or corrections when information is incorrect.
• Avoid opinions and claims by non-experts. These include columns, but also panel discussions, social media posts, and more. The best sources of information are experts qualified in the topic they are discussing.
• Avoid trusting information on treatments and health from businesses trying to sell a product. Scammers selling fake cures or preventions are using the pandemic to make money.

Something important to note regarding coronavirus #Coronavirus #CoronaVirusSA pic.twitter.com/zyM300N2bN

— Megan Ellis, Tech Harpy ????? (@Megg_Ellis) March 28, 2020

Finally, it’s important to understand that the visualizations of data and information can be edited or decontextualized. Find the original graph or media from its source. A logo doesn’t make something official—rather check the original source (e.g. a verified health department social media account).

Don’t use screenshots or decontextualized media as the basis for your coronavirus knowledge.

How Google Helps You Find Coronavirus Information

If you’re finding tracking the coronavirus pandemic overwhelming, Google has provided a simpler way to follow news around the topic. The company launched a Google COVID-19 microsite to help you keep track of coronavirus news. Find out more about the tool, and where it gets its information, in our story on the announcement.

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Tech Courses Gone Free! Make the most of your time at home

We are living in extraordinary times, locked down and trying to work from home. This could also be a good time to level up your tech skills and learn something new that could help in the future when things get normal again.

Also see:

• The Best Websites to Learn to Coding Online
• The Best Online Teachers for Learning Web Development

Learn Tech While You #StayAtHome

To help you make the most of your time, I have curated a list of premium video courses that have gone completely free temporarily during the Coronavirus crisis.

1. Pluralsight is among the world’s best online training platforms producing video screencasts around software development, machine learning and new technologies that are in demand. They have made their entire library free for the month of April and you don’t even need a credit card to register an account. Learn more.

Recommended: Python for Data Analysts

2. I am a fan of Udemy and some of the programming skills I have learned in through recent years are through Udemy. The courses are inexpensive and the teachers that have high-rating are actually very good. Udemy just made over 180 top courses for beginners free and these aren’t just limited to tech. Learn more.

Recommended: Amazon Web Services - Zero to Hero

3. Coursera helps you build tech skills with courses developed in collaboration universities and tech companies like Google and Amazon. They have made a selection of online courses free for the next few months and you can even get a certificate after course completion. Learn more.

Recommended: Machine Learning for Business Professionals

4. Udacity offers paid nanodegree programs in collaboration with Google for web and app developers. The programs are oriented towards beginners as well as advanced users. They have made all premium nanodegree programs free for one month. Learn more.

Recommended: Become an Android Developer

5. Google-owned Qwiklabs platform offers self-paced exercises for learning everything about Google Cloud, GSuite and Amazon Web Services. Unlike other video courses where you only watch screencasts , Qwiklabs offers you practical hands-on training so you can actually log into the console and follow along. Free for one month. Learn more

More Learning Resources for Stay@Home Workers

Here’s a list of other companies that are offering freebies and discounts amid the Coronavirus crisis:

• This Google Sheet curates a list of companies that are offering free or discounted products during the COVID-19 crisis.
• MOZ Academy offers free SEO training using the code wegotthis - valid until May 31.
• Nikon School is now streaming all their online photography courses for free for the entire month of April.
• Zoho offers a suite of productivity tools for remote workers and they are completely free for the next few months.
• LinkedIn Learning is offering a fullvideo course on remote working and it covers topics like time management to managing virtual teams.
• This Reddit offers a list of things you can do while you are at home.
• Audible is offering audiobooks that you can listen in the browser without having to sign-in with your Amazon account.
• Automate the Boring Stuff, the best selling video course on learning Python is free until April 7.
• YouTube has launched a micro portal - Learn@Home - that curates the best YouTube channels for learning science and maths.

Also see: The 101 Most Useful Websites

Never stop learning!

Collector's Edition

Collector's Edition

Google Can Now Turn Your Photos Into Works of Art

You can now turn your photos into works of art, and all you need is the Google Arts and Culture app. This is because Google has added a new feature called Art Transfer to the app. And this lets you apply various art styles to a photo of your choosing.

How to Turn Your Photos Into Works of Art

Google details Art Transfer in a post on The Keyword. The company explains that this lets you “apply the characteristics of well-known paintings to your own images.” Artists featured include Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Edvard Munch, and Leonardo da Vinci.

To use the Art Transfer feature:

1. Open the Google Arts and Culture app.
2. Tap the Camera icon in the bottom-center.
3. Click Art Transfer.
4. Either take a photo or choose one from your camera roll.
5. Choose an art style to apply to your photo.

Google will apply the art style to your photo. You can then choose to view it as a still or as a GIF. Or, by clicking the Scissors icon in the top-right, you can select a portion of your photo to be transformed. When you’re done, you can save or share the results.

It’s fair to say that the Art Transfer feature produces mixed results. I chose one photo of myself and applied various different styles to it. Some worked really well, while others didn’t work at all. So be prepared for a certain amount of trial and error.

Download: Google Arts and Culture on Android | iOS

How to Find Your Lookalikes in Works of Art

Art Transfer is a good timewaster for anyone bored at home. It’s also educational, sharing fun facts about the works of art as the app applies the styles to your photo. Google Arts and Culture also lets you find people from works of art who look like you.

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You Can Now Use Facebook Messenger on Desktop

Facebook has launched a standalone Messenger app for PC and Mac. This means that you can now use Messenger on your desktop computer, as long as it’s running Windows or macOS. These desktop apps have arrived nine years after Messenger debuted.

At its 2019 F8 conference, Facebook announced that a Messenger desktop app was in development. One year on, and with demand for messaging apps on the increase, the social network has now launched a Messenger app for Windows and macOS.

How to Use Facebook Messenger on Desktop

Facebook announced Messenger for desktop on About Facebook. Stan Chudnovsky, VP of Messenger, stated that Facebook is launching a desktop app so that “you can video chat on your computer and stay connected with friends and family all over the world.”

New Messenger Desktop App for Group Video Calls and Chats https://t.co/wk1zFyp7tk pic.twitter.com/bLBwRDZ1a3

— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) April 2, 2020

With the populations of lots of countries locked down to prevent the spread of COVID-19 this is more important than ever. And Chudnovsky said that there has been “a 100% increase in people using their desktop browser for audio and video calling on Messenger.”

The Messenger app for Windows and macOS brings everything across from the browser version. This includes group video calls (for up to eight people), notifications for new messages, support for Dark Mode and GIFs, and chats sync across mobile and desktop.

Download: Facebook Messenger on Windows | macOS

COVID-19 Is Changing the Way We Communicate

While Facebook has clearly been planning to launch a Messenger desktop app for a while now, we suspect the current crisis—and the way it has changed how people are communicating—led Facebook to release it early. And without much of a fanfare.

Messenger isn’t the only option available to those keen to keep in touch with loved ones. And many people are choosing Zoom instead. If you’re new to Zoom, here’s how to use Zoom for online meetings. And here’s a list of Zoom keyboard shortcuts.

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So Your iPhone Was Lost or Stolen? Here’s What to Do

If you lose your iPhone—or if some dastardly thief steals it—the ensuing panic makes it difficult to know what you need to do next. Where should you start your search? Do you need to alert the police? How can you use your IMEI number to block your iPhone?

Don’t worry: we’ll explain everything you need to know about reporting and retrieving your stolen iPhone. We’ll even show you how to lock your lost iPhone so no one else can use it.

Without further ado, here’s what to do when the unthinkable happens.

How to Locate Your Lost iPhone

The first step you need to take when your iPhone goes missing is to look for it. That might include searching the house or tracking it on a map. If you think someone stole your iPhone, it can be useful to find out where it is, but you shouldn’t try to retrieve it yourself.

Here are all the ways to track and locate a missing iPhone.

Try Calling It

Most of the time, a missing iPhone is simply lost around the house. It may be stuffed behind the couch, locked in the car, or buried beneath a pile of laundry. After giving your home or office a thorough search, try calling your iPhone next.

While it’s ringing, retrace your steps, keeping an ear out for your ringtone. If your iPhone is on vibrate, you might hear the telltale sound of it buzzing against the floor somewhere.

Don’t worry if your iPhone is on silent; you can still make it ring using the Find My app.

Use Apple’s Find My Service

Apple’s Find My app makes it easy to track your iPhone on a map, provided it has a cell signal or a Wi-Fi connection. This doesn’t work if Find My iPhone is turned off in your settings, but since the option is on by default when you sign into iCloud, you should be fine.

Open the Find My app on a different Apple device or head over to iCloud.com and log in with your Apple ID, then click the Find iPhone button. To use the Find My app on someone else’s Apple device, go to the Me tab and tap the option to Help a Friend.

After signing in, Find My shows the location of all your connected Apple devices. Select your lost iPhone to get directions to its location. If your iPhone is offline, ask Find My to Notify When Found instead.

If you believe someone stole your iPhone, for your safety you shouldn’t attempt to retrieve it yourself.

Play a Sound From Your Lost iPhone

Find My only gives an approximate location on the map. This means you might still struggle to find your lost iPhone, even if you know it’s somewhere in the house. Luckily, you can use the Play Sound option in the Find My app or on iCloud to make your iPhone play a pinging sound.

This works even if your iPhone is on silent mode with the volume turned all the way down.

Enable Lost Mode to Lock Your iPhone

In Find My or iCloud you can choose to Mark as Lost or turn on Lost Mode for your missing iPhone. When you do this, it locks your iPhone—giving you the option to create a passcode if you didn’t already use one—and lets you write a message on the screen for whoever finds your lost device.

To protect your data, you should mark your iPhone as lost to lock it whether you believe someone stole it or not. Doing so makes it difficult for anyone to resell your iPhone and makes it impossible for them to access sensitive services like Apple Pay.

You may notice another option to erase your lost iPhone. Don’t use this yet.

Use Google Timeline to Track Your Lost iPhone

It’s a well-known fact that Google tracks our every move. While privacy advocates bemoan this invasion of privacy, it might save your bacon if you lose your iPhone. As it turns out, you can track your device using Google Timeline instead of Find My or iCloud.

Sign in to your Google account on the Google Timeline website. You should be able to see all the recent locations where Google spotted your iPhone.

Like the Find My app, this only works if you had already installed Google Maps on your iPhone and enabled location history in the account settings. Google turns this option on by default, so it’s only off if you chose to disable it.

Again, if you believe someone stole your iPhone, don’t try to get it back yourself.

Ask Around the People and Places Near You

It often pays to ask your friends and family on social media to keep an eye out for your missing iPhone. It’s quite possible you left your iPhone at a friend’s house the last time you visited. All you need to do is ask them to look for it.

Similarly, take a look in the lost and found boxes at any public places you recently visited. That includes cafés, theaters, gyms, and more. You could even call the public transportation company if you recently used a bus or train.

It’s also worth asking the police if anybody has handed in a lost iPhone. You might need to find your iPhone’s IMEI number before doing so to prove that it’s your iPhone. You can find this on the original packaging or on your purchase receipt.

How to Recover a Stolen iPhone

It’s one worry to locate your iPhone, but another matter entirely to get it back. Of course, if you simply lost your iPhone in the house or left it at the office, it’s perfectly fine to go and retrieve it yourself.

But if you think someone stole your iPhone, you need to be far more cautious.

Report Your Stolen iPhone to the Police

Despite the fact that the Find My app offers to give you directions, don’t be tempted to recover a stolen iPhone yourself. There are reported cases of people getting attacked, shot, or even killed when attempting to do so.

While some people successfully retrieve their stolen goods through direct confrontation, these are the lucky minority. Instead, you should report your stolen iPhone to the police.

Give them as much supporting documentation as you can. This include your IMEI number—which you can find on the original packaging or the purchase receipt—to prove the iPhone belongs to you. You should also provide the last known address of the iPhone, if you were able to track it.

Unfortunately, you may find that the police treat this as a low-priority case, depending on the crime rate in your area. Even if that’s the case, you can use the official police report as part of an insurance claim for a replacement device.

Report Your Stolen iPhone to Your Insurance Company

If you insured your iPhone against loss or theft, now is the time to speak to your insurance company about a claim for a replacement device. Be sure to provide them as much information as you can, including a copy of the police report and a list of all the steps you’ve tried to take to recover your iPhone.

Even if you don’t have specific gadget insurance, you may be able to claim for your iPhone with your home insurance or even with your credit card company.

How to Block a Lost or Stolen iPhone

If you can’t recover your phone, there are a few precautions you should take to ensure your data remains secure. If you haven’t already, use the Find My app or iCloud website to enable Lost Mode and create a secure passcode to lock your iPhone.

You may also want to take additional steps to erase the device entirely or revoke access from certain accounts.

Activation Lock Still Protects an Erased iPhone

If you already have a backup of your iPhone and you’re convinced you’ll never get it back, you might want to erase it remotely using Find My or the iCloud website. You can’t track your iPhone after erasing it, so only use this option if you’ve given up all hope of getting it back again.

To do so, select your iPhone in Find My or on iCloud and use the option to Erase This Device.

Thanks to Activation Lock, even if you erase your iPhone, no one can set it up without your Apple ID and password. Thus, there’s still a chance your iPhone might get handed in and make its way back to you even after you erase it.

Change Your Email and Account Passwords

In the unlikely event that someone else does manage to unlock your iPhone—perhaps if they found out your passcode—you can still protect most of your data by changing your account passwords.

Make a list of each app and service you use with your iPhone, including:

• iCloud
• Email accounts
• Online shopping
• Social media services
• Cloud storage services

Then sign into the website for each of those services and create a new password for your account. Also, look for an option in the account settings to revoke access to existing devices.

When you do this, it blocks anyone from being able to log in as you on your lost iPhone without entering the new password. It’s particularly important to change your email password, because this is where your other password reset links get sent to.

Block the SIM Card in Your Lost iPhone

Next, you’ll want to move on to contacting your carrier to block your SIM card. A thief could use your mobile number in a different device to make phone calls and rack up expensive data bills.

You shouldn’t need your IMEI number to block the SIM card for a stolen iPhone. But if your cell carrier asks for it, you can find the IMEI number on the original packaging or on your iPhone purchase receipt.

How to Avoid Losing Your iPhone in the Future

Whether you recover your iPhone or replace it with a new one, you’ll likely want to know how to protect yourself against losing it in the future. While it’s difficult to actually avoid losing it again, you can ensure your data is secure if you do so.

The best step to take is to create a six-digit passcode that is difficult for other people to guess. Enable this from Settings, where you may also be able to turn on Face ID or Touch ID to make it more convenient to securely unlock your iPhone.

Also, make sure you enable Find My iPhone by going to Settings > [Your Name] > Find My. Turn on Send Last Location for an increased chance of finding your iPhone when the battery dies.

Finally, consider getting insurance that covers you against loss or theft. That way, you don’t need to pay for a replacement device yourself if it ever does go missing.

Don’t forget that even if you think it’s gone forever, a good Samaritan still might hand your iPhone in to the police. Make sure you know what to do if you find someone else’s missing iPhone so you can return the favor as well.

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11 Things You Must Do With a Brand New Laptop

Whether you’ve just bought a new laptop to replace an old one or upgraded to treat yourself, you should make some small investments in time to ensure the best experience down the road.

Here are the most important things to do when you get a new laptop, no matter which OS it runs.

1. Update the Operating System

Whether you bought the laptop from a brick-and-mortar store or online, it likely sat around for several months. One of the first things to do with a new laptop, then, is to install any existing OS updates. This gets you the latest features and makes sure your system is secure.

To check for OS updates, perform the following:

• On Windows 10, go to Settings > Update & Security and click Check for updates. Windows will automatically download and install updates in the future.
• If you have a Mac, click the Apple menu in the upper-left corner and choose System Preferences > Software Update.
  • If you’re on macOS High Sierra or older, you’ll need to visit the App Store to check for updates. Search for “macOS” on the App Store to download the latest version.
• On Linux, updates are more for usability than security, but still as important. Depending on your distro, you may find an option to update in the system settings. See how to update the Linux kernel for more details.
• Finally, Chrome OS handles all updates behind the scenes. As long as you’re connected to Wi-Fi, Chrome OS checks for updates and downloads any that it finds. To install, all you have to do is restart your device.

2. Remove Bloatware

Bloatware is software preloaded on the operating system that’s unwanted or unnecessary. These apps are often useless, yet waste drive space and system resources. Windows laptop manufacturers are notorious for this, whereas it rarely happens on Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS laptops.

Follow our guide to removing bloatware in Windows 10 to delete junk you don’t need. If you’re not sure whether a program is important, search for it on Google or Should I Remove It? to see what others think.

3. Review Antivirus Software

Windows 10 comes with Windows Defender built-in, which is good enough for most people. If you want some extra protection, you can pair it with other strong security tools.

Mac and Linux machines don’t include an antivirus out of the box. Careful browsing and a bit of common sense should protect you on both of these platforms, but you can install Mac antivirus software or an antivirus for Linux for additional security.

Meanwhile, Chromebooks have built-in malware protection, so you don’t need anything special on that platform.

4. Configure Anti-Theft Tools

Next on the checklist of what to do with a new laptop is protecting yourself from theft. If someone stole your computer, you’d not only lose your device, but potentially all the data on it. Have measures in place to retrieve it if possible.

Windows 10 includes a built-in feature called Find My Device, located at Settings > Update & Security > Find my device. For a similar feature on macOS, visit System Preferences > Apple ID and select iCloud from the sidebar. Here, make sure you have Find My Mac enabled.

Both of these tools allow you to locate your laptop from another device logged into your Microsoft or Apple account. If you have a Chromebook, you can locate lost devices by heading to the Security section of your Google account settings and clicking Find a lost device.

For another option (which also works with Linux machines), check out Prey. It lets you track up to three devices on the free plan. See the below section on backups for another important way to protect your digital property from theft.

5. Optimize Power Settings

Since laptops are all about portability, maximizing battery life should be a priority. A few simple tweaks can result in a difference of hours per charge.

The most important step is to reduce the display brightness. Making it too dim could cause eye fatigue, so test out some options to find a comfortable balance between the extremes.

You can tweak Windows 10 power options for better battery life at Settings > Power & sleep > Additional power settings. We’ve also looked at how to improve battery life on a Mac. Many of these settings are accessible at System Preferences > Energy Saver.

Otherwise, try to avoid using resource-heavy apps when possible. Chrome is a notorious battery hog, so you’ll get better battery life with Safari, Edge, Opera, or another alternative browser.

6. Configure Automated Backups

Before long, your laptop will be full of documents, projects, presentations, and all kinds of other personal data. What happens if it suddenly stops working or you drop it? You’d lose all that data, which is a terrible fate.

Don’t let that happen: set up a backup plan right now to protect your data.

Follow our Windows 10 data backup guide if you use that platform. On a Mac, you can use the native Time Machine backup tool. And there are a number of backup utilities for Linux to save your data.

On a Chromebook, anything stored in Google Drive is accessible from your Google account. You can also back up to an external drive, such as a USB stick.

7. Set Up Cloud Storage Syncing

There are still more things to do on your new laptop! In addition to a solid backup, cloud storage will make your life easier if you work on multiple devices.

Cloud storage services, like Dropbox and Google Drive, sync anything you place inside them to the company’s servers. You can then access those files from any device where you’re signed in. That means you can easily grab a file you were editing on your desktop while you’re out working on your laptop.

Whether you use it as a layer of backup or to avoid moving files with flash drives, cloud storage is essential for today’s computing. Check out the best free cloud storage providers to get started, or consider some cheap cloud storage services if you need more space.

8. Minimize Heat Damage

Laptops are usually more susceptible to heat than other types of machines. Desktop cases are large enough for good ventilation, and tablets don’t have to worry about dust buildup. Meanwhile, many laptops have poor air circulation and lots of spots for dust to accumulate.

Over time, a lack of ventilation plus dust buildups results in excess heat. This damage can cause your CPU to under-perform in an effort to produce less heat, which means slower system performance. Excess heat can also shorten internal storage drive lifespans and cause the battery to lose charging capacity prematurely.

Here are a few preventative measures to keep in mind regarding laptop heat:

• When at all possible, don’t use your laptop on carpet, bedding, a couch, or even in your lap. Place it on a hard, flat surface to minimize dust intake.
• Every so often, clean your laptop as best you can to remove dust.
• Know what PC operating temperatures are safe. If you feel the system getting too hot, shut down intensive apps.

9. Customize System Settings

Now that all maintenance-related tasks are out of the way, it’s time to make the laptop your own. This is the time to tweak the system theme, desktop wallpaper, taskbar layout, and other personalization options.

If you need some ideas, check out these resources:

• Change the look and feel of your Windows 10 desktop.
• Personalize and customize your Mac, including icons, wallpapers, and the Dock.
• Review some ideas on how to make a Linux desktop look fantastic.

10. Install Your Favorite Apps

Now that your laptop is clean and ready to go, it’s time to install all the apps you need. Depending on your OS, you might find these on the Microsoft Store, Mac App Store, Chrome Web Store, or a repository of Linux apps. Many apps are only available to download from the developer’s website, however.

To install many popular Windows apps in one bundle, take a look at Ninite. This allows you to check all the apps you want to use and install them without clicking through dialog boxes or worrying about bundled junk. Mac users can try the similar MacApps.link.

Not sure what to install? Here’s are some lists to get you started:

• Must-have apps for Windows systems
• The best Mac apps
• Ubuntu apps to install right away
• The best Android apps to use on your Chromebook

11. Start Using a VPN

A virtual private network (VPN) may sound daunting, but using one is simple: you just download and run an app. The app encrypts your connection, protects against eavesdroppers, lets you access region-blocked content, and makes it harder to trace web activity back to you.

See our introduction to VPNs for more important info. Afterward, we recommend signing up for one of the best VPN services to protect your browsing on any platform. If you’re not sure, go with ExpressVPN—you can get three months free using our special link!

The Most Important Things to Do With a New Laptop

Now you know what to do when you get a new laptop. This preparation takes a bit of time to do correctly, but will make your experience smoother and hopefully increase the lifespan of your machine, too.

Looking for even more tips? Find out whether you should keep your laptop plugged in all the time, or check out ways to boost gaming performance on a laptop.

Image Credit: stockyimages/Shutterstock

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