I wrote about vaccine passwords for Avast’s blog back at the beginning of the year. Since then, we have some more clarity over where and how they will be used, and a lot more questions too. Here is a brief summary on their progress.

First, the passports have now entered the political arena. Several states (including Missouri and Florida) have actually issued rulings preventing them from being used by state agencies or by local businesses. Pennsylvania, Montana and Arkansas are close to passing similar prohibitions. The White House has stated that there will be no federal mandate for any vax credentials. This pretty much guarantees that Americans will be stuck with those postcards that are handed out when we got the Covid shots. Coming from the opposite direction is NY which has their own passport app. As Shelly Palmer documents, this has been a fiasco — even calling the app the NYS Wallet to confound usability and destroy what little trust users might have about this passport.

The politics of the passport go something like this: we don’t want to create a centralized health database, because chances are the gummint will screw that up and we would have a massive data privacy issue on our hands. (Perhaps almost as bad as what just happened recently with Facebook.) Yet the local health departments have been issuing paper vaccination records for decades without any controversy (for the most part), and schools and military use these paper documents to prove that you have gotten vaccinated.

Covid it seems requires something new and a more digital approach. And with a new system comes the challenges of being able to preserve privacy and yet allow people to have their individual freedom. The ACLU has weighed in with their opinion here. They warn, “we could see a rush to impose a COVID credential system built on an architecture that is not good for transparency, privacy, or user control. The devil is in the details.”

But there are some pretty significant efforts being done by open source folks, such as this one that is trying to work out these details to keep the vax record on an individual’s smartphone. We shall see whether these will pass muster and have the right controls when they are finally implemented. There are some pretty smart people working on this, but then because of politics anything could go awry. (I wrote about the anti-vax movement earlier this year here.) In the meantime, when we get our Covid vaccinations, we get a small postcard. But will that be sufficient proof?

Second, the pilot programs have begun but have very limited use. One series of trials has been happening at more than 20 different airlines that are using the IATA travel pass. These trials are typically on a couple of city pairs and a small number of flights, where passengers are notified they will either have to download an app or print out the certificate to prove they have been vaccinated. None of these are US-flag carriers, and probably the furthest along is Singapore Airlines, which is planning on rolling out this pass by summer.

Probably, the furthest along is the Israel Green Passport smartphone app. Israel has done the best job of almost any nation at getting vaccines distributed to people over 16. The app is required for numerous large social gatherings, although as this NYTimes article documents, it isn’t uniformly enforced. One interesting side note: another digital passport is being contemplated to be used by airlines and nearby-countries to allow Israelis passage and entry if they want to travel. It isn’t clear how this will work. One problem: given that children haven’t yet been vaccinated, families who want to eat or attend these activities together can’t, unless the kids get a Covid test ahead of time.

The enforcement issue brings up another point: who is going to authenticate the passport holder? Right now when we can actual cross an international border, there are trained professionals who look at your regular passport and any paper and digital visa stamps and approve your passage. Do we really want to have bar bouncers, part-time ticket takers and other assorted folks determining whether we can enter a concert venue, shopping mall, restaurant or whatever?

Israel has addressed this problem of controlled access a long time ago. If you want to attend university, go to a shopping mall, ride a train or go to a concert, you have to pass through the barrier that most Americans just associate with airport TSA checks. Granted, these checks were mainly for weapons, and to that effect similar controls were recently placed around the Capitol. Yet many members of Congress pay them no heed. That doesn’t bode well for US-based enforcement.

There are a lot of other issues about how to implement the vax passport apps, and solving these isn’t going to be easy. But at least getting your shots is getting better: we are approaching delivering 4M shots a day now.

I have a confession to make: I have never fired a gun. I don’t own any firearms, and the closest I came to having a gun was when I was growing up my brother was a member of the high school rifle team and we had some old thing. But a friend of mine, whom I will call Harry, is a gun owner. Indeed, he now owns nine different ones: a mixture of rifles and handguns, revolvers and semi-automatics. Given that he lives in New Jersey, he can’t easily carry them — either concealed or openly — and has to carefully transport them from his home to the various ranges that he shoots competitively.  Yes, he is a real gun advocate now.

And did I mention that he is your stereotypical Jewish liberal from the northeast? “For 50 years, I didn’t think anyone needed guns. But now I feel differently.” Harry is your typical suburbanite: has two adult children. Neither of whom — nor his wife– are very interested in using his guns, although his daughter has shot one of his weapons to impress her boyfriend, who is looking for a career in law enforcement.

Harry bought his first gun, a HK 9 mm, back in 2016, just after Trump started winning various primaries. “I figured if he got elected, he could set the country back 50 years. And with all his turmoil and racist language, I wanted to be able to defend my own home. I was afraid that my family would be one of the first targeted, since we are Jewish.” His first gun had a magazine for 15 rounds, but he had to give that up because New Jersey changed their law to restrict magazines to just 10 rounds. “There is a lot to know legally,” he told me. “And our state has a lot of restrictions, so the liberals who say we need more regulations don’t understand the wide variation in different states.” Exactly: here in Missouri, we have more liberal gun laws. He does have concealed carry permits for Virginia and Florida, and has a variety of reasons for obtaining those permits in these places.

The other issue for Harry is the amount of time it takes him to actually get a gun. “It took me a long time to register and obtain a permit — it was supposedly to be less than 30 days but now it takes longer because so many people want guns,” he told me. “And when I actually walk into a store and buy my gun, it used to take just a few minutes to do the background check, but now it takes as long as a week.” There are millions of new gun owners as a result of Biden’s election, interestingly. And if he were to go to an out-of-state gun show, many of the sellers don’t want to bother selling him anything, since it has to be shipped to a licensed gun dealer in New Jersey.

Harry has spent nearly $9000 over the years, on all of his weapons and on a stockpile of more than 15,000 rounds of various ammunition. You might think he is part Doomsday prepper, but he tells me that when he shoots at the range, he could easily go through 300 or so rounds, and because he is Jewish, he buys in bulk. (Sorry, just had to put that in there.) He has met plenty of other Jews on the range.

He is also an NRA member, but he doesn’t fully support their political positions. He became a licensed instructor. “I wish they would stick to their training — which is excellent — and did less of their political BS,” he told me.”But not all of us gun owners are planning to revolt against the government either.”

Harry is also a lifelong Democrat, and has never voted for a Republican presidential candidate. But he also decries the left-wingers that populate his party, and thinks they are off base. “I absolutely hate Trump, and can’t stand him as a person or as a candidate. I actually find him nauseating. But many of the press stories are just not true,” he told me.

Yes, we have more guns than people here in the US. And Harry is certainly an example of how that is possible. But you can’t paint every gun owner on the same canvas.

I was just finishing off an article that will be posted on the Avast blog in a few days about ransomware-as-a-service. I was typing that one way to minimize the damage from ransomware is to “ensure that your backups are intact and accurate.” This was somewhat ironic, given that soon after disaster struck. And it had to do with the poor quality of my iPhone backup. As if this wasn’t bad enough, next week is the annual World Backup Day. Let’s rewind a bit to set the context.

For the past four or so years, I have been using an iPhone 7. Because I was a cheapskate, I bought the phone with only 32 GB of storage. Over the past several months, as I diligently kept the iOS version updated, I saw that it was having issues finding enough empty space to do the updates. Then last week I got tired of deleting apps or trying to fit my music and photos (the things that take up the most storage) and just said the heck with it and bought a new iPhone 12 and got the 128 GB model, which hopefully will last me a few years. This is my fourth or fifth iPhone (I think I had the 4 before the 7). Activating and moving my data over to the new phone was time consuming but mostly an automated transfer of data, and today I was ready to get down to working with the phone.

Just one problem. I am a big user of the Google Authenticator app to provide additional login security, and when I went to open the app on my new phone, there were no password codes installed. Now, I have about 25 different logins that use this app, and if I didn’t have access to these codes it meant that I couldn’t login to any of my apps. After I had been resuscitated seeing that empty Authenticator screen, I was ready to figure out how to get these login authentications back on my phone. One thing that I didn’t want to do was to have to authenticate each login separately by entering manually these logins to the app. Fortunately, I still have my old phone, and (after looking around) I found the way to transfer them manually. I had to do it 10 logins at a time (the Authenticator app produces a nifty QR code that you then use to restore the logins to the new phone), but problem solved. If my phone had been lost or stolen, I think I would still be in the local cardiac care unit.

Even the best backup plans can ignore certain scenarios. Look at the OVH data center that was on fire not too long ago. That brought down quite a few internet sites. that never thought they would see something like that happen. And I have had my own brushes with bad backups (or no backups, as the case may be), including a fire in my office building many years ago, or a flood in my provider’s basement. Both times things could have been catastrophic, and I did learn my lessons and improve my internal procedures. (Here is a post that I wrote many years ago about my own backup commandments. And for your own amusement, there is always the Tao of Backup.

But apparently there are still some lessons to be learned. So this whole experience with Google Authenticator made me think what else isn’t being backed up on my new phone? How about all the credit cards that I entered for my Apple wallet? Yup, MIA. A relatively easy one to fix. But still, ensuring your backups are complete isn’t a simple concept, even for a company of one. And there are still lessons to be learned, particularly as we do more computing on our mobiles.

This week the art auction house Christie’s sold a work of art for $69M. What is noteworthy here is that the artist Mike Winkelmann had until last fall never sold any of his works for more than $100. Entitled Everydays: The first 5000 days, (a portion of it shown here) the artwork was entirely a digital work. The buyer got a digital record of the work, but not the graphics file itself. What was interesting about the sale was the bidding process, typical of a valuable eBay collectible: the auction had to be extended several minutes as dozens of hopeful buyers bid the price up in the last moments. You would think they were bidding on a “analog” DaVinci or a Degas. The piece, as you can see, is a digital file composed of a mosaic of other digital files. How meta!

This is the brave new world of what is being called non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or crypto art. This world is heavily into cryptocurrencies, blockchains, smart digital contracts and other totems of tech. Even if you think you understand what each of these things means in isolation, you might not be able to wrap your brain around this concept entirely. So you should start with this post on GitHub, which explains some of the movers and shakers, links to where you can purchase other crypto art works, how the various tech pieces fit together, and other components of this ecosystem. The NY Times documents some of the other crypto works that have recently sold for multiple millions of dollar-equivalents (the actual transactions typically happen via Ethereum), such as a digital copy of Jack Dorsey’s first Tweet. One analog art collector commented about the Christie’s sale that “Art is no longer about a relationship with an object. It’s about making money,” he said. “I feel bad for art.” As someone who has purchased a few analog pieces myself (more on that in a moment), I would tend to agree.

The site CryptoSlam keeps track of recent transactions and should convince you that this is now A Thing. Tim Schneider writes this excellent piece about the crypto art evolution and mentions four important and unresolved issues:

• Who really owns what? As I mentioned, these works are really selling digital licenses and descriptions but not he bits of the digital art itself. The art is hosted elsewhere – what happens if the hosting provider disappears? Or if your digital wallet is compromised?
• Will gatekeepers be the same old rich white boys club or have a chance to decentralize and diversify? Or put another way, is there an opportunity for grassroots and sustainable tech platforms to take hold that will encourage a more pluralist art world?
• Will collectors be the same old RWBC, or worse –the rich tech bros from Silicon Valley? How the gatekeepers and collectors interact will be critical for the future success of the crypto art world.
• The old system benefitted the collector on resale of the art. Can crypto-based systems benefit the artist since they can track ownership forever? But while using existing ETH-based smart contracts is a step in the right direction, it is just a small step. Most of these contracts don’t contain any resale/redistributions provisions. The Mint fund is trying to solve this in a different way by giving grants and getting new artists started and trying to diversify the creators beyond the US/EU RWBC axis.

This last point deserves further discussion. One crypto artist is Sara Ludy. She wrote smart contracts that lays out the revenue share arrangement, now and forever, for her works. She keeps half of any sale for herself, 15% goes to the crypto marketplace/platform she chooses to sell with, and then the remaining 35% to her gallery, where it is divided among the staff in equal portions. That means as the price of the art work escalates, everyone retains a piece of the action. That Christie’s sale only benefitted the last owner of the work — who wasn’t even the artist. Clearly the crypto world still has some major teething pains.

My first piece of art that I bought was a series of county courthouse photos taken by William Clift in 1976. I owned them for many years and they had supposedly appreciated in value. But when I couldn’t find a buyer, I decided to donate them to a museum instead. That points out that any auction requires both buyers and sellers.

I am getting close to hitting the pandemic wall. Like many of you, I have been trying to be safe, following the rules, limiting my social contacts. Not getting on planes, going to any f2f meetings or even driving very much. I think last year my wife and I put a grand total of 6,000 miles on our car. So here is my current fantasy: becoming a digital nomad and living in some foreign country.

It is very ironic, this fantasy, because to some extent I already am a digital nomad, just without any of the nomadic travels. I have had my own freelance writing and speaking business now for several decades, but always have had a nearby office. (Mine is across the street from my home, but it could be anywhere in the world). Yet all my work is done for clients remotely. In some cases, I haven’t ever met some of them f2f. I was talking about this with my accountant, who lives just a few miles away. She and I have worked together for more than a decade but have never physically met.

In years past, I was semi-nomadic: I did a fair amount of travel to industry events, to speak at conferences, or to work with my clients at their offices. But now, thanks to the pandemic, that is all off the table. There is also an upside to the pandemic though: some companies have loosened their remote work restrictions and no longer care where in the world you work, just as long as you have the connectivity, the tools, and the time zones that you consider part of your workday firmly in place. This last issue is important: if your employer expects to find you at your desk or online at a certain time, you need to structure your day accordingly, wherever in the world you might be.

If you are considering becoming a digital nomad, you might want to study up on how to make the transition, as well as to figure out where in the world the Global You HQ will set up shop. Now is certainly the time to think about this, especially as many countries are trying to make it easier for nomads to settle – in some cases for years or more. Here are two resources that have the most current info on which countries are offering this arrangement, one from GodSaveThePoints and one from TravelOffPath. The list is somewhat fluid, as countries are changing the rules and evolving their Covid restrictions often at the same time. You can see some countries have placed income requirements: they want to attract nomads who have resources and income to come, and who will continue to work and earn their livings there. If you are just starting to think about becoming a digital nomad, there are dozens of blogs that describe the process, such as this one on TwoWanderingSoles.

In the past, pre-pandemic, nomads usually worked in a country under the radar, using 90-day tourist visas. You can still do this, if you understand that when the time is up, you literally must pack your bags and get out of Dodge. You can then find your next post and take up another 90-day residency. But that can get tiresome. And it could be risky: in these Covid times, you might not be able to get on any flights and then you would be in trouble when you try to leave on an expired visa. So that is where the digital nomad visa comes into play. Actually, the name is somewhat misleading, because it really is a temporary residency permit for an extended period of time.

I spoke to Bryan Cooley, who is a serial tech entrepreneur that I met when he was living in St. Louis. He has lived in various places around the world and now spends half the year in Manila as a permanent resident. He has spent at least a week in more than 130 countries and dozens where he has lived at least a month. I asked Bryan about his Internet connectivity, and he told me it has never been an issue. “I have had better connectivity than back in the US, even in some very remote areas.” Certainly, Covid has disrupted his travel plans: for example, even though he is a permanent resident in the Philippines, under current rules he can’t return if he leaves during the pandemic. He is looking into getting residency in Australia. He feels the digital nomad visas are mostly marketing efforts: “There are so many people traveling and going where they want to live. It has been going on for a long time. These programs are very limited in terms of numbers.”

A tech writer colleague of mine, Sharon Fisher, decided to go nomadic last fall, and has been to both Aruba (from October to January) and is now in Bermuda with her partner. I asked her how she ended up in these two places. She said that first she examined if Americans could enter the country, how their Covid cases were being handled, and what kind of broadband internet was available. Part of her Covid research was in understanding how onerous their quarantine protocols were. “We didn’t mind testing and staying home for a while, but we didn’t want to have to each pay $5000 to be sequestered for 14 days in a specific hotel on arrival.”

Next, they looked at the AirBnB situation, and so far they have had great experiences with the hosts they stayed at. They also need to have a close time zone to US operations: “we looked at Saipan (an island in the middle of the South Pacific) but that meant having to work in the middle of their night,” she told me.

Her biggest issues so far were groceries, transportation and bandwidth. “Food is more expensive than we anticipated, milk and produce in particular. Rental cars in Aruba were expensive but necessary. There are no rental cars in Bermuda, so we take the bus. Internet has been fine in the AirBnBs, including streaming video, with two people using the Internet just about constantly.” They also have T-Mobile cellular coverage which enables international data roaming but they eventually bought local SIM cards in Aruba.

What about her travel in the time of the Covid? “Ironically, it’s actually kind of been easier because Covid has reduced the number of choices we’ve had to make, and everyplace is less crowded. But the hardest part about traveling now is the existential question of ‘should we be doing this?’ The people in Aruba were very appreciative that some travelers were still coming, because of how dependent their economy is on tourism. Also, both countries have had much lower incidences of Covid than where we were in the US, and people seem to take it far more seriously. We personally have been much safer in these countries than we would have been in the US, and we have taken all the steps we can to ensure that the people in the other countries are safe as well. We realize what a privilege we have, and we appreciate it.”

If you are thinking about becoming a nomad, here are a few more points that I want to make. First, learn as much about the expat culture of your target destination. There is a difference between expats – people from elsewhere who intend to live there for the long haul – and nomads, who might not want to stick around or who want to travel as part of their newfound freedom. Bryan mentioned these communities might not be everyone’s cup of tea: “there are a lot of nomads who don’t really know what they are doing.”

Second, look at places that are specifically focusing on startups, such as Madeira.  Their website offers links to coworking places, long-term housing rentals, and other aspects of their support for digital nomads. Yes, the number of people that will be accepted to this program is small, and Americans can’t yet travel there — but it represents an interesting step in the nomad field. Next, don’t forget about your digital entertainment. If you expect your streaming services to deliver the same programming you have gotten in the US you might want to experiment with various VPNs. Also, understand the Covid vaccination program at your destination. Sharon mentioned that her “current plan is to stay in Bermuda through March, return to the US, get vaccinated, then see what options we have. If we aren’t yet able to get vaccinated, we will likely stay in Bermuda until we can. So far as I know we can stay for up to a year.”

Finally, learn about the changes that the EU has in store for its visa requirements in the near future. That could influence how your plans evolve once we are finally out of the pandemic.

A new report from the Anti-Defamation League has reviewed the stated hate speech policies of nine different social media platforms. Unlike other studies, it also tests their responsiveness to user reports of violations of those policies. The ADL is an organization that has been operating for more than 100 years trolling (literally) these waters. They were specifically interested in how social media propagated posts made by Holocaust deniers across their networks. They scored each platform in terms of intentions and how they performed in terms of preventing hate speech on such issues such as:

• Did the platform investigate the report and promptly respond (defined as within 24 hours) to the complaint?
• Do users of each platform understand why it has made a certain content decision based on its stated policies?
• Did the platform take any actual action once something was reported?

You can see a part of their report card above. Before I get to the grades given for answering these and other questions, I want to talk about my own personal experience with Holocaust denial. About four years ago, my sister and I went to Poland to see the places where our mom’s family came from. One of our cousins did some genealogy research and found an ancestor who lived in a small town in northeast Poland who was a rabbinical judge back in the 1870s. One of the stops on our trip was to visit Auschwitz, and you can read my thoughts about that day here.

One of the exhibits at the site was about the German engineering firm that designed the mass extermination equipment. For years, the copies of the original drawings used to build this gear were kept from public view by the denier network. But eventually they were sold to someone who flipped from being a denier to someone who realized the legitimacy of these plans, and that’s how we were able to finally see them.

Several years ago I attended a lecture by Jan Grabowski, a history professor from Ottawa. He has done extensive research into Polish Holocaust history, despite the current denier political climate where he and his research associates and colleagues have been threatened and in some cases jailed for their work. Grabowski is affiliated with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw which is attempting to find primary source records to document what happened during those dark times. Add to this a recent survey of millennials that found that 56% of the respondents could not even identify what Auschwitz was about.

From these two personal moments, I realize that we need more evidence-based approaches and to disseminate facts rather than fiction or misdirection. That is where the social networks come into play, because they have become the superhighway of these fictions. Let’s not even glorify them by using the term “alternative facts.”

Let’s return to the report card. Sadly, only Twitter and Twitch acted against the Holocaust denial content reported. No network got any A grades across the ADL’s rubric, to no surprise. Twitch, the gaming social network, scored B’s. Twitter and You Tube got C’s. Facebook and others received grades of D.

Based on its research, the ADL has some recommendations:

• Tech companies must make changes to their products to prioritize users’ safety over engagement and reduce hateful content on their platforms.
• All the platforms need to do a better job on transparency. They should provide users with more information on how they make their decisions regarding content moderation. This is especially urgent, given the recent decisions to terminate several high-profile accounts.

You can read others at the link above. My final point: yes, censoring hate speech — whether it about the Holocaust or whatever — is destructive to our society. Just look at the mob that swarmed across our Capitol earlier this month. The social networks have to decide whether they can step up to the task. And while it bothers me that we have to censor the most dangerous of hate speakers, we do have to recognize their danger.