James' World 2

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While we can’t predict what 2022 will have in store, you can get your year off to a slightly better start by performing a digital detox on your smartphone by deleting apps that are no longer working for you.

Everybody’s wants and needs are different, so it’s possible that you’ll decide to keep some of the apps I mention below. Even so, it’s a useful year-end exercise to step through all the apps on your phone and ponder whether each one deserves a spot there. Here are some types of apps you might conclude have more downside than benefits:

Messaging apps that could be more private

Let’s start with the easy ones. Messaging apps are among the most-used apps on any smartphone. But many of them don’t provide you as much privacy as they could. Skype, for example, is still one of the few major messaging apps that doesn’t offer end-to-end encryption by default.

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[Illustration: FC]

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Every cloud backup service we tested is a pain to use for one reason or another, but we still recommend using one. A good backup system starts with a local backup but should end with a subscription to an online backup service. After years of testing, we think Backblaze is the easiest to use and the best cloud backup service for most people.

Offering unlimited online storage for one computer for $70 a year, Backblaze is the most affordable backup service we tested. It’s easy to use on both Windows and Mac. With the software installed and the settings at their defaults, uploads start immediately and include the most commonly used folders that need backing up. Backblaze keeps file versions around for 30 days—less than we’d like—but it offers paid upgrades to adjust that retention period if you want to keep your backups available for longer. Backblaze supports external drives connected to your computer and has a good combination of online support tools. But its implementation of private encryption keys sacrifices some security for usability, and its restoration process is way too slow.

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Photo: Rozette Rago

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These memories have tormented Cowley his whole adult life. For 30 years he suffered from flashbacks and insomnia. He had trouble working but was too ashamed to talk to his wife. He blocked out the worst of it by drinking. In 2004 one doctor referred him to a trainee therapist, but it didn’t help, and he dropped out after a couple of sessions.

But two years ago he spotted a poster advertising therapy over the internet, and he decided to give it another go. After dozens of regular sessions in which he and his therapist talked via text message, Cowley, now 49, is, at last, recovering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. “It’s amazing how a few words can change a life,” says Andrew Blackwell, chief scientific officer at Ieso, the UK-based mental health clinic treating Cowley.

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Karolin Schnoor

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What happens after you die doesn’t need to be a mystery. At least when it comes to your email, that is.

As we move through life there are few things that we truly take with us. A family heirloom, perhaps. Your loved ones, if you’re lucky. And, more and more frequently, one of those things happens to be an email account steadily filling up with personal correspondence, bills, medical records, and embarrassing moments from your past.

And thanks to the modern wonder of cloud computing, that collection will likely long outlast you. Unless you set your entire Google account to self-destruct after your death — which, thanks to Google’s Inactive Account Manager, you can do.

Why you should enable Inactive Account Manager

Take a moment to think about the contents of your email account. Likely spanning from the quotidian and mundane to the extremely revealing, as the years progress your email account will accumulate evidence of the life you’ve lived.

Which can be extremely useful. It’s also extremely personal. Once you’re gone, is there really a reason for this compendium of deeply revealing data to sit for who knows how long on Google’s servers?

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Hello from low-earth orbit! I have spent hundreds of hours working here in virtual reality. Even as I write this to you, I have Facebook’s Oculus strapped to my face and am in an aptly named app called Immersed. It puts me in this orbiting spaceship where there’s just me, the computer screen in front of me, and—let me look out the window—Ecuador.

I’m not sure where Facebook’s Metaverse begins or ends; perhaps I am in it right now. But I am primarily a writer of English text and computer code, a solitary profession that rarely requires real-time meetings like those in the Metaverse demos. When I was a kid, I wrote homework essays on a manual typewriter. What I do now is not much different, except I don’t need to use that white correction tape stuff to erase typos—and I’m in space.

Working from home certainly feels isolating to all of us who do so, but when working from space I’m a thousand kilometers from the next human.

I wasn’t thinking about such things when I got this VR headset. I just wanted to be more comfortable and relaxed while working. Sitting at a desk is the opposite of relaxed. Working on the couch feels better at first, but using a laptop always involves contortions wherein either the screen is too close or the keyboard is too far. Wouldn’t it be great if I could have a screen floating before me at just the right position?

VR desktops like Immersed put you in an environment like this spaceship, or a mountain lodge, or a serene forest shrine, and project your computer’s screen before you. Stretch your screen to massive proportions if you’d like. If you want a standing desk, just stand up and take a few seconds to flick your monitors to the right height.

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Photograph: pixdeluxe/Getty Images

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The narrow stretch that separates Quay Tower from a thatch of bamboo and oaks in Brooklyn Bridge Park doesn’t look like much, especially in winter. Unless you’re a bird.

To a bird, the copper-colored building’s glass is a mirror, reflecting the thick grove of trees and suggesting that the wilderness continues across the road. To a bird, that can be a deadly mistake.

“You see that reflection? To a bird that looks like a tree, that is a tree, and they will go right for the tree,” says Catherine Quayle, social media director at the Wild Bird Fund.

The surprising uptake of birding as a pandemic hobby, along with social media and data collection tools like eBird and dBird, has created new visibility for bird collisions with glass, which kill as many as 1 billion birds in the U.S. per year. At the same time, a new generation of urban parks has given birds more places to roost in highly populated areas. But something else has followed these parks as well: real estate capital. The vogue for urban parks creates more economic impetus to build shiny buildings with big windows opposite those urban wetlands, glades, and groves.

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Illustrator: Cathryn Virginia

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First, it was Facebook, and then it was Twitter. In 2019, Twitter admitted that it allowed marketers to access the phone numbers that users had registered with the site. Many had given their numbers to enable two-factor authentication (2FA)—that process where a website sends you a text message to verify it’s really you who’s logging in. Users didn’t realize they were also allowing marketers to verify who they are in order to build better advertising profiles incorporating Twitter user data. (Twitter says this was an inadvertent mistake and that it has closed the hole.)

That’s especially scary because our phone numbers have become powerful tools to identify and track us, not just for companies but for anyone who wants to look up our personal information stored in a myriad of public records such as court filings, voter registration, real estate transactions, and marriage records.

Twitter’s admission is a nasty case of déjà vu since Facebook admitted to misusing phone numbers for ad targeting about a year before this article was written in 2019. “For a lot of people, [text-message authentication] is a totally reasonable protection that you should feel comfortable using,” says Gennie Gebhart, a researcher on consumer privacy and security at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But Facebook was irresponsible, and now we can’t have nice things.”

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Photo by Yagi Studio/Getty Images

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