Many of us, in the current conditions, will be home working if not for the first time, then more often than usual. Automattic, the company that owns wordpress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr, has distinguished itself by hiring many remote workers – indeed, much of its workforce is globally distributed.
Not one to let this wealth of experience or, it may be said, let a clickbait opportunity like this go to waste, the WordPress.com blog leads on Working Remotely: An Automattic Reader
The post seems like a useful collection of resources on this subject though, with tips and tricks to help everyone, whether it be the humble worker or the team manager. So I pass it on. Happy home working!
During the pandemic, the online tools so assiduously created by third parties can come into their own, and not just for work. Two yoga teachers of my acquaintance, not as far as I know known to each other, are independently using the video conferencing application Zoom to run online classes.
Indeed, on Thursday the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted Zoom “has quickly become a popular option to work and keep in touch with others in the midst of social distancing and shelter-in-place protocols”, in a great piece entitled What You Should Know About Online Tools During the COVID-19 Crisis. The piece also reproaches Slack for it’s data retention policies, points out the growth of surveillance in schools, and most pertinently in the current crisis, points out a potentially dangerous regulatory change.
The US department of health is “allowing health care providers to use applications such as FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, etc so they are able to provide care to patients remotely”.
The EFF suggests that if our healthcare is conducted remotely in this way, we should check what safeguards they have in place to ensure patient privacy.
In other COVID-19 surveillance-related news, the EFF also report a tweet sent by the Deputy Executive Assistant Commissioner of the US customs and border agency, who co-incidentally shares a name with one of the co-creators of Judge Dredd:
The EFF repeat their call for a ban on facial recognition technology, under the headline Face Surveillance Is Not the Solution to the COVID-19 Crisis
I just thought I’d take this opportunity to relate an amusing anecdote from Cherry Red’s, back in I think December. I was having my veggie breakfast there, a lone woman at the table next to me, and a couple of people at another table. The couple were talking about the German market, or some German sausage, or other meat product, advertised on the wall and suggested checking it out. The lone woman rose to her feet, and said, in a friendly and helpful way, “I’m German and I can tell you that stuff – it isn’t really very German at all”. The other woman replied, perfectly deadpan and I think quite seriously and without a trace of irony, “Well it’s German enough for us”.