• ZOOM HAS BECOME THE DEFACTO PLATFORM AS COVID-19 HAS FORCED SELF-ISOLATION. Businesses, schools, fitness instructors, therapists, along with families & friends are now meeting online amid the quarantine and stay-at-home orders. However, “it didn’t take long for threat actors to sabotage this new way of communication by ‘zoom-bombing’ public links to shock, taunt or scare users, disrupting online conferences by pornographic images, hate speech or even threats.” TIPS FROM ZOOM: (1) Caution in sharing links by social media; (2) Avoid using Personal Meeting ID to host events; (3) Use the Waiting Room Feature – a virtual staging area until host approves participation; (4) Only allow participants to log-in through an invited email link; (5) Generate a random Meeting ID requiring a password to join; (6) Use a ‘Remove’ feature to kick off unwanted participants, or disable their video. [THREATPOST – 3/26/20]
  • ALSO TIPS FOR OPTIMAL VIDEOCONFERENCING IN THIS NEW NORMAL: (1) Tilt your head slightly forward versus having the camera pointing upward toward you, which makes your face look pudgy; (2) Have lighting at your front versus behind you, which can make you look dark or shady; (3) Mute your device when not speaking, to keep echoes and noises from your home from annoying others; (4) Speak clearly and facing the microphone; (5) Move away from the camera if/when you do need to sneeze/cough/yawn/etc; (5) Do your best to look attentive and actually listen. “True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it.”
  • THE CURRENT STATE OF CORONOVIRUS FEAR & PANIC HAS LAUNCHED “A GIANT RESET BUTTON ON ALL OF HUMANITY,” and the aftermath will unquestionably respond to the need for safety with tighter (versus the push for ‘open’) border protocols. Most countries will “amp up their artificial intelligence detection networks designed around making invisible threats visible. Every border crossing, international terminal, and port of entry will have growing levels of sensor, video & audio detection, with drone fleets and swarm plans to add coverage. The objective is attempt to ensure that no germ, virus, bacteria, fungi or protozoa will have power to cross undetected – the equivalent of a full cavity search done imperceptibly, for the most part, with remote scanners, swarmbots, and A.I. networks… At least the job of being a spy just got exponentially more sophisticated.” [THOMAS FREY INSIGHTS – 3/26/20] 
  • ARMCHAIR EXPERTS, SELF-APPOINTED DATA ANALYSTS, are certainly triggering our impulse to distrust epidemiologist Experts, which then prompts us to reach personal judgments “under the illusion that we can do it ourselves even though we don’t know the empirical facts… Anxiety about health & economic prospects is perfectly rational, and using logic to try to understand the environment around us is a coping mechanism, but it’s a cardinal mistake to believe that, just because we are reasoning, we are reasoning well – and thinking in domains about which we individually know very little, we ignore facts about the world not because they are inconvenient but because we have no idea what they are.” Unfortunately, as long as the Experts consistently decline to speak with much consistency or any certainty, people take that as a license to second-guess, anxiety continues to increase, and potential for panic will not subdue. This Pandemic experience is new, open-ended, scary, and certainly getting worse before getting better, but it will pass. So “winging it is madness”; following the guidance of Experts and staying as calm as possible is the only sensible strategy.  [BLOOMBERG.COM – 3/25/20]

       And Philharmonic Orchestras are not entirely impeded by quarantines: https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/26/confinement-concerto-as-isolating-musicians-play-beethoven-from-home

       Pope Francis advised his 1.2 billion following that “if you can’t confess in person to a priest during the pandemic, you should speak directly to God, and assure God that ‘I will go afterward but forgive me now’,” reports THE WEEK – 4/3/20