The exact worries vary, although they tend to be a mix of tangible security and privacy problems with teachers and staff who may not be familiar with how Zoom works. There’s no end-to-end encryption for Zoom meetings, making it possible to intercept videoconferences. Teachers have also had to grapple with “Zoombombing” incidents where bad actors disrupt virtual classes — sometimes by guessing the meeting number, sometimes because staff share the meeting details on public sites. Add vulnerabilities and people uploading videos to unprotected websites and it may be all too easy for a determined intruder to spy on calls or collect recordings.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Zoom reiterated that it takes privacy and security “extremely seriously.” It said it had been “proactively engaging” to outline best practices and policies, and pointed out changes taking effect that require waiting rooms for K-12 classes and limit who can share data by default. These should help, but they’re clearly coming too late for some schools. They’ve had untrustworthy experiences with Zoom, and they’re unlikely to come back in the near future even if all their complaints are addressed.

In New York City, Lyft will provide hospital workers, first responders and transit workers with a free, one-month Citi Bike membership. Those passes can be obtained through employers, who can email HeroBikes@Lyft.com to enroll their staff. The offer applies to anyone working in these fields who recently purchased a membership or has an upcoming membership renewal, too. After this initial trial, Lyft and its partners will determine ridership needs and reevaluate.

“Having seen higher demand for Citi Bikes near our critical hospitals, Lyft has arrived at a generous and creative plan that will help get first responders where they need to go,” said NYC DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg.

At certain high-traffic Citi Bike stations — like those outside of hospitals — Lyft valets will dock and disinfect bikes. Lyft will expand its cleaning operations and continue to disinfect bikes every time they enter the depot or are repaired in the field.

Healthcare workers in Boston and Chicago will also have access to discounts, The Verge reports. In Boston, Lyft’s Bluebikes is offering hospital workers a free 30-day membership, and in Chicago, healthcare workers have access to free rides on the city’s Divvy bikes through April 30th.

Lyft tends to be the more altruistic of the major ride-share players. Previously, Lyft has offered free rides to voters and people traveling to job interviews. This latest move will help workers who still have to head outside during the pandemic.

The bikes use a pedal-assisted electric drivetrain that allows you to get some exercise on the flats but not kill yourself on hills. According to Lyft, each e-bike was used for 15 rides per day during the trial, triple the usage of classic bikes during the same period. They were particularly popular in winter (when classic bike usage plunged by 60 percent), and twice as likely to be used to cross an East River bridge.

Members on the $169 per year classic bike plan can pay an extra ten cents per minute for the e-bikes, capped at $2 for 45 minutes or less, according to Citi Bike. Non-members pay $3 per ride for a 30-minute trip on a classic bike and can upgrade that to electric for an extra $0.15 per minute — or a total of $7.50 for a 30 minute e-bike trip. Lower income New Yorkers pay $5 per month for a classic membership plus 5 cents a minute for an e-bike, up to 45 minutes.

The initial pilot didn’t go too well, as members had trouble with very touchy front brakes that reportedly caused “dozens” of accidents and injuries. At the same time, Lyft’s e-bikes also had battery issues that caused fires in San Francisco and elsewhere. Because of all that, Citi Bike was forced to redesign the bike’s brake setup and also find a new battery supplier. The company also decided to change its e-bike pricing structure by eliminating flat fees and introducing per-minute charges.

The e-bikes are now back in service and Lyft has over 2,000 in San Francisco with plans to expand to Chicago, Washington DC, Minneapolis and other US cities. In New York City, it will soon expand in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, “with more neighborhoods to follow.” It had 1,000 e-bikes in NYC when they were pulled over the brake issues, and Lyft eventually plans to install 4,000 in the city.

The app will send notes to a department database, which offers a few benefits over the physical notebooks. It could eliminate potential abuses, like faking entries in order to get search warrants, and headaches, like having to interpret illegible handwriting. Plus, individual officers won’t have to keep track of dozens of notebooks. Instead the logs will be managed in the database, and officers will be able to do quick database searches through the app when they’re in the field.

Of course, there are potential drawbacks. Police union officials fear the app could lead to invasive real-time tracking of officers’ locations, and unlike physical notebooks, phones can stop working and be hacked. The NYPD won’t be alone, though. As you’d expect, many major departments across the US have already moved away from log books.

A software glitch is causing parking meters throughout New York City to reject credit and prepaid parking cards, The New York Times reports. The payment software was set to expire on January 1st, and the vendor reportedly failed to update the software before the new year. So, at the stroke of midnight Wednesday, the city rang in a bug reminiscent of those feared around Y2K, which predicted computer systems would crash.

As with the earlier rollout, this should deliver meaningful coverage. NYC is virtually blanketed in 5G, for example, while Las Vegas’ access expands well past the main city.

The deployment brings AT&T’s normal 5G coverage up to 19 cities, and its millimeter wave access to 25 cities. It also underscores AT&T’s middle-of-the-road approach to introducing 5G. It’s not about to go nationwide with modest speeds like T-Mobile did in December, but it’s also determined to fill out coverage in a given city rather than focusing on small but very high-speed rollouts like Engadget’s parent company Verizon. Whichever carrier you choose, it’ll be a long while before 5G access is truly comprehensive.

The bill was passed in June with strong support, sailing through both the state Senate and the state Assembly will minimal opposition. The new legislation was particularly desired by delivery workers, according to StreetsBlog NYC, who often prefer e-bikes for their work.

However, Gov. Cuomo chose to veto the bill due to a lack of included safety measures. The bill did not include mandatory helmet requirements, for example, although municipalities could still have chosen to enforce a helmet rule if they had wanted to. A copy of the veto message was posted on Twitter by senior advisor to Gov. Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi.

Here is a copy of the e-bike / e-scooter veto message. The short version is that significant safety provisions were left out of the final version. This will be worked in next session. pic.twitter.com/HwD9k3E61T

— Rich Azzopardi (@RichAzzopardi) December 26, 2019

To move forward from here, the New York legislature will have to come up with a new version of the bill, pass it again and send it back to Cuomo will the hope that he will approve it this time.

The drone inspections could alleviate staff shortages at NYC’s building department while saving money. More importantly, they could save lives. The council proposal comes days after falling debris from a fined building killed architect Erica Tishman while she was walking below. Ideally, this would have helped pinpoint and fix the problem.

There’s one problem: right now, the 1948-era airspace laws would forbid drones. The city would have to relax those laws for this concept to move forward. If that happens, though, drones might soon be a regular part of NYC’s landscape.

Early this year, Amazon pulled the plug on plans to build an “HQ2” in Queens after a number of local leaders and activists pushed back against the $3 billion in tax breaks and incentives it would receive. Now the online retail giant has confirmed plans to lease 335,000 square feet of office space in Manhattan, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new NYC expansion will be located in the Hudson Yards neighborhood with more than 1,500 employees.

It’s a much smaller footprint than what Amazon had proposed for HQ2 — which shifted to other locations in Virginia and Tennessee — but it comes with no tax breaks or incentives, and no nationwide contest to lure the company’s business. US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to the news “Won’t you look at that: Amazon is coming to NYC anyway – *without* requiring the public to finance shady deals, helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos, & corporate giveaways.”

The move is designed to curb teen vaping. New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot noted recently that there’s evidence of kids as young as 11 using e-cigarettes. Around 1 in 15 middle school students in the city have said they do so.

“New York City is finally addressing a public health crisis which has been mounting for years while state and local governments across the nation did next to nothing. We are finally taking action to address the resurgence of youth nicotine addiction caused by e-cigarette usage,” Mark Levine, who introduced the legislation and is chair of the council’s health committee, said in a statement to CNBC. “With this vote, the City Council is moving to ban the fruity, minty, candy-like flavors of e-cigarettes which were clearly designed to appeal to young people in the first place.”

A lung disease that has been linked to vaping has caused the deaths of 42 people across the US and affected more than 2,100 people. The Trump administration has wavered over whether to ban flavored vape pods at the federal level, or raise the minimum e-cigarette age to 21 to combat teen vaping.

New York City is following Massachusetts, which banned all flavored tobacco last week, and Michigan’s temporary flavored e-cigarette ban. Several other jurisdictions have raised the minimum vape age to 21 or blocked non-tobacco flavored vape sales. Other efforts at state level, such as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s bid to block flavored vape sales, have stalled in courts.

This week, attorneys general in New York, California and Washington, D.C. filed separate lawsuits against Juul, claiming that the e-cig manufacturer targeted young people and used deceptive marketing. The company, which stopped selling flavored vape pods over the last several weeks, has been under scrutiny for some time from regulators over similar concerns.