This month's winner is TONY LEE of San Francisco, California:
Traveling on the Silk Road in China in July 2018, I arrived at Jiayuguan. The westernmost gate of China's Great Wall is located outside of that city, and I hired a driver to take me to several sites along the wall. Unfortunately for me, the driver spoke no English, and I had only a minimal understanding of Mandarin, so we had to rely on using the translation apps on our phones.
Any traveler entering New Zealand, if asked by a Customs officer to hand over his cell phone and pass code, must do so, according to a law (the Customs and Excise Act 2018) that went into effect on Oct. 1. Anyone refusing to do so will have his phone confiscated, be fined NZD5,000 (near $3,330) and face arrest and/or deportation.
Between Aug. 21 and Sept. 5, a data breach involving British Airways' smartphone app exposed the passport numbers and credit card information of thousands of customers. It is estimated that the personal information of more than 300,000 people was stolen.
Only the accounts of customers who used the app to purchase or change flights were included in the breach. Accounts of people making purchases or changes on the airline's website (www.ba.com) were not exposed.
With the app "Arataki – Cultural Walking Trails – New Zealand," your smartphone becomes a Maori storyteller.
The app contains guides to culturally significant Maori locations along walking trails. As you follow a trail, "beacons" connect to the app and, using text, images, audio and video, present tales and legends of locations you're passing.
Arataki is free on Android and iPhone and requires Bluetooth for full functionality. Currently, sites that work with the app are only in the Tauranga region on the North Island, but expansions are ongoing.
My wife, Karen, and I have often read about getting cell phones or SIM cards for overseas travel, but, as my wife and I have found, there is no need to do that due to affordable and universally useable cell service from Google's Project Fi (fi.google.com).*
My personal experience with both T-Mobile and Verizon while traveling internationally was receiving bills amounting to several hundred dollars for only a few phone calls and less than a gigabyte of data usage. That's what prompted me, in July 2016, to ditch the normal US carriers and go with Project Fi.
A data breach involving Air Canada's smartphone app may have resulted in the stealing of the personal information, including passport information, of thousands of customers. Authorities are unsure how the breach occurred or who is responsible for it but noted that Air Canada had a weak password system. All customers with an Air Canada account have been asked to reset their passwords using new, more stringent guidelines.
Using crime reports from local police and governments as well as incident reports from users and on Twitter, the app “RedZone Map” can show you the safest walking routes to your destinations in many cities worldwide.
The app, free on iOS and Android, displays the safest route in green. A shorter route might also be displayed but in red if it is not the safest. The app also can show real-time updates of events happening along your route, if other users report them. A network or Wi-Fi connection is necessary to use the app.
I would like to thank Mark Gallo for his article “They’re Called Smartphones for Good Reason” (first of two parts) (Feb. ’18, pg. 50). His column was an interesting read, as were all the websites he mentioned, where I learned lots of tricks, photo and otherwise, available for the iPhone.
