Weekly output: Twitter geotagging, AI promises, FCC pay-TV transparency proposal, FTC click-to-cancel proposal, cryptocurrency mining

The last week of March comes with an exciting local development: the Washington Nationals home opener Thursday. I look forward to trying to ignore my smartphone as much as possible that afternoon.

Twitter location-tagging story3/20/2023: Good Luck Tagging Your Specific Location on Twitter Anymore, PCMag

This story started with a tip from @HelicoptersOfDC proprietor Andrew Logan, which eventually led me to write “whatever is left of Twitter’s press office sent its new autoreply of a poop emoji.”

3/22/2023: Is AI Ready to Fulfill Its Promises or Is This Just Another Hype Cycle?, Grit Daily

Here’s a recap of the panel I moderated in Austin two weeks ago.

3/22/2023: FCC Wants to Force Cable Companies to Disclose Upfront What You’ll Actually Pay, PCMag

It’s crazy that it’s taken this long for any nationwide government regulator to demand that a pay-TV service tell would-be subscribers just how much they’ll pay.

3/23/2023: Click to Cancel: FTC Wants to Make It Easier to Dump Subscriptions, PCMag

My pitch to cover this proposal got an usually fast approval from my editors, which may say something about how much people hate subscriptions that auto-renew inside some dark-pattern interface.

3/25/2023: Crypto-Mining Advocates: Actually, We’re Not Terrible for the Environment, PCMag

I took notes at a blockchain-policy conference Tuesday, then needed another three days to turn those notes into copy.

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Weekly output: the CIA’s SXSW sales pitch, Amazon unveils Project Kuiper receivers, NASA’s plans for privately owned space stations

This week went by fast, between my spending the first two days of it in Austin for SXSW and then spending all of Wednesday at the Satellite 2023 conference in downtown D.C. And then St. Patrick’s Day came around–which this year reminded me of how great it was to return to Ireland last summer, the first trip I made there with my Irish passport.

Screenshot of story as seen in Firefox for Windows 113/15/2023: The CIA’s SXSW Sales Pitch: We Need Your Help, Please Come Work for Us, PCMag

Four Central Intelligence Agency executives gave a talk at SXSW Monday afternoon with an interesting wrinkle: If you resent ubiquitous digital surveillance and want to find ways to defeat it, our agents and assets in hostile countries could use your help.

3/15/2023: Amazon’s Project Kuiper Satellite Receivers Cost Less Than $400 to Make, PCMag

If Satellite 2023 had not been scheduled on top of SXSW, I could have watched Amazon’s Tuesday-morning keynote in person and filed this post Tuesday afternoon. Instead, I wrote up the company’s news about its upcoming Project Kuiper constellation of low-Earth-orbit broadband satellites after reading Amazon’s blog post and reading press accounts of the talk.

3/17/2023: Here’s how NASA plans to replace the International Space Station—by becoming a private company’s tenant, Fast Company

This story started out with my watching a few panels about NASA’s plans for “commercial LEO destinations” at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference in early February, spending the next two weeks lining up interviews with most of the companies bidding for this work, having MWC force me to set aside the work for a week, finally filing the story the night before I headed out for SXSW, and then having my editor not look at the piece until after SXSW because he was also busy at the festival.

Arlington should stop discriminating against duplexes, and so should other counties and cities in America

While the Arlington County Board started hearing out hundreds of citizens at its Saturday meeting about its “Expanded Housing Option” proposal to liberalize zoning regulations and enable the construction of multiple-family residences in more of the county, I went on a bike ride that took me through several of those single-family-zoned neighborhoods on my way to the Donaldson Run trail.

Many of the front yards I passed featured a yellow “No Missing Middle” sign supporting the current regulations, which only permit by-right construction of single-family residences in the vast majority of Arlington.

It’s not that you can’t build a duplex, triplex, quadplex or a tiny apartment building there if you really want to–but you’d better clear your calendar and have money to pay for a real-estate lawyer to navigate your project through the county’s Site Plan Approval process and have it voted on by one or more county commissions and then the County Board.

Buildings cluster along the Orange Line, as seen from an airplane departing National Airport; north and south of them, single-family homes dominate.

That took six months for one recent proposal to build a duplex a 10-minute walk from the Ballston Metro; another, which only involved renovating a 1935-vintage duplex, has spent years grinding through this process but remains on hold.

(Disclosure: My wife works for Arlington County’s government but has no role in housing policy.)

So while Arlington has done fantastically well at nurturing dense, walkable and transit-oriented development along Metro and bus lines, outside those corridors the county remains mostly single-family homes. Which are both getting increasingly expensive and at increasing risk of being torn down and replaced by giant homes built to maximize a lot’s development potential (and a developer’s profit), and which are only affordable to the wealthiest buyers.

We could have intermediate types of development like duplexes and triplexes–what affordable housing advocates call “missing middle” housing–but county leaders, like many local governments across America, chose otherwise in a series of actions that often reeked of racial and economic exclusion. In 1938, Arlington banned row houses outright; in 1942, another zoning revision limited duplexes to a small fraction of the county; a 1950 revision further clamped down on duplexes.

So when an existing house goes up for sale here, only two things can happen to it when the default setting is single-family dwellings: Somebody buys the place to live in and hopefully fix up, or somebody buys it as a teardown and replaces it with yet another 5,000-square-foot mini-mansion. I think about this every time we get an unsolicited letter from a realtor saying they have a buyer interested in the lot occupied by our 1920 bungalow–which we could only afford because I had the good timing to buy a condo here in 2000 and have it double in value by 2004.

A "Dead End" sign in Arlington, with   a series of bungalows visible behind it and then an apartment building across the street.

Lot-coverage rules can tamp down building sizes and encourage neighborhood-friendly touches like front porches, but we can’t prohibit homeowners from optimizing a sale for personal wealth. Some places can offer property-tax incentives for keeping older homes, but in Virginia we’d literally have to amend the state constitution to add a carve-out to its clause requiring uniformity in property taxation.

The people who put those “No Missing Middle” signs in front of their 1950s-vintage homes–not to mention the one I saw in January in front of a row house built just before the county’s 1938 ban–seem blissfully unaware of this dynamic. And yet nobody here seems happy with how expensive housing has become or how bungalows keep getting replaced with giant, boxy abodes that only a couple with dual six-figure incomes can consider buying.

Partially deregulating zoning to allow more but smaller homes on one property, subject to limits about factors like parking spaces and lot coverage–also known as “giving the free market a chance to work” and “not having the government pick winners and losers”–is a feasible route out of this dead end.

It’s also the right thing to do. We don’t need to be yet another privileged place sticking with a housing policy that amounts to “Screw you, I’ve got mine”; as a pro-missing-middle editorial in Saturday’s Washington Post concludes with an icepick of a sentence, “One San Francisco is enough.”

Weekly output: AT&T’s 5G plans, TikTok’s “Project Texas,” JSX’s Starlink WiFi, Mark Vena podcast, reproductive rights, AI writing

AUSTIN–This is my 10th trip here for SXSW, which means I have long since made my peace with the reality that I’m never going to get to all the panels that I’d like to watch. At least this conference now offers video on demand of panels, so I can catch up on what I missed in my nonexistent spare time.

3/7/2023: AT&T’s Mansfield touts midband 5G, but downplays standalone 5G, Light Reading

I wrote about half of this interview of Gordon Mansfield, vice president for global technology planning, network planning and engineering, on my transatlantic flight back from MWC Thursday of last week, then wrote the other half Friday.

3/7/2023: TikTok Plans to Keep Your Data Safe With a ‘Massive Amount of Oversight’, PCMag

I spent Monday at the State of the Net conference in D.C., not sure of what story I’d come away with, then found one in this brief session in the afternoon. Once again, I wrote half of it on a plane–from DCA to DFW–and then finished it in a hotel room in Dallas.

Screenshot of the story as seen in Safari on an iPad mini 6, as illustrated by a photo showing a Pixel 7 showing a 96.24 Mbps download in the Speedtest app.3/9/2023: Starlink Flight Test: What It’s Like Using SpaceX’s Broadband for Inflight Wi-Fi, PCMag

I’d been trying to find a way to test JSX’s Starlink WiFi when I’d already be on the West Coast near one of the airports this regional carrier serves, but instead the media day the carrier hosted in Dallas allowed me to get this done. (As I noted in the story, JSX provided airfare to and from DFW plus one night’s lodging.) For another read on their inflight connectivity, see Zach Griff’s writeup at The Points Guy; for a take on JSX’s overall value proposition, enjoy this post from Gary Leff at View From the Wing.

3/9/2023: S03 E47 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

Watch the video version to see me talking with my hands while opining about CDA 230.

3/11/2023: How Can Big Tech Preserve Reproductive Rights? Cool It With the Data Collection, PCMag

Of course the first panel I’d watch in Austin would feature a tech-policy type from D.C., Center for Democracy & Technology president and CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens–along with former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and The Markup CEO Nabiha Syed.

3/11/2023: Can You Tell Whether this Headline Was Written by a Robot?, Grit Daily House

I moderated this 20-minute panel at the media house set up offsite by my conference pal Jordan French’s startup-news publication. Something I learned from my conversation with Anne Ahola Ward, John Sung Kim, and De Kai: AI is already doing a lot of work on LinkedIn, in terms of polishing profiles and writing recruitment letters.

A rite of (almost) spring renewed: SXSW PR thirstiness

Here’s how I know that SXSW is back to its usual self: “I had to pass up on the race-track event because I accepted an invitation to visit a nuclear reactor instead” is a true statement about my scheduling for this gathering in Austin. Even if it is also a profoundly weird one.

(Yes, there is a small research reactor on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, and I have my journalistic reasons to stop by.)

Years ago, South by Southwest developed a second life as Marketing Spring Break–a time when social media managers, PR reps, ad execs, and brand ambassadors felt at liberty to set corporate credit cards on fire to try to get the interest of journalists and, more important, influencers with free tacos, free drinks, free BBQ, and more free drinks.

And then the pandemic rudely slammed the door shut on that judgment-free zone in 2020–in the process punching a hole in the pocketbooks of service-industry professionals and many other Austinites who counted on March as a bonus-income month.

SXSW resumed in person last year, but it wasn’t clear that its marketing-driven gift economy would resume. Now that does seem certain, to judge from the clogged state of my inbox as a stream of messages come with requests that I stop by this panel or that reception or this “activation” (in the SXSW context, that means renting out a bar or restaurant and turning it into a three-dimensional ad for the company in question). I can only imagine the ROI calculations that went into some of these events.

To be clear: I’m not complaining! Being this sought-out is nice, even if some of these PR types may be putting in this effort because they still think I write for USA Today. And even if all this attention–see also, CES–can make one wonder why the compensation of journalists doesn’t reflect the apparent value of our time and attention as indicated at events like this.

Because despite all the marketing hype, SXSW continues to gather smart people to talk about interesting problems in a city that I enjoy coming back to, and which has excellent food even if you must pay for it with your own credit card. See you soon, Austin!

Updated 3/10/2023 to make the title compliant with season definitions.

Weekly output: Google MWC updates, Nokia’s lunar LTE, anti-virus software, Bluetooth Auracast, fixed wireless 5G, most innovative robotics companies, Formic’s robots as a service, broadband and pay-TV subscribers, Microsoft’s plans for digital deserts

I wrote three of the items below between weeks and months ago, but I still feel a little tired looking at this list now. And yes, I have had a lot of naps since coming home from MWC Thursday–because I need to rest up before I head out to Austin for SXSW on Friday.

2/27/2023: Google Kicks Off MWC With Grab-Bag of Android, Wear OS, Chrome OS Updates, PCMag

Google PR sent this embargoed announcement to me and my PCMag colleague Eric Zeman. He had enough other things to write–as in, he somehow cranked out eight posts Monday–so it fell to me to cover this.

2/27/2023: How Do You Make LTE Relevant at MWC 2023? Fly It to the Moon, PCMag

I wrote about this project last year for Fast Company, but this time I could look at a life-size model of the rover and quiz one of the researchers face-to-face on the MWC show floor. And yet despite that acquaintance with the topic, we had to correct the story after publication.

AARP story, as seen in Safari on an iPad mini 6.2/27/2023: Should You Pay for Antivirus Software? These Experts Say No, AARP

My debut at AARP covers a topic I’ve been writing about since I was way too young to let myself think about AARP membership: Should you pay for a third-party anti-virus app or stick with the security tools that came with your desktop, laptop, tablet or phone?

2/28/2023: A Quick Listen With Bluetooth Auracast: Like a Hotspot, But for Audio, PCMag

I got a demo of this short-range audio broadcast technology Tuesday morning, then wrote it up after in the afternoon after multiple meetings and at least one nap.

3/1/2023: Questions over FWA capacity, competition dominate MWC, Light Reading

I watched this panel about fixed-wireless access late Monday morning and found time to write it up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, when jet lag once again left me staring at the ceiling of my Airbnb and I gave up trying to sleep for a bit.

3/2/2023: The 10 most innovative companies in robotics of 2023, Fast Company

My introduction to the Most Innovative Companies feature consisted of judging candidates in this category, then narrowing my choices over a couple of rounds and finally writing up profiles of the 10 finalists. It was fascinating and educational work, and I hope I can do it again.

3/2/2023: This startup is reviving American manufacturing with robots as a service, Fast Company

One of those 10 “MIC” honorees in the robotics category, a Chicago startup called Formic, also earned a spot in the overall top 50, so I interviewed the CEO and wrote this profile that print Fast Co. readers can see in the March/April issue of the magazine.

3/3/2023: Brutal Year for Pay TV Sees Wireless Carrier Broadband Picking Up Steam, PCMag

The telecom consultancy Leichtman Research Group posted their summary of 2022 broadband subscriber trends on Thursday (when I was too tired to think about writing that up) and then posted their 2022 pay-TV recap Friday morning, allowing me to cover both in one post.

3/5/2023: Microsoft’s ambitions for digital deserts, Al Jazeera

Having covered this topic for PCMag in December, I was happy to accept AJ’s invitation to come into their D.C. studio for a quick interview (overdubbed live into Arabic as usual) about the ambitions of Microsoft and others to get hundreds of millions of people online in the world’s poorest countries.

I remain a WhatsApp curmodgeon

My six days in Barcelona for MWC had me using one app far more than usual: WhatsApp. But while I often delight in seeing people route their communications out from under the control of incumbent telecom operators, every time somebody asked me to message or call them in that Meta-owned app, I felt a little more grumpy.

That’s because WhatsApp continues to lack a feature found on any 1970s Trimline phone or on a turn-of-the-century, five-line-display cell phone: You cannot text or call a random set of digits unless you first let this app ingest your entire contacts list.

My phone's screen shows the Android system permissions dialog asking if WhatsApp should have access to my contacts, with MWC attendees in the background.

As WhatsApp says in two of the more shameful dialogs around: “To make a call, allow WhatsApp access to your contacts” and “To help you message friends and family on WhatsApp, allow WhatsApp access to your contacts.”

I got tired years ago of apps making sweeping demands for my data and don’t see any reason for contacts upload to be a prerequisite to pinging somebody I just met and may never run into again, so I keep declining that request.

WhatsApp’s FAQ item about contact upload makes a respectable argument for its stewardship of this data, saying it doesn’t collect non-phone-number contact details and deletes the numbers of non-WhatsApp-using people after saving a cryptographic hash of their digits for future cross-referencing should they join later.

But WhatsApp’s parent firm has racked up quite a list of privacy violations, some of which led to the Federal Trade Commission hitting it with a $5 billion fine in 2019 that still stands as a record penalty.

And that WhatsApp FAQ item doesn’t even try to answer why without contacts permission, the app won’t let you punch in any random phone number to start a chat or call. Or how if you revoke that permission, it will stop showing the names of contacts–a creepy move that in 2019 Fast Company’s Michael Grothaus called “one of the most manipulative things Facebook does with WhatsApp.”

In the U.S., being a WhatsApp contacts-access refusenik isn’t so bad, because most people still use carrier texting services. But in the rest of the world, historically higher carrier prices for messaging have made WhatsApp far more widely used. And at MWC that led to some awkward moments.

Most of the time, I could socially engineer my way out of them by asking my new acuaintance to message me from their copy of WhatsApp, at which point I could reply from my copy. One MWC attendee then pointed me to the option to have WhatsApp show a QR code that other people can scan to add you to their contacts lists.

And after coming home, I learned of the click-to-chat option in which you can type in a wa.me Web address in your phone’s browser that ends with a contact’s number (no dashes or spaces) to have the app open a chat thread with that individual.

It’s good, I guess, that WhatsApp provides workarounds for its own demand for the data of people who may have zero interest in seeing their numbers get uploaded even briefly. It would be better if WhatsApp would show a little humility and end this gropey, growth-hacking nonsense.

Weekly output: free MLS Season Pass via T-Mobile, Twitter snuffs out transparency reports, MWC preview, spam calls, Android data-safety labels, fake reviews, mobile edge computing

BARCELONA–Ten years after my first trip here for the telecom trade show then called Mobile World Congress, I’ve learned a lot about the event, the wireless industry and this lovely city. Alas, I cannot say as much about dealing with jet lag.

2/21/2023: Here’s How to Get a Free MLS Season Pass From T-Mobile, PCMag

I wrote up a quick explainer of this process after stepping through it on my own phone.

Story as seen in Safari on an iPad mini; lead art is a color-shifted image of Elon Musk2/22/2023: Twitter’s transparency reporting has tanked under Elon Musk, Fast Company

I can’t take credit for noticing that Twitter had not posted a transparency report since last July–the Washington Post’s Cristiano Lima brought that to my attention a few weeks ago–but I did get some justifiably-angry quotes from digital-rights experts about this latest casualty of Elon Musk’s chaotic reign. A few days later, Rolling Stone picked up on this subject and got some good quotes from former Twitter staffers.

2/22/2023: Episode 8 – Previewing MWC 2023, Liberty On the Line

I joined this Liberty Comms podcast–hosted by Liberty CEO Elena Davidson, with the other guests being telco analyst Charlotte Patrick and Telecoms.com editor Scott Bicheno–to talk about what I’m expecting from the event and share some MWC tips. Of course, my advice started with taking the metro.

2/23/2023: If You Think Phone Spam Is Bad in the US, Try Picking Up in Argentina, PCMag

I wrote up a study of spam calls–which can include both unwanted calls from legitimate businesses and outright fraud–among dozens of countries that found that U.S. callers actually don’t have things too bad.

2/23/2023: Don’t Trust the ‘Data Safety’ Labels on These Android Apps, PCMag

I got an advance on this Mozilla study of how the privacy labels in Google’s Play Store compare to the privacy policies of their developers, then updated the post with a comment from Google. Big surprise, Google was not happy with it. I imagine the company was even less happy with Gizmodo’s more scathing coverage of this study.

2/24/2023: Fake Online Reviews, CQ Researcher

My former Washington Post business-section colleague Kathleen Day quizzed me for this piece and quoted me once in it.

2/26/2023: The Interoperable Mobile Edge: New monetization opportunities for operators and enterprises via the Telco Edge Cloud, MEF Global Forum

I took part in a brief discussion at the Mobile Ecosystem Forum’s afternoon event with Summit Tech chief sales and marketing officer Doug Makishima, STL Partners principal consultant and edge practice lead Tilly Gilbert, and Bridge Alliance senior vice president Ken Wee about mobile edge computing–think cloud computing, except fast 5G connections let telecom firms push the remote processing much closer to the customer or device in question. As a student of digital privacy, I said I was most interested in “MEC” because of how it can allow personal data to be processed and then deleted much closer to its source than traditional cloud architectures often permit.

Spring, sprung much earlier than usual

The calendar tells me that winter remains in effect around Washington. And yet temperatures today hit 81 degrees at National Airport, while at home I found myself distracted by the sight of buds on the trees around our house between doing what I think is my earliest ever weeding of the yard.

Buds on a cherry tree, with leaf-flecked grass in the background.

Old photos taken around this time in February tell a different story. We’ve had snowfall–enough for cross-country skiing, although in some years that’s required placing a sufficiently low value on one’s x-c skis–as late as mid March and not that long ago.

Today’s unseasonably warm temperatures and the too-early harbingers of spring that preceded it could be just a random roll of the climate dice that will be undone next winter. That is my hope, because I like living in a place with distinct seasons and even the occasional blizzard. I would be sad if I had to retire our snow shovels, notwithstanding how shoveling the sidewalk can be exhausting, back-aching work.

It’s supposed to get cold again next week, and Saturday it may yet snow. But if it doesn’t, at least we’ve already had some actual, paltry accumulation this year–which I think elevates 2023 over 2020 even before we get into everything else that went wrong three years ago.