It’s been another week with less stories to my name than usual. I’ve done more work than the number of links would suggest–over the past two weeks, I’ve filed three pieces that have not yet been posted–but it does look bad.

10/20/2017: Why the Feds want to make it easier for them to get into your phone, Yahoo Finance

I’ve written dozens of posts about the angst of law-enforcement types over the rise of encrypted devices and apps that they can’t search, so for this one I quizzed a few different sources… and came up with the same overall conclusion as before.

10/22/2017: Why Flash and Microsoft Silverlight frustrations just won’t go away, USA Today

I had what I thought would be a decent column with meaningless quotes from publicists at three sites that still ask their users to install Flash or Silverlight–but then a publicist for Major League Baseball told me that they’d move from Flash to HTML5 video for the 2018 season, a fact they had yet to announce.