This edition of my weekly recap features a new client: The Parallax, the security-news site founded in 2015 by former C|Net writer Seth Rosenblatt. At least two friends had suggested earlier that I look into writing there, but that didn’t happen until I spotted Seth at the Google I/O press lounge earlier this month and introduced myself. If you were going to ask about the absence of another client in this post: Yahoo Finance hasn’t forgotten about me, I haven’t forgotten about them, and I’ve got three posts in the works there this coming week. Hint: One involves a hydrogen-fueled car.

5/22/2018: IoT regulation is coming, regardless of what Washington does, The Parallax

I wrote up the panel I moderated at RightsCon two weeks ago–which required me to record the whole thing on my phone and then spend an hour and change transcribing everything. On the upside, having to set aside my phone to capture the audio meant I couldn’t be distracted by the Twitter backchannel during the panel.

5/24/2018: Don’t ignore this alert from Facebook. It’s your chance to quickly curb what it knows, USA Today

I filed a cheat sheet on the privacy-settings pop-up you may have already seen. I got my version of this interruption Friday; mine did not advise me to check the info in my profile, maybe because I don’t have anything there advertising my political or religious leanings.

5/24/2018: 20 years on, L0pht hackers return to D.C. with dire warnings, The Parallax

The lede for this popped into my head not long after arriving at the Rayburn House Office Building for this panel Tuesday afternoon and noticing that the name tags in front of the room featured the hacker handles of the four speakers instead of their given names: Kingpin (Joe Grand), Mudge (Peiter Zatko), Weld Pond (Chris Wysopal), and Space Rogue (Cris Thomas). At one point, Zatko complained about companies that try to win over customers by stapling on “flashy security products” like anti-malware utilities; as the Parallax is sponsored by the anti-malware vendor Avast, I made sure to include that line, and it went into the post intact.

5/26/2018: May 26, 2017 — Rob Pegoraro and Ben Williams, Tech Night Owl

I showed up on Gene Steinberg’s podcast to talk about my at-the-time incomplete iMac drive transplant (by the time he rang me on Skype, I hadn’t finished disassembling the old drive, which is an anxious point at which to have to set aside the work), the weird case of an Amazon Echo capturing and sending a recording of people’s in-home banter, and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.