Now it can be told: I spent all of the last two weeks on the West Coast, with my stay in Las Vegas for Black Hat and DEF CON sandwiched inside time with my in-laws in California. That let me have a much shorter trip to and from Vegas and then segue from WiFi security to a little wine tasting and, more important, a lot of napping.

8/12/2019: WiFi can be a free-for-all for hackers. Here’s how to stop them from taking your data, USA Today

I e-mailed this to my editor with the following note: “I’m sending this over the DEF CON conference WiFi, so if you only see pirate-flag emoji I trust you’ll call or text to warn me.” If you don’t want to read all 600-ish words in this piece, the top three are “encryption is your friend.”

8/12/2019: This tech could secure voting machines, but not before 2020, Yahoo Finance

One of the big reasons I decided to stick around Vegas for DEF CON–even though it meant I’d have to pay $300 in cash for that conference badge–was the chance to see the exhibits and presentations at its Voting Village. The proceedings did not disappoint, even if a DARPA demo from a project with the delightful acronym of SSITH is far from yielding shipping voting hardware.

8/12/2019: Google got Apple to fix 10 security flaws in the iPhone, Yahoo Finance

Black Hat offered a two-course serving of Apple-security news. Its first day featured a briefing from Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich about how her team uncovered 10 serious iOS vulnerabilities, and then its second day brought a talk from Apple security-engineering head Ivan Krstić that ended with news of a much more open bug-bounty program.

8/14/2019: This Morning with Gordon Deal August 13, 2019, This Morning with Gordon Deal

I talked about my USAT column on this business-news radio program; my spot starts just after the 13th minute.