Tomorrow evening I head to Berlin to cover the IFA electronics trade show (as in prior years, the organizers are covering most of the travel expenses of a group of U.S. journalists and analysts, myself among them). I’m back next Sunday, after which I have all of three nights at home before I fly to New Orleans for the Online News Association’s conference. And that’s not all of September’s travel. Yay, conference season?

If you’ve signed up at my Patreon page, you would have been able to read notes from my first look at Sprint’s 5G service–both in D.C. and at my home. I like the idea of sharing my first observations of a gadget, app or event there, so I will probably do that more often. If you like the idea of reading them before they condense into article form, $2 a month gets you in.

8/31/2019: Rewinding a Netflix account hack: Why would somebody bother?, USA Today

This post started with a tweet from Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi about getting locked out of her Netflix account. I thought she had experienced an interesting problem–both in the sense of the reward for a Netflix account takeover being so limited, and in the sense of my wondering if Netflix’s systems had offered enough resistance to this takeover–and started making inquiries. One of those was to Netflix itself; at first, the company’s PR director wanted to answer on a not-for-attribution basis, but I said I’d really rather have an actual named human quoted. She said that would be okay, and I’m glad I pressed that point.