This was my first Easter spent in the D.C. area since… sometime in the mid 1990s? I would like to know a more exact date, but those years passed when I still used paper calendars that I lost in a prior millennium.

4/6/2020: Gaps in Internet access, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk about inconsistent Internet access–some the fault of dysfunctional economies, some the fault of governments deciding that cutting off the Internet will help them manage domestic dissent. The next day, an e-mail from the advocacy group AccessNow scolded Qatar and its neighboring Gulf states for blocking WhatsApp, FaceTime and other Internet-calling apps.

4/9/2020: Who Wrote That Hit Song? It Depends on How Human They Are., Glimmer

My second post for the Web-creativity shop Glitch’s equivalent of an inflight mag covered how copyright law should treat works created by artificial intelligence. I haven’t had a chance to get into the weeds about intellectual-property policy like this since I was last writing for the Disruptive Competition Project seven years ago; I’m glad there’s still a market for that sort of wonky work.

4/12/2020: Using apps to trace COVID-19, Al Jazeera

AJ had me on a second time this week to talk about the potential of smartphone apps to help trace patterns of novel-coronavirus transmission–without giving your location history up to Google or the government or even sharing your name with the people you might have occupied some personal space with after catching this virus.