We’re now more than halfway through this presidential term, which is crazy to think about considering that January 2017 sometimes feels like it happened five years ago.
The cable industry chose CES week to announce its “10G” initiative for 10-Gbps broadband, which helped ensure that I couldn’t get around to unpacking how much of his plan isn’t new until a couple of weeks later.
I returned to my occasional client to write this wonky article about how cloud services and mobile devices are democratizing geographic information systems in much the same way that they’ve opened up online publishing.
For the first time since two Augusts ago, I have no new bylines in a week. I did file one story, not yet posted, and get much of the reporting done for two others–after losing much of the first two days from having our schools closed after last weekend’s snowstorm–but it’s still annoying to have this post equate to a divide-by-zero error.
And that happened even though I worked for a good chunk of this weekend: I spent most of Saturday at the Shmoocon cybersecurity conference in D.C. I connected with people much better-informed than me, picked up some useful insights that I hope to turn into a post, caught up with an old friend, and enjoyed spotting the hilarious National Security Agency recruitment ad pictured at right. (No, I did not plug in my phone.)
Having this con take place at the Washington Hilton provided a bonus level of amusement. I’ve been at the venue Washingtonians call the Hinckley Hilton for many other events, but none had involved so many people with hair dyed interesting colors and on-message t-shirts (e.g,, “Crypto means cryptography”). That was an excellent change-up from this hotel’s usual overdressed look.
I never work harder in a week than during CES, so I immensely appreciated the gift of a snowstorm this weekend that let me get in some cross-country skiing, go sledding with my daughter on the nearest suitable hill and think about work very little.
If you’ve already read all of the posts below, please check out my Flickr album from the show.
My spot on this panel track was an onstage interview of cryptocurrency investor Michael Terpin about how a SIM-swap hack led to him being robbed of startup tokens worth almost $24 million at the time.
Just about every one of the 22 consecutive CESes that I’ve covered has led to me writing a report on the state of the TV. This year’s version involves an unusual company: Apple.
Once again, I helped judge this gadget competition and introduced one of the contestants–Origami Labs, developer of the Orii smart ring. This year’s contest, however, featured a new emcee. Instead of my former Yahoo colleague David Pogue, my USA Today colleague Jennifer Jolly did the honors.
Once Samsung explained how this year’s version of their Family Hub fridge automatically identified food inside visible to its three interior cameras, Silicon Valley’s “Shazam for food” plot line immediately jumped into my head. That also led me to think of the role of hacked smart fridges in the HBO comedy–which made the unwillingness of so many CES smart-home exhibitors to talk specifics about security fixes all the more annoying.
I wasn’t sure how I’d end this story until finding myself staring at a an enormous John Deere combine–brought to the show floor to exhibit how GPS guidance lets it drive itself to an extraordinary degree of accuracy. That makes it a very large drone that happens to help bring corn and corn-based products to supermarkets, and there I had my ending.
This take on TV technology revisited some CES flops of a decade and two decades ago: 3-D TV and the would-be CD-upgrade formats DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD.
I wrote this, along with the two prior stories, after landing at Dulles early Friday morning. It turns out that you can be productive after a red-eye flight home if you pass out for almost the entire flight, nap a couple of times during the day and apply caffeine as needed.
Updated 1/24/2019 with video of my interview of Michael Terpin.
Just as I predicted a year ago, cable and broadband companies marked the new year with a round of rate hikes. This time around, I focused on increases to the add-on fees that are usually confined to the fine print of ads.
A couple of readers complained that this column didn’t address third-party solutions for reading your texts on your Mac or PC–for example, MightyText, Pushbullet, Pulse SMS. That, I have to admit, is a fair point.
Updated 1/15/2019 to add a link to the Wirecutter how-to post that I’d missed at the time.
I hope your holidays have involved a minimum of tech support–and if they did, it was of the sort that allowed you to declare victory and accept compliments from relatives in time for dinner.
I marked my seventh anniversary of writing for USAT in a subpar way. We had to correct this column because I swapped the free-storage allotments of Microsoft and Google, even though I pay each company for extra storage because their no-charge tiers weren’t enough. Then we tweaked it further to reflect Dropbox offering a discount for yearly billing.
I wrote this year-in-preview post in part to take yet another whack at Facebook for its fumbling responses to its privacy failings and obvious violations of its rules. But along the way, I kept getting angrier about its continued addiction to the Silicon Valley cult of engagement. Facebook–and Google, while I’m at it–needs to stop acting like a startup growth-hacking its way to traction, consequences be damned.
Looking at my last possible day of Christmas shopping reminds me of one evening in pre-Amazon days when I wrapped up the season’s gift procurement on my walk home along Connecticut Avenue–by ducking into the shops I found interesting. That was not a cheaper time, but in some ways it was a simpler time.
I had meant to write this earlier, but breaking news kept interrupting my progress. Fortunately, Facebook kept getting tripped up by new reports of its erratic enforcement of its own rules.
I had my first spot on the Arabic-language news station in a several weeks to talk about Twitter’s disclosure of a data breach that revealed the country codes of the phone numbers of some users–a data point that could have helped certain foreign intelligence agencies. My spot comes up at about 18 minutes into this clip.
I had a second appearance on an Arabic-language channel this Tuesday, this time to talk about the two reports commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian disinformation campaigns. I’m on at 35 minutes in.
I returned to AJ to talk about the New York Times report documenting Facebook’s history of poorly-governed data-sharing deals with other companies; I start to discuss this some 19 minutes into this clip.
I thought of one good angle to put into this post about messaging interoperability while I was on my way to Al Jazeera’s studio Thursday: Facebook’s abandoned, now-largely-forgotten plan to turn its messaging service into an email alternative that you could use from any browser.
The House Judiciary Committee–in particular, certain of its Republican members–obliged me by living up so completely to this preview of Google chief executive Sundar Pichai’s Tuesday appearance there.
Microsoft president Brad Smith came to the Brookings Institution last week to make an unusual plea: Please regulate us before we get dragged into a race to the bottom with ethically-unbounded vendors of facial-recognition technology.
I got an advance on this news from one of Lime’s publicists; by itself, this new feature isn’t a huge development, but covering it allowed me to discuss broader failings in both Google and Apple’s navigation software.
I wrote about several security and privacy questions that should have been asked during Pichai’s grilling but never came up. The single worst omission: Not a single representative even mentioned the name of a non-Google search engine.
I’ve had the idea of an explainer about “U2F” security keys on my to-do list for a while. In the time it took for me to sell the piece, Microsoft and Apple finally began moving to support this particularly secure two-step verification option.
My former Washington Post colleague Jackie Spinner wrote about how the sites of some U.S. newspapers continue to block European readers instead of complying with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. She gave me a chance to critique this self-defeating practice–I’d earlier griped about it in a Facebook comments thread with her–and I was happy to give her few quotes.
1/22/2019: Techdirt Podcast Episode 196: The CES 2019 Post-Mortem, Techdirt
Once again, a Sunday in January finds me in Las Vegas for 
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12/18/2018: 
