Category Archives: Weekly output

Weekly output: locked phones, tax-return fraud

Posted on by
1

BARCELONA–Mobile World Congress officially starts tomorrow, but I’ve been here since Saturday morning and have already attended five vendor events here. The one you’ve read most about, Samsung’s unveiling of the Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones, is also the one MWC event I knew beforehand that I wouldn’t have to cover–my regular clients all got pre-briefed before the show and had copy ready when Samsung’s embargo expired. That freed me to take notes and play with the S9’s AR Emoji feature at my relative leisure instead of hunkering down with my laptop to file a report.

2/22/2018: Verizon’s decision to stop selling unlocked phones means travelers need to plan ahead, USA Today

Verizon’s impending move to lock phones it sells for some period after subscribers activate them won’t be as strict as its competitors’ policies, but it also reinforces the argument I’ve been making for years: Don’t buy your phone from your wireless carrier. So does the $70-above-list prices three of the big four carriers announced tonight for Samsung’s new phones.

Yahoo tax-return-fraud post2/23/2018: Tax return scammers are taking a big hit, Yahoo Finance

A year and a half ago, I’d started gathering string for a post about the problem of tax-return identity-theft fraud–sparked by my seeing a Facebook post from a friend who is both a privacy professional and a serial victim of that problem. For various lame reasons, I failed to turn those notes into a story at the time. But tax time inevitably rolled around again–and then the IRS served up a novel and more interesting news peg by making serious progress in reducing this problem.

Advertisements

Weekly output: forced-redirect ads, broadband infrastructure, Russian indictments

Posted on by
Reply

After a workweek that I interrupted for an overdue reunion with my skis, I have another abbreviated week coming up. On top of Monday being a holiday, early Friday evening I depart for Barcelona to cover my sixth Mobile World Congress show. If you have any questions about the state of the smartphone–especially outside the U.S. market–the next five days would be a great time to get them to me.

2/12/2018: Surfing the web can leave you open to ad hijackings. A browser fix has been slow, USA Today

I revised earlier coverage of “forced-redirect” ads that hijack your Web reading to note that Google had wound up not activating an advertised defense against this scam in January’s update to Chrome.

2/16/2018: Trump needs to do more to get more Americans online, Yahoo Finance

A year ago, even some skeptics of President Trump voiced cautious optimism that his vaunted infrastructure plan would include a broadband component. This week’s release of that plan–yes, over a year after he took office pledging to rebuild America’s roads, rails, airports and waterways–pretty much crushed those hopes. This post outlines some ways that this plan could have done better.

2/17/2018: Russian social-media indictments, Al Jazeera

For once, I was able to chase down a link to one of my appearances on the news network’s Arabic-language channel. If you can speak Arabic, skip to the 11:15 mark in this evening-news roundup and please let me know how intelligent (or not) the live translation made me sound about the Justice Department’s indictment of 13 Russians and the St. Petersburg troll factory that calls itself the “Internet Research Agency.”

Weekly output: Falcon Heavy (x2), family-plan wireless math, Strava privacy, Web-site defacements, Tech Night Owl

Posted on by
1

This week was more exciting than most: I returned to the Kennedy Space Center for the first time since 2011 to see the liftoff of the most powerful rocket to leave American soil since 1973. I still can’t quite believe that I pulled that off… but I have the photos I took around Launch Complex 39A and the audio of the launch I recorded from the KSC press site to remind me that I did.

2/6/2018: SpaceX successfully launches the world’s most powerful rocket, Yahoo Finance

Two posts about the Falcon Heavy appeared at this Web address. The first was a curtain-raiser I filed late Monday explaining the significance of the Falcon Heavy. The second was a launch story–written in advance so I only had to add descriptions of the liftoff and the subsequent landing of the outer first-stage boosters–that my editors subbed in Tuesday afternoon. I also had a third post mostly ready that you didn’t read: a just-in-case piece about an unsuccessful launch that became irrelevant minutes after 3:45 p.m. Tuesday.

If you didn’t get a chance to see the pre-launch story at Yahoo, you can still read it at the Internet Archive, as shown in the screengrab above.

2/7/2018: The family cell-phone bill: How to find savings on shared wireless plans, USA Today

A reader complained that last week’s USAT column on cheaper alternatives to unlimited data for a smartphone didn’t offer any insight about saving money on shared-use family plans. Dear reader: story assignment accepted.

2/7/2018: The Strava social exercise app can reveal your home address, Yahoo Finance

I was grateful for this chance to redeem my prior Strava coverage: a study by a mobile-security firm that revealed how that exercise-tracking app’s geofenced privacy options can pinpoint a Strava user’s home address instead of obscuring it.

2/10/2018: Kuwait interior-ministry site hacked, Al-Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk (overdubbed live into Arabic) about a recent episode of a hacker in Saudi Arabia defacing the site of Kuwait’s Interior Ministry. There’s a long history of this kind of digital vandalism, and fortunately the host mainly asked me about that instead of Gulf politics.

2/10/2018: February 10, 2018 — Kirk McElhearn and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I talked with host Gene Steinberg about the Falcon Heavy launch, Strava’s privacy issues and Apple’s new HomePod speaker. Gene’s other guest was Kirk McElhearn, who’s long been among my favorite Apple reporters.

Weekly output: Amy Webb, unlimited data, connected-car privacy, commercial geoint, U2F adoption, ECPA reform

Posted on by
Reply

The next few days will be a little crazy–starting with a 6 a.m. flight tomorrow to Orlando. I’m returning to Central Florida for the first time since 2011 to cover SpaceX’s attempt Tuesday to launch the Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful launch vehicle the U.S. has seen since the Saturn V. Assuming no scrubs, then I’m flying up to New York Tuesday night so I can cover Yahoo Finance’s cryptocurrency-focused All Markets Summit Wednesday, after which I will be delighted to sleep in my own bed once again.

1/29/2018: Fireside Chat with Futurist Amy Webb, State of the Net

I interviewed Amy at this tech-policy conference. She started with some harsh words about Washington’s ability to forecast future tech trends (her stock in trade), which probably didn’t go over very well in the room even if many policymakers around here need to realize the limits of their vision.

1/31/2018: Unlimited wireless data is here to stay; so is the need to check your options, USA Today

A new study by OpenSignal finding that download speeds at AT&T and Verizon have rebounded after a slump the research firm blamed on their shift to selling unlimited-data plans provided a news peg for this column reminding readers that they may be able to save money by opting for a limited-data plan–as unfashionable as that may be.

1/31/2018: Why a car can’t protect your privacy as well as a smartphone, Yahoo Finance

Watching a few panels at the Washington Auto Show’s public-policy day last week got me thinking about how Google Maps and connected cars each treat your location history–only one lets you inspect, edit, export and delete that information, and it’s not the one that requires an oil change.

1/31/2018: The Vanguard of Commercial GEOINT, Trajectory Magazine

This is the cover story for the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s quarterly magazine that holds up reasonably well for the first three-fourths or so–after which comes a bit on Strava that now looks problematic.

2/1/2018:  The authentication solution government has been slow to adopt, Fifth Domain

I’ve been meaning to write something about what’s held up the usage of “U2F” security keys–the cryptographically-signed USB fobs that can protect your Gmail or Facebook account from both phishing and the loss of either your phone number or your phone. This new government-cybersecurity site gave me that opportunity.

2/2/2018: The email privacy hole Congress won’t fix, Yahoo Finance

A couple of years ago, I started thinking that whenever Congress finally passed reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, it would be fun to write a post recapping how long that took. Well, that hasn’t happened, so I decided to use Groundhog Day to instead write a post recapping how long Congress has failed to fix this obsolete law.

Weekly output: Section 702 surveillance, ad fraud, App Store review

Posted on by
Reply

Monday will be my first workday spent entirely in D.C. since mid December. I’m both attending and speaking (as in, quizzing futurist Amy Webb) at the State of the Net conference at the Newseum. “SOTN” is always a good tech-policy talkfest, and you can watch the proceedings live at its site.

1/22/2018: What you need to know about the government’s renewed surveillance law, Yahoo Finance

This explanation of the National Security Agency’s “Section 702” authorization to spy on foreign-intelligence suspects from within U.S. territory should have run in December. But once again, CES Advent left me with too little bandwidth to write the post then.

1/23/2018: How a gang of crooks hijacked your web browser, Yahoo Finance

One of the companies that I talked to for a December post on the plague of “forced-redirect” ads offered me an advance look at a study they’d done of a racket that not only inflicted these ads on readers at scale but set up its own network of fake ad agencies to get their fake ads on real networks. We updated the post a couple of days later to note that the report no longer mentioned two ad networks as being especially willing to do business with con-ad artists.

1/24/2018: Net neutrality app is a lesson in Apple’s App Store power, USA Today

I’ve been writing about Apple’s use and misuse of its App Store review authority for almost as long as I’ve been writing about net neutrality, so an episode involving Apple rejecting an app designed to help users spot net-neutality violations was an obvious topic.

Weekly output: a bum Bitcoin deal, CES recap, Facebook and trusted news

Posted on by
Reply

The week after CES is always among my less productive ones–but this year, I can’t blame that on coming down with a CES-transmitted cold. Fortunately, I have the Dealmaker-in-Chief’s accomplishments of the past few days to put my own in a more positive context.

1/15/2018: Kodak bitcoin miner: What this dubious scheme says about technology’s misdirection, USA Today

My last post about CES unpacked a dubious Bitcoin-mining proposition on display in Kodak’s booth.

1/16/2018: Techdirt Podcast Episode 150: The CES 2018 Post-Mortem, Techdirt

I spent an hour or so talking with Techdirt’s Mike Masnick about what we saw at CES and what that suggests about the state of technology. Once again, I was struck by how more than two decades of practice at CES did not stop me from missing some interesting things at the show.

1/20/2018: Facebook and trusted news sources, Al-Jazeera

The news channel had me on to talk–as usual, overdubbed live into Arabic–about Facebook’s announcement that it will survey its users to see which news sites they trust, then prioritize those sources in the News Feed accordingly. I expressed my doubts about that idea, noting that a survey done last summer by the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute found that ranked Buzzfeed less trustworthy than Brietbart News–and that the conspiracy-theory outlet Infowars outranked both.

Weekly output: Meltdown and Spectre, CES 2017 revisited, CES 2018 (x3), TV technology, IoT security, Last Gadget Standing, Volocopter, Facebook News Feed

Posted on by
Reply

CES 2018 is done, but I’m nowhere near done recovering from the sleep deficit I ran up during my 21st consecutive trip (!) to the Consumer Technology Association’s gargantuan gadget show. While I try to catch up with that, why not have a look at my Flickr album from the convention?

1/8/2018: That big computer security flaw has one hidden value, USA Today

Not long after this post about the Meltdown and Spectre processor bugs went up Monday, we updated it to note that Apple had since posted a second batch of updates.

1/8/2018: How the hottest gadgets from CES 2017 panned out, Yahoo Finance

This exercise in self-accountability journalism is something I should do before every return to CES… and Mobile World Congress and SXSW and Google I/O and Web Summit, etc. etc.

1/9/2018: CES report, WTOP

I did a live radio interview without having had any coffee, which is always a risk. At least Washington’s news station quizzed me on-air early in CES week, when my voice was still mostly intact.

1/9/2018: CES 2018: The TV set will not be revolutionized, Yahoo Finance

The headline “The television will not be revolutionized” popped into my head as I was sitting in a CES press room Tuesday, and I knew it was the obvious headline for a post about the state of the TV even if there was no way I was the first to think of it. (Indeed, I wasn’t.) And then the copy desk tweaked the hed slightly anyway.

1/11/2018: CES 2018 Day 4 roundup: Self-driving cars and insanely big screens, Yahoo Finance

I shot this video recap with my Yahoo colleagues Dan Howley and JP Mangalindan after a few false starts that would make a great bloopers reel (one of us kept bursting into a stream of curses after flubbing a line, and that person wasn’t me). Looking at the video now, it’s clear that I didn’t tuck in my shirt properly or talk with my hands sufficiently.

1/11/2018: What a security expert thought of a few new smart-home devices at CES 2018, Yahoo Finance

In case people think that all CES pitches are a waste of time, this post started when I got an e-mail from a publicist for a local cybersecurity company that I’d talked to in October. I answered that offer of security insight by saying that what I could really use was a chance to follow the company founder around the CES floor to see him quiz various smart-home companies.

1/11/2018: Last Gadget Standing, Living in Digital Times

For the second year in a row, I helped judge this contest and introduced one contestant. (As you can see from that Facebook Live clip, I momentarily blanked on the name of one of the company founders.) The gadget in question, the Play Impossible Gameball, won the in-person vote–not because of anything I said, but because the founders put on a great presentation and had a fun, reasonably priced product.

1/11/2018: Intel wants this drone to fly you around, Yahoo Finance

Wednesday morning, I got to the Las Vegas Convention Center by 8 a.m.–it was the one traffic-free ride to there I had all week–for an up-close look at the passenger-carrying drone that Intel had shown off at Monday evening’s CES keynote.

1/12/2018: The weirdest tech of CES 2018, Yahoo Finance

I started writing this Thursday night at McCarran Airport before a sequence of flights that brought me to Dulles around 7 a.m. Friday, then finished the post at home that afternoon in a haze of sleep deprivation.

1/13/2018: Facebook’s new News Feed, Al Jazeera

The Arabic news channel had wanted me to talk Friday about Facebook’s coming de-prioritization of public pages in the News Feed. Fortunately, I had a schedule conflict more specific than “I’m so tired I need to sound out my words,” so they pushed this hit to Saturday.