Tag Archives: Ajit Pai

Weekly output: Sudan Internet shutdown, 5G and smart cities, net neutrality, Facebook marketing itself

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If you’ll have next Saturday morning free and a commute to George Mason University’s Fairfax campus wouldn’t be too bothersome, you can see me talk about privacy, security and other tech topics (while handing out random tech-event swag) at Washington Apple Pi’s general meeting. If this Apple user group’s schedule sticks to pattern, my spot will come up around 11 a.m.

6/12/2019: Sudan Internet shutdown, Al Jazeera

I made a Skype appearance on the Arabic-language news channel to talk about a frequent hobby of totalitarian governments: cutting off their citizens’ Internet access.

6/12/2019: Smart Cities Council—5G Networks: The Keys to Smart City Growth, CE Week

As the one person on this panel not working in the 5G or smart-cities spaces (as opposed to the Smart Cities Council’s Jason Nelson, Aero Wireless Group CEO Jim Lockwood, and Verizon 5G Labs manager Joshua Ness), I tried to ask the questions average customers and citizens might have about the advent of low-latency sensor networks in urban areas.

6/12/2019: The FCC said repealing net-neutrality rules would help consumers: It hasn’t, Yahoo Finance

I’ve had this piece on my to-do list since not long after the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 net-neutrality rules expired last June. I didn’t get a reply out of every small Internet provider that FCC chair Ajit Pai had cited as a victim of net neutrality, but the responses I did receive did not confirm the upsides Pai forecast when leading the drive to kill the old rules.

6/15/2019: Facebook’s new promotional push, Al Jazeera

Asked to comment on a Wall Street Journal report that Facebook would step up its please-trust-us marketing efforts, I reminded viewers of its previous efforts to do just that. Did they convince you that the company had turned a corner? I didn’t think so.

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Weekly output: net neutrality, Web browsers compared, Last Gadget Standing, China’s autonomous-vehicle ambitions, Sprint and Verizon “unlimited” data

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My most-distant business trip of the year is in the books, and I don’t even feel that tired after getting home Friday evening. Falling asleep in my own bed remains the single best cure for jet lag that I know. I’m traveling again this year coming week, but I’m only going about 3 percent as far–I’m in New York from Tuesday night through Friday afternoon for the CE Week show.

6/11/2018: Why the death of net-neutrality rules will be a big campaign issue, Yahoo Finance

I started writing this from Newark International Airport, then finished it and filed it from the plane–worrying I’d lose the satellite link as the plane got farther and farther north. My thanks to United for not leaving me in the lurch… and for opening some upgrade space just in time for my longest flight this year.

6/12/2018: Stuck on Chrome? Always use Safari? It may be time to break up with your default web browser, USA Today

Apple’s WWDC news about online privacy got my editor interested in a post comparing the virtues of the Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. If you still run Microsoft Internet Explorer, my advice in this column remains unchanged from prior years: stop.

6/13/2018: Last Gadget Standing, CES Asia

I helped emcee this competition along with my former Yahoo colleague Dan Tynan and Last Gadget’s impresario-in-chief Robin Raskin. I introduced and briefly quizzed the people behind three finalists: iGlass AR, Action One, and the Wahe nuclear living room machine V. Alas, my joke about the name of that last device–a streaming-media player with gaming aspirations–becoming “nucular living room machine” in the American South was never going to make it through translation.

6/16/2018: How self-driving cars will take to China’s roads, Yahoo Finance

I wrote most of this from my hotel, then filed it from my flight home–except that when edits came back, we were still too far north to have a reliable signal. And since I had stupidly neglected to e-mail photos before taking off, I also had to deal with the horribly slow uploads of satellite Internet.

For more from CES Asia, have a look at my Flickr album from the trip.

6/17/2018: Sprint and Verizon’s latest deals offer still more definitions of “Unlimited“, USA Today

Verizon decided that having two different flavors of unlimited wasn’t enough, so it added three–while Sprint elected to mix up its own offerings with a quickly-expiring offer that amounted to a Basic Economy level of unlimited data.

Weekly output: Apple Park, forced-redirect ads, net neutrality, tech trends, Tech Night Owl, media-player tips

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I would add up how many weeks this year have involved me writing about net-neutrality issues, but that would be too depressing.

12/11/2017: Why doesn’t Apple make its devices as carefully as it’s making Apple Park?, The Washington Post

After seeing Jony Ive’s talk at the Hirshhorn Museum last month, I tweeted out a line from him about how people should shut up about Apple Park’s perfectionist design–which then irked a great many people. I decided there was a story in this and, after striking out at two other places, found a home for it at the Post. Once again, I enjoyed confusing people who hadn’t seen my byline there in years.

12/11/2017: How to stop rogue ads that can set you up for malware, Yahoo Finance

When my mom asked how to dispel an obnoxious “forced-redirect” ads–the kind that take you off whatever you’re reading and then break your browser’s back button–I figured the problem was widespread enough to be story fodder.

12/14/2017: Here’s what you can expect now that the FCC has killed net neutrality, Yahoo Finance

The anger I’m seeing about this–not to mention the 3,767 comments this has drawn so far–suggest that FCC chair Ajit Pai’s PR strategy of laughing off fears is not calming anybody down.

12/16/2016: What’s Up With Tech?, PATACS

In my first talk to this user group since 2010, I talked about why I’m not sold on a handful of much-hyped technologies–4K TV, smart speakers, drones, virtual reality and Bitcoin. I brought a bag full of random trade-show swag to give away, and now I have that much more room in my home office’s closet.

12/16/2017: December 16, 2017 — Rob Pegoraro and Jeff Gamet, Tech Night Owl Live

I talked to host Gene Steinberg about the demise of the service once known as AOL Instant Messenger, net-neutrality politics, and my decision to replace my MacBook Air with a Windows laptop.

12/17/2017: Cord-cutting tips for setting up your new Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV, USA Today

The advice about using an Ethernet connection instead of WiFi should be obvious, but I’ll bet a lot of people don’t think about using Plex’s apps to play music and videos stored on their PCs or using a media player’s remote-control app to avoid having to type passwords by clicking at letters on the TV’s screen with the player’s regular remote.

 

 

Weekly output: net neutrality (x2), 2018 security risks, bargaining for a better TV or Internet bill

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One of the ways that self-employment has taught me to see the calendar differently: Once you put November in the books, you’ve pretty much put your yearly income in the books too unless you can sell something early in December to a client that pays unusually fast. (See also, a client worth keeping around.)

USAT net-neutrality transparency post11/28/2017: After net neutrality: Up to you to police the ISPs, USA Today

My contribution to USAT’s coverage of Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai’s move to repeal all of 2015’s net-neutrality rules was to unpack the disclosure requirements he would impose on Internet providers. One big catch: An ISP wouldn’t have to post on its own site that it blocks or slows certain sites or charges others for priority delivery of their bits.

11/28/2017: Why the FCC chair says social networks are the real threat to the free internet, Yahoo Finance

Pai gave a speech Tuesday that included some reasonable arguments against the current, proscriptive net-neutrality rules–and then pivoted to the deeply dubious contention that we should really worry about Twitter and other social networks being mean to conservatives.

11/29/2017: How hackers might target you in 2018, Yahoo Finance

I wrote up McAfee Labs’ cybersecurity forecast for next year–which identified the companies selling connected gadgets for your home as a major part of your privacy and security risks.

12/3/2017: Check your cable or Internet bill: After the first year discounts, it’s time to bargain, USA Today

Three weeks ago in San Francisco, I sat down with my USAT editor for the first time after two-plus years of her handling my column to brainstorm tech-support columns that might resonate over the holidays, and this was among them. Conveniently enough, my Thanksgiving tech support a week ago allowed me to inspect my mom’s Fios bill to see how Verizon breaks down its promotional discounts and what you’ll owe after their expiration.

 

Weekly output: Life as a journalist, data-cap calculations, FCC vs. net neutrality, “EC 261” flight-delay compensation

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I got through this Thanksgiving without having to write a single gift-guide story. I can’t remember when I could last make that claim.

11/20/2017: EP 57 – What It’s Like To Be a Journalist in This Day and Age, The Lorne Epstein Show

I sat down in the studios of Arlington’s low-power FM station WERA in late August with Epstein and my fellow guest (and Washingtonian Tech Titan honoree) Tajha Chappellet-Lanier to talk shop about my profession. A little while later–Epstein is apparently better at working ahead of time than me–the show aired.

11/21/2017: Internet data caps: Why you end up busting them, USA Today

A reader’s e-mail about being puzzled by Cox telling her she’d exceeded its 1 terabyte data cap led me to revisit data caps and their essential unfairness.

11/21/2017: How the FCC’s plan to kill net neutrality affects you, Yahoo Finance

You can advance a respectable argument against net-neutrality rules by saying that ISPs have given up on trying to block or slow individual sites. Calling a repeal of those regulations on the behavior of corporations alone “restoring Internet freedom” is not that argument.

11/23/2017: Delayed in Europe? How EC 261 Services Can Get Airlines to Pay, The Points Guy

I’ve had this story on my to-do list since seeing AirHelp present at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in 2014. A year later, I finally tasked another company expert in the European Union’s “EC 261” flight-interruption regulation to get Lufthansa to compensate me for the hours-long delay that held up my return from IFA in 2012. The airline sent me a check last March, and then it took me another year and a half to sell a piece about it. That itself only happened when a TPG editor asked if I had other posts in mind after passing on one I’d thought to pitch after seeing a friend’s byline there.

Weekly output: pro tablets, iPhone X, Google Maps and airport transit routes, Honest Ads Act, media consolidation, WiFi-password troubleshooting

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After a month and a half with no travel aside from one overnight trip, I’ve got my next international departure in five days: Web Summit has me moderating at least three panels and will have me busy watching everybody else’s in Lisbon the week after this. Which once again means I will once again be spending Election Day overseas.

(There may “only” be statewide races at stake this time, but I cast my absentee ballot three weeks ago anyway. New Jersey and Virginia voters–and anybody with even a local race on the ballot–show up and do your job as a citizen.)

10/23/2017: Can an iPad Pro or Surface Pro Tablet Replace Your Laptop?, Wirecutter

This update to my Wirecutter guide adds my thoughts on Microsoft’s new Surface Pro and Apple’s latest pair of iPad Pro models. I was harsher about the Apple Pencil this time around even before I managed to lose one on our coffee table.

10/26/2017: iPhone X, WTOP

I thought the hosts at D.C.’s all-news radio station would spend more time quizzing me about the camera notch at the top of the $999-and-up iPhone X’s screen or the Face ID login system that camera offers, but instead they focused mainly on its price.

10/26/2017: Why Doesn’t Google Maps Know the Best Way to the Airport?, CityLab

My first appearance at The Atlantic’s transportation-and-development site since 2013 (when it went by the name The Atlantic Cities) was originally going to be a cranky post here about Google’s continued inadequacy with transit directions to Dulles Airport. But then I thought I should try to be a little more enterprising about that idea. It took just long enough to get the post written and edited that Google finally added IAD’s Silver Line Express bus–but in a botched way that incorrectly advises walking another .7 miles after exiting the bus.

10/26/2017, A bill aimed at Facebook’s bogus political ads has some big problems, Yahoo Finance

The Honest Ads Act is a good idea and worth passing even after Facebook and Twitter’s belated moves towards transparency about their advertising, but it’s not going to stop all the social-media engineering the Russians put on last year.

10/27/2017: How Trump’s FCC chair could limit your media choices, Yahoo Finance

Writing about Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai’s moves to open up media-ownership restrictions got me thinking about how an earlier FCC made it so much easier for out-of-town conglomerates to roll up radio stations.

10/29/2017: Wi-Fi problems are the worst. 3 ways to solve them., USA Today

This was going to focus on Apple’s neat but undocumented way to share a WiFi password from one Apple device to another (if each runs its latest mobile or desktop operating system), but my editor asked me to broaden the column to cover non-Apple use cases.

Weekly output: 5G, broadcast TV on online video, wireless broadband, machine-learning platforms

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Having our kid come down with strep throat put a serious dent in my productivity on this week. (She’s fine now.) The next five days, meanwhile, have a much more crowded schedule that includes an overnight trip to Cleveland. You’ll find out why Tuesday.

9/18/2017: 5 things to know about what’s next for wireless internet, Yahoo Finance

Too-soon hype about 5G wireless is already getting customers confused–as I realized anew when a reader asked how it couldn’t be coming until 2020 if she already had a 5G router. (Answer: It was a 5 GHz router.)

9/18/2017: Broadcasters aren’t going OTT ASAP, FierceBroadcasting

The latest in a steady series of features I’ve written for Fierce’s monthly (registration required) bundles, this one looks at the tangled availability of local channels on “over the top” online-video services. I missed it when it first came out because, I guess, I didn’t see the download link in Fierce’s daily newsletter at the time.

9/20/2017: Why you might trade your wired internet connection for your phone, Yahoo Finance

This headline overstates the story a little. My answer to the question–newly raised by an FCC proceeding–of whether we should count the wireless carriers’ mobile broadband as competition for wired cable, fiber and DSL is that a mobile-only strategy doesn’t work as long as you still need to use a desktop or laptop computer.

9/22/2017: Machine-learning cloud platforms get to work, Ars Technica

This piece focuses on a much wonkier subject than my usual consumer-tech coverage, but I carved some time out of my schedule to write it anyway. On one hand, it allowed me to get into the weeds on the workings of some technologies that I do write about all the time. On the other hand, the story was for a site at which I hadn’t written in way too long (my last Ars byline happened over four years ago) and involved a great per-word rate.

That rate, in turn, was a product of this post being part of a set of stories sponsored by Siemens. I didn’t know the sponsor going in and, as I wrote in a comment below the piece, my editor neither told me which companies to feature nor instructed me on any conclusions the article should reach.

Updated 10/3/2017 to add a link to the broadcasters story.

 

Weekly output: Ajit Pai’s agenda, inflight WiFi, Clinton-era telecom policy, cord cutting, electronics ban

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This week has me headed to the Bay Area to cover Google’s I/O developer conference. If you have questions about Google’s intentions for its Web services, Android, Chromebooks, or any of its other products, now would be a good time to send them my way.

5/8/2017: Trump’s FCC chief looks to expand broadband internet access, Yahoo Finance

I’ve beaten up on FCC chairman Ajit Pai many times already, but this recap of his speech last Friday at the American Enterprise Institute had me in a somewhat forgiving mood. I don’t like scam robocalls any more than he does, and this talk was nothing like the red-baiting denunciation of net-neutrality regulations I’d watched last month.

5/11/2017: How Gogo will transform your Wi-Fi experience in the sky, Yahoo Finance

Here’s my recap of Tuesday’s Gogo flight that showed how inflight WiFi doesn’t have to be terrible–unless airlines screw up anyway. If you’d like more technical details about Gogo’s souped-up “2KU” satellite-linked system, read my fellow passenger Seth Miller’s writeup.

5/12/2017: The Trump administration gets the history of Internet regulations all wrong, The Washington Post

Six years and 25 days after the Post last featured my byline, I wrote another story for the paper. This was originally going to be an item on the PostEverything blog unpacking Ajit Pai’s inaccurate praise for 1990s telecom regulation. But after a John Oliver rant about net neutrality and multiple rounds of editing, it became a broader take on the history of open-Internet policies and found a spot on the front of today’s Outlook section.

If you read this piece in the first few hours it was up Friday, you probably caught it citing an older FCC statistic about the state of competition among Internet providers. Conservative analyst Richard Bennett tweeted out my failure to include the latest, less-depressing stats (they may have been posted after I started writing this), and I only spotted that after seeing this guy had added me to a Twitter list named “open piracy”–a notification Twitter’s “quality filter” showed while hiding the more-relevant tweet calling out my error. Anyway, I e-mailed my editor about the problem, he fixed it, and I left a comment advising readers of the change.

5/12/2017: Financial Review by Sinclair Noe for 05-12-2017, Financial Review

I talked with host Sinclair Noe about the ups and downs of cord cutting, the subject of a Yahoo Finance post last week.

5/13/2017: How a wider laptop ban could threaten your safety and data, Yahoo Finance

I take this story somewhat personally, since if the Feds do expand the current laptop ban, my trans-Atlantic travel habits will ensure I’m hurt by it. And since it looks like my next trip to Europe will be this year’s edition of the Viva Technology Paris conference, I may get to experience any such ban in one of the EU’s worst places for passenger queues: Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle airport.

Weekly output: Porsche Design laptop, net neutrality (x2), getting the world online, app privacy

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You can tell I’m about to go to New Orleans because I put a bunch of songs from the Meters and the Neville Brothers on my phone. As was the case about this time last year, my excuse is the Collision conference; I’ll be moderating four panels at this offshoot of Web Summit.

4/24/2017: We took Porsche’s pricey new laptop for a spin, Yahoo Finance

I filed this first-look report from the IFA Global Press Conference, but it didn’t get posted until the day after I returned from Lisbon.

4/26/2017: Trump’s FCC bulldozes open internet rules without a plan B, Yahoo Finance

The copy I filed went into more detail about FCC chair Ajit Pai’s weird, red-baiting attack on the liberal tech-policy group Free Press, but my editor thought that was a little too much inside baseball. I should note that I’ve spoken at two of Free Press’s events, most recently in Denver in 2013; I may have missed any praise from the organizers for Marx and Lenin when I ditched the conference for an afternoon to see the Rockies home opener.

4/27/2017: Trump’s FCC chair issues attack on open internet rules, Yahoo Finance

A day after Pai spoke about his intention to demolish the current net-neutrality rules, I unpacked the FCC notice of proposed rulemaking that would accomplish that goal.

4/29/2017: How to get 4 billion unconnected people online, Yahoo Finance

I wrote this post about the issues that keep some four billion people off the Internet after attending a Tuesday IEEE event featuring TCP/IP co-author Vint Cerf, but this week’s surplus of net-neutrality news caused it to get set aside for a few days. Having a chance to talk shop with one of the inventors of the Internet remains a mind-bending experience.

4/30/2017: Your data is priceless; that’s why some apps sell it, USA Today

Writing this piece about the amount of access some apps have to your data led me to yank the TripIt app out of my Gmail–I can have that service advise me about changes to my travel plans almost as easily by forwarding booking e-mails to it. And that way, I won’t have TripIt thinking an incremental e-mail from an airline or Amtrak represents a new itinerary.

Weekly output: Internet-provider privacy (x2), net neutrality, online privacy advice

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I spent the first two days of the week commuting to Reston (by Metro and then Bikeshare) for a fascinating conference on drone policy issues. That hasn’t yielded a story yet, but it should soon.

3/28/2017: Congress votes to roll back internet privacy protection, Yahoo Finance

The speed with which Congress moved to dispatch pending FCC regulations that would have stopped Internet providers from selling your browsing history to advertisers without your upfront permission is remarkable, considering how our legislators can’t be bothered to fix actual tech-policy problems that have persisted for decades. It’s also remarkable how blind many people in Washington are to the immense unpopularity of this move.

I’m told this post got a spot on the Yahoo home page, which may explain the 2,796 comments it’s drawn. Would anybody like to summarize them for me?

3/29/2017: Internet providers and privacy, WTOP

The news station interviewed me about this issue. I was supposed to do the interview live, but after I got bumped for breaking news, they recorded me for later airing. How did I sound?

3/31/2017: Trump is going after the open internet next, Yahoo Finance

I have to admit that I missed White House press secretary Sean Spicer using part of his Thursday briefing to denounce the idea of the FCC classifying Internet providers as “common carriers,” which he compared to them being treated “much like a hotel.” That would be because I’ve never made a habit of watching White House press briefings live; it’s a little concerning to see alerts about them splashed atop the Post’s home page.

4/2/2017: Take these 5 steps to help protect your privacy online, USA Today

This story benefited from some fortuitous timing. When I wrote it, USAT’s site had not yet switched on encryption, and so the copy I filed had to note its absence. I asked my editor if she’d heard anything about a move to secure the connection between the site and a reader’s browser. She made some inquiries and learned that this upgrade would go into effect Sunday, my column’s usual publication day.