Tag Archives: blockchain

Weekly output: LinkNYC, Google renews RCS plea, Chris Krebs at Black Hat, 5G explainer, Cyber Safety Review Board, Web3 security

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After a week on the West Coast, including four days in Las Vegas for the Black Hat security conference, I now have two weeks of not going anywhere. Which is good!

8/8/2022: LinkNYC begins deploying 5G kiosks – but not yet with 5G inside, Light Reading

After too many months of not writing for this telecom trade-pub client, I filed this update on New York rebooting its LinkNYC effort to bring free WiFi and digital city services to individual blocks.

8/9/2022: Google Posts Yet Another Plea for Apple to Support RCS Messaging in iMessage, PCMag

Google makes fair points when it calls out Apple for hindering the quality and privacy of cross-platform text messaging by not supporting the RCS messaging standard in iMessage. But Google hurts its cause by not supporting RCS in Google Voice–or even explaining that hangup. Also unhelpful: Google has yet to ship an API that would let the developers of Signal and other third-party messaging apps support RCS.

Screenshot of PCMag post as seen in Chrome on a Pixel 5a, with a VPN service active.8/10/2022: Ex-CISA Chief’s Advice at Black Hat: Make Security Valuable and Attacks Costly, PCMag

I covered the keynote by former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency head Chris Krebs that opened Black Hat. His talk ended on a self-help note, as he advised his audience: “Life’s too short to work for assholes. So don’t.” And yet Krebs worked for President Trump from 2018 through 2020, when Trump fired him for correctly confirming that the 2020 election was run fairly and securely; that could not have been easy for him.

8/11/2022: What Is 5G, and Does It Actually Make a Difference?, Wirecutter

I wrote yet another 5G explainer, this time for the New York Times’ Wirecutter site.

8/11/2022: How a US Govt Board Helped the Open-Source Community Leap to Patch Log4j, PCMag

As the token Washingtonian among PCMag’s crew of writers, I had to write up this very Washington panel about the first test of the Cyber Safety Review Board–an organization set up as an infosec version of the National Transportation Safety Board.

8/12/2022: Why Is Web3 Security Such a Garbage Fire? Let Us Count the Ways, PCMag

This talk about a series of security meltdowns at blockchain-based sites and services had more than a few unintentional-comedy moments.

8/12/2022: The 14 Scariest Things We Saw at Black Hat 2022, PCMag

My contribution to this recap was the “Startups Shirk Security” section.

Updated 8/21/2022 to add the PCMag Black Hat recap.

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Weekly output: EU Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts, bringing blockchain technology to land titles, Mark Vena podcast, FCC goes after auto-warranty robocall enablers, Elon Musk tries to back out of buying Twitter

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I much enjoyed not going any farther than a neighborhood friend’s house for the Fourth of July; if you traveled further for the holiday, I hope the trip did not involve any unwanted bonus airport time.

7/5/2022: Sweeping EU Bills May Require Major Changes at US Tech Firms, PCMag

Writing this post took longer than I expected because digesting the text of the European Union’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act took longer than I expected.

Screengrab of the story as seen in the Brave browser for Windows7/6/2022: This Virginia county is trying to use blockchain-like tech to store land titles, Fast Company

I started working on this story months ago–after learning about Wise County’s project from a story by Cardinal News, a local non-profit covering southwest Virginia–but didn’t get all the quotes I needed until hearing one expert talk at Collision and meeting another at that conference in Toronto a few weeks ago.

7/7/2022: S02 E28 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

I joined my usual podcast partners for the first time in a few weeks to discuss TikTok privacy concerns, Netflix’s recent headwinds, and more. If you watch the video version of the podcast, you can see me sporting a Washington Apple Pi shirt.

7/8/2022: FCC Goes After Voice Providers Enabling 8 Billion Auto-Warranty Robocalls, PCMag

Just like you, the members of Federal Communications Commission are sick of people trying to reach them concerning their cars’ extended warranties.

7/9/2022: Elon Musk tries to back out of buying Twitter, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news network had me on in overdubbed form to talk about the billionaire’s belated buyer’s remorse.

Weekly output: smartphone biometric security, Google vs. the headphone jack, Voatz blockchain absentee voting

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Once again, Columbus Day–or, if you prefer, Indigenous People’s Day–delivered the unwelcome combination of our kid’s school being closed while both my wife and I still had to work. I joked on Twitter about resolving the argument over what to call this fake holiday and also saving Americans billions in day-care costs by abolishing it outright. But on reflection, the widely-tweeted suggestion that we relegate Columbus Day to a trivia question and promote Election Day to actual, don’t-have-to-work holiday status makes much more sense.

10/8/2018: Unlock your phone with your face or fingerprint? Here’s how to shut that off – quickly, This Morning With Gordon Deal

I talked about the subject of my most recent USA Today column on this business-news radio show.

10/10/2018: With Google’s new devices, music fans once again don’t get jack, Yahoo Finance

I’ve had this post in mind for a while, ever since conversations at events like Mobile World Congress and IFA revealed their lack of interest in shipping USB-C headphones. I expected that Google wouldn’t retreat from last year’s idiotic move to remove the headphone jack from its flagship smartphones, but I didn’t realize they would pull the same stunt with the new Pixel Slate tablet.

10/11/2018: This startup wants to secure absentee voting with a blockchain, Yahoo Finance

Even after spending a couple of weeks talking to various experts, I still have questions about how Voatz has been securing its blockchain-based voting system and whether states have thought long enough about how to ease absentee voting for faraway citizens. That said, many of the other options for absentee voting look even worse, something upon which I hope to write further in the coming weeks.

Updated 10/21/2018 to add a link to the Gordon Deal show.

Weekly output: hotspot data use, smart grids, 3D printing, quantum computing, Sheryl Sandberg

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After clocking almost 24,000 miles in the air in a 12-day period, I’m not scheduled to fly anywhere until late July–and that time, I’m taking my family. This week’s trip was to Paris for the second installment of moderating panels at the Viva Technology conference (with a side order of meetings with local tech types set up by a PR firm hired by Business France, the government trade-promotion organization that paid for my airfare and lodging), and the flights seemed positively short after last week’s jaunt to Shanghai and back.

6/14/2017: Use a mobile hotspot? How to avoid busting data caps, USA Today

I heard from a reader who said he’d successfully dropped his residential broadband connection in favor of tethering off his phone; I worried he’d exceed his wireless plan’s cap on mobile-hotspot use, so I wrote this how-to. It ran in the paper’s print edition Friday.

6/15/2017: Smart Grids Are Getting Smarter, Viva Technology

My conversation with LO3 Energy’s Scott Kessler and Upside Energy’s Graham Oakes involved some unexpected difficulty: I woke up around 3:30 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep for the next two hours. I haven’t had jet lag that bad in Europe in a couple of years, but spending the previous week six time zones to the right (or 18 to the left, depending on how you look at it) could not have helped.

6/15/2017: How Industrial​ ​3D​ ​Printing Is Helping Startups Go from Zero to Factory​, Viva Technology

Having his panel with Product of Things’ Moriya Kassis and re:3D’s Samantha Snabes come almost right after the other meant I didn’t have a chance to realize my fatigue again. Afterwards, I thought I could get in a nap in the speakers’ lounge–but French president Emmanuel Macron’s visit there made that impossible. (My Yahoo writeup of the pro-startup agenda Macron talked up in his Viva Tech speech should post Monday morning.)

6/16/2017: Quantum Computing, Cryptography And Our Privacy, Viva Technology

I felt like less of a zombie for this chat with Kudelski Security’s Jean-Philippe Aumasson and Shlomi Dolev of the wonderfully-named Secret Double Octopus. And I learned a few things about quantum computing in the process, which is how a panel is supposed to work.

6/18/2017: Sheryl Sandberg has 2 useful pieces of advice for Facebook advertisers, Yahoo Finance

Facebook’s chief operating officer spoke by video to Viva Tech co-founder Maurice Lévy at the end of Friday’s sessions, which made for some rotten timing in terms of my writing the story and then deal with edits. The lesson I take from that: It’s a privilege to be able to go to Paris for work.