Tag Archives: broadband privacy

Weekly output: selling online video, online privacy

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I’m going to spend most of Monday on airplanes as I make my way from D.C. to Shanghai for CES Asia. I’m helping to emcee the Last Gadget Standing app competition, after which I hope to learn a thing or two about the state of consumer electronics on the other side of the Pacific.

5/30/2017: How To Sell OTT To Cable, Satellite And ‘Cord Never’ Subscribers, FierceCable

The highlight of reporting this feature about how online video services try to pitch themselves to potential viewers: having to lean into my laptop to hear an interview subject when I realized I didn’t have a hands-free kit with me. (I’d already answering the call on my laptop instead of my phone, for reasons lost in the mist now.)

6/1/2017: How Washington is throwing away its shot at protecting your privacy, Yahoo Finance

Sometimes, what people don’t say matters more than what they do say. This piece offers some recent evidence for that, in the form of a new bill from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tex.) that’s surprisingly favorable towards consumers and has been ignored by some of her usual allies.

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Weekly output: watching baseball online, broadband privacy, Apple secrecy, Comcast wireless, Tech Night Owl

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This week saw me at two Opening Days: On Monday, I attended the Nats’ home opener, and today I kicked off the 2017 lawn-mowing season. In both cases, I’m worried we’re going to fade down the stretch.

4/3/2017: The cheapest way to watch baseball online, Yahoo Finance

For once, I had good things to say about the availability of sports programming online, thanks to many regional sports networks now showing up on services like Sling TV, PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now. Alas, the Nats’ Mid-Atlantic Sports Network is not among them.

4/5/2017: Broadband privacy, Al Jazeera

I talked about the swift, Republican-led dispatch of privacy regulations for the Arabic news network.

4/6/2017: How Apple’s secrecy can hurt consumers, Yahoo Finance

Apple’s unprecedented revelation of even broad details about the next Mac Pro and iMac kicked off this post about the unhelpful hangup many tech companies–no, not just Apple–have about keeping customers in the loop.

4/7/2017: The hidden details in Comcast’s wireless plan, USA Today

The amount of interest in Comcast’s upcoming Xfinity Mobile wireless service–which will run off Verizon’s network as well as Comcast’s network of WiFi hot spots–is remarkable, given that you’ll need to subscribe to Comcast Internet to use it. Also remarkable: how many details Comcast left out of its opening sales pitch for Xfinity Mobile. 

If you look at the comments, you’ll see a complaint from a reader that an accompanying chart didn’t list the correct price for Google’s Project Fi wireless service. That chart now lists the right rate–yes, I do try to read comments, and in this case I sent a quick note to my editors advising them of the error.

4/8/2017: April 8, 2017 — John Martellaro and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I returned to this podcast for the first time since August (had it really been that long?) to talk about Apple’s tepid gesture at transparency, Xfinity Mobile, and the state of broadband privacy and competition.

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.