Tag Archives: CDA 230

Weekly output: One America News, how to exceed Comcast’s 1.2 TB data cap, tech and humanity, Big Tech, remote teamwork in a pandemic

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve finally reached the last month of this ordeal of a year.

11/30/2020: The Most Trump-Tastic Network Might Lose Its Biggest Carrier Next Year, Forbes

I’ve had this story on my to-do list since seeing a Bloomberg report this summer about the precarious prospects for One America News after its current carriage deal with DirecTV expires, reportedly in early 2021. It was gratifying to write this at last–and see it get a bigger audience than my other Forbes posts so far.

12/2/2020: Comcast’s 1.2 TB data cap seems like a ton of data—until you factor in remote work, Fast Company

After seeing some readers tweet their skepticism about anybody possibly topping 1.2 terabytes a month, I talked to three Comcast users who had done just that–and who, despite their technology backgrounds, could not identify an app or service that had pushed them over and which they could have foregone without excess pain. (One even sent screengrabs of data-usage stats from his Ubiquiti router, which Patreon readers got to see today.) The story seems to have resonated with readers, including a sarcastic retweet from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) taking a whack at Comcast’s phone support.

12/2/2020: Technology: The key to making us more human, Web Summit

My first of two panels for this year’s online-only Web Summit had me talking to Ikea chief digital officer Barbara Martin Coppola and AI Now Institute co-founder Meredith Whittaker about various tech-ethics issues, from ways to shrink a global organization’s carbon footprint to tech-policy advice for the incoming Biden administration.

12/2/2020: Who’s afraid of Big Tech?, RI Digital: USA 2020

My second virtual panel of the week consisted of a discussion at Responsible Investor’s conference about tech policy in such areas as privacy and global warming. My fellow speakers: ClearBridge Investments analyst Hillary Frisch, Migrant Nation director Simon Zadek, and Responsible Investor co-founder Hugh Wheelan. My major line of argument: The most effective way to rein in the power of large technology companies would be to pass effective digital-privacy laws, but since that seems to be a task beyond the reach of Congress, we keep getting sidetracked into less-useful discussions about how we might make life less pleasant for one or two of the tech giants.

12/4/2020: Evolution from the inside out, Web Summit

My second Web Summit panel had me quizzing Weight Watchers CEO Mindy Grossman and Julien Codorniou, Facebook’s vice president for its Workplace collaboration platform, about how WW had to accelerate existing moves towards distributed work once the pandemic hit.

Weekly output: fake pundits, CDA 230, Keyring’s password-sharing service

Posted on by
1

One highlight of this four-day work week (subtracting the Tuesday I spent as a poll worker for the third time this year) doesn’t appear on this list below. I filed a draft of the longest piece I’ve written since college, also the first work I’ve done since then to be assigned in terms of pages instead of words or column inches.

7/6/2020: Fake pundits, Al Jazeera

I got asked late Monday night to speak briefly for one of AJ’s morning-news shows (Doha being seven hours ahead of Eastern time) about the Adam Rawnsley’s report for the Daily Beast about a squad of entirely fake pundits who first had their “work” published in various right-wing outlets (some of it trashing Qatar, which apparently got AJ’s interest) and then leveraged that validation to show up in more prestigious outlets.

7/8/2020: Section 230 in an Election Year: How Republicans and Democrats are Approaching Proposed Changes, Broadband Breakfast

I took part in a panel about proposals to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act–the law that basically lets social media, from the comments on this blog to Facebook, function free of litigious strangulation. That’s a fun topic to a policy nerd like me; what made it more fun was having the panel feature two of my favorite people in tech policy, lawyer Cathy Gellis and TechFreedom senior fellow Berin Szóka.

If you don’t have time to watch the video, Broadband Breakfast’s Emily McPhie wrote up our panel the next day.

7/8/2020: This App Wants To Help You Share Streaming-Video Passwords—And For Video Services To Like It, Forbes

My first pitch for an entertainment-password-sharing startup called Keyring came not from the CEO quoted in the post, but one of his colleagues–who happens to be the son of one of my long-ago Post co-workers. That refined bit of name-dropping got my attention, but I was also struck by how Keyring is trying to make itself not look like the enemy to streaming-media services.

Weekly output: WiFi help, SpaceX and NASA, cybersecurity issues and the coronavirus (x2), Trump’s social-media executive order (x3)

Posted on by
Reply

This weekend has shown some of the ugliest sides of the United States, from systemic racism to abuse of police power to wanton destructiveness. It would have been even worse without Saturday’s reminder from SpaceX and NASA that we can also do great things together.

5/25/2020: Think you are ready for a new router? First, try these free home Wi-Fi fixes, USA Today

I borrowed the expertise of my friends Tom Bridge and Glenn Fleishman for this column about no-cost tweaks to a home network that may improve your experience.

5/27/2020: SpaceX’s Dragon launch ushers in a new era for Americans in space, Fast Company

I’d meant to write this story from the Kennedy Space Center’s press site. Instead, I wrote it from my desk at home–below a picture I took of the last shuttle launch that STS-135 commander Chris Ferguson signed for me at a later NASA Tweetup.

5/27/2020: The Thought Leadership Summit, Webit Virtual

This conference was once going to take place in Spain next month and have me moderate some panels. Webit’s had to go virtual like every other large event, so my first spot involved a panel on cybersecurity issues in the novel-coronavirus pandemic that featured Webit executive chairman Plamen Russev, Siemens chief cybersecurity officer Natalia Oropeza, Inrupt security-architecture chief Bruce Schneier, and VMWare security vice president Tom Corn.

5/27/2020: Trump vs. Twitter, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news network had me on to talk about President Trump’s temper tantrum of executive order that makes a lot of noise about Twitter’s alleged unfairness but contains almost nothing in the way of a legally-valid signal.

5/28/2020: The Leading Media Forum, Webit Virtual

My second appearance for Webit featured an extended discussion about media coverage of cybersecurity issues with Webit’s Russev, Wired Italia’s Luca Zorloni, Forbes’ Monica Melton, and Euronews’ Salim Essaid. The video on this should look much better than the earlier panel, because I realized that my laptop’s camera had the white balance so hideously bad that my navy-blue shirt looked purple. With only a couple of minutes to go before showtime, I grabbed my iPad, braced it between my laptop keyboard and screen, and used that instead.

5/28/2020: Trump’s social-media executive order, Al Araby

My second TV hit about the Trump executive order came right after he signed that document, which meant my interpreter on this Arabic-language network and I had to wait for him to stop talking.

5/29/2020: Trump’s Twitter Tantrum; Hong Kong Crackdown, Bipodisan

My first tweets about the Trump order caught the eye of my friend Robert Schlesinger, who then invited me to join him and his co-host Jean Card on this political podcast. We had much more fun than you might expect from a chat about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Weekly output: watching baseball online, ATSC 3.0, 5G media, CDA 230, alternative DNS, Lyft vs. Uber

Posted on by
Reply

My college newspaper celebrated its 50th anniversary this weekend, which both let me catch up with not enough of my long-ago colleagues and contemplate anew how important the Georgetown Voice was to this business I’ve chosen. Without all those insane (and unpaid) hours, I might have still made my way into journalism–but I wouldn’t have had four years of learning to report, write creatively but quickly, deal with frequently-brutal edits by peers, and get back to it for the next issue.

4/1/2019: Why these 6 baseball teams still won’t let you watch their games online, Yahoo Finance

For the third year in a row, I ranted about regional sports networks–yes, I very much have the Nats’ Mid-Atlantic Sports Network in mind–that still limit their distribution to traditional cable and satellite bundles instead of following cord-cutting viewers to streaming TV services.

4/2/2019: ATSC 3.0 hits the road at NAB 2019, FierceVideo

I wrote a short post for this trade publication about likely storylines at the National Association of Broadcasters’ trade show involving this next-generation broadcast-TV standard.

4/2/2019: 5G brings optimism and concern to NAB Show 2019, FierceVideo

My second NAB-show preview outlined what this conference, happening this week in Las Vegas, might have to say about media ventures built on 5G wireless.

4/3/2019: Why killing a law that shields tech companies would actually cement the dominance of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, Yahoo Finance

When I wrote this post unpacking a recent bout of criticism of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act–the statute that says online forums aren’t publishers and can’t be held liable for everything their users post–it came in at well over a thousand words. It took multiple rounds of editing to get my precious prose down to a manageable size (sound familiar, my former Voice editors?).

4/4/2019: Primer: When (and how) to dump your Internet provider’s DNS service, The Parallax

I wrote a how-to post about using such alternative domain name services as Google and Cloudflare to work around reliability and privacy issues you can run into if you stick to your Internet provider’s DNS.

4/4/2019: Lyft exec says ‘we’re a company of values’ when asked about Uber, Yahoo Finance

I wasn’t sure the lunchtime talk by Lyft public-policy chief Anthony Foxx at the Washington Auto Show Thursday would yield a story until he answered an audience question about how his employer differentiates itself from Uber with that company-of-values line. I’m not sure how many of my readers bought that self-assessment; at UberPeople.net, a forum for ride-hailing-service drivers, the reaction was distinctly cynical.

Weekly output: iOS 11 issues, Super Cruise, SESTA, Tech Night Owl

Posted on by
4

In recent years, late September has seen me jetting off to one city or another to attend the Online News Association’s annual conference, but this time around my ONA travel will consist of taking Metro–the conference starts Thursday at the Marriott in Woodley Park. And I’m also on the schedule for the first time: I’m speaking Saturday afternoon with veteran freelancer Katherine Lewis about survival skills for the self-employed.

Meanwhile, the Nationals host the Cubs sometime Friday and Saturday in the first two games of the division series, ensuring that I will be completely hoarse and sleep-deprived by Sunday. Go Nats!

9/26/2017: How to fix Apple iOS 11 battery and Outlook problems, USA Today

My editor opted to hold this post for a day to reduce the odds of it getting lost in USAT’s other iOS 11 coverage.

9/28/2017: What it’s like riding in Cadillac’s self-driving Super Cruise for 350 miles, Yahoo Finance

This account of having a 2018 Cadillac CT6 drive me along much of I-70 and the Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpikes was the most interesting transportation-related piece I’ve written since this spring’s post about advances in Gogo’s satellite WiFi. The long drive from Washington to Cleveland also let me see parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio that I hadn’t glimpsed in years and take a detour to pay my respects at the Flight 93 National Memorial.

9/30/2017: Why the tech industry is worried about a bill targeting sex trafficking, Yahoo Finance

I should have had this post about the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act written earlier, but the delays allowed me to add some useful quotes from a panel I attended on the Hill Thursday.

9/30/2017: September 30, 2017 — Rob Pegoraro and Kirk McElhearn, Tech Night Owl

I talked with host Gene Steinberg about my Cadillac test drive, my iOS experience, and the macOS High Sierra install that was going on in the background but had not wrapped up by the time my roughly hour-long segment ended.