Tag Archives: crypto

Weekly outpot: Web Summit podcast, cheaper hearing aids, Mark Vena podcast, Google vs. Roku, Amazon satellites, FTC broadband-privacy report, blockchain domains

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This afternoon featured the longest bike ride I’ve done in, I think, five years. Observations: It’s good to know that I’m not too old and busted to clock 35 miles and change, Reston Town Center has grown up and out a bit since 2016, and the nap you have after a longer ride followed by dinner you cooked yourself is the nap of the righteous.

10/19/2021: EXCLUSIVE: Siemens & Maersk Chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe, The Next Stage Podcast

Web Summit’s podcast had me interview this executive about the sustainability efforts of his two companies, a conversation that I wound up having through my laptop and webcam in my hotel room in Philadelphia on the first morning of the ONA Insights conference earlier this month. We had a great chat and I learned a few things, which is always a good outcome of an interview.

10/20/2021: The Feds Are (Finally) About to Make Hearing Aids Cheaper, Easier to Buy, PCMag

I wrote up the overdue release of regulations to allow over-the-counter sales of hearing aids, using this piece to recount the long, strange trip this policy shift has taken through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.

10/20/2021: S01 E14 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

This week’s episode of my industry-analyst pal’s podcast (also on video) had me and fellow tech-journalist guests John Quain and Stewart Wolpin discussing Apple’s product-launch event Monday. We agreed that the $4.99/month Voice Plan for Apple Music was a weird bit of product segmentation, and that people who don’t edit video for a living can ignore Apple’s high-end MacBook Pro models.

Screenshot of the story as seen in Safari for macOS10/21/2021: Google Says It Will Pull YouTube App From Roku on Dec. 9, PCMag

This became a longer-than-usual post for PCMag when Roku offered to show me their receipts of Google’s demands that it revise its search features to benefit YouTube–including a Sept. 2019 e-mail in which a Google executive called adding a special shelf of YouTube results to Roku’s standard search interface “a must.” I’m still waiting to see how Google will explain how that message squares with its past statements that it’s “never” asked for special search privileges on Roku’s media players.

10/21/2021: Satellites, Fast Company

This non-bylined item, part of the “Amazon Unpacked: A-Z” cover story of Fast Company’s November issue, popped up Thursday.

10/22/2021: FTC: Here’s How Much of a Snoop Your ISP or Wireless Carrier Can Be, PCMag

My third post for PCMag walked readers through a lengthy report the Federal Trade Commission released Thursday about the tracking habits at six major Internet providers–in which I also took care to remind readers of how fast Republicans in Congress worked to squelch pending broadband-privacy rules from the Federal Communications Commission in early 2017, even before the FCC could undo the net-neutrality regulatory foundation of those rules.

10/23/2021: The blockchain is making domain names more private—for good or bad, Fast Company

The Microsoft digital-defense report that I covered briefly for PCMag two weeks ago got me curious about domains stored on various blockchains instead of hosted at traditional registries–which the report called “the next big threat.” So I made some inquiries of my own and came to a somewhat different conclusion than Microsoft’s researchers.

Updated 3/21/2022 to add a link and description for the Web Summit podcast that escaped my attention when I wrote this post months ago.

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Weekly output: smartphone-only Internet access, data discussion, Credit Karma, GDPR notices, ad agencies, Sprint and T-Mobile’s networks, live music, encryption politics, future of the FTC

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I spent most of this week in New Orleans for the Collision conference–that event’s finale there, as it’s moving to Toronto next year. (The clip the organizers put together to announce the change of host cities includes a snippet at the 0:21 mark of a panel on VR and AR that I did at Collision last year, something that completely escaped my attention when they played that clip Tuesday.) I’m sad that I won’t have an obvious reason to put NOLA on my Schedule C next year, but I don’t want to complain too much after three years in a row of being able to do just that.

Meanwhile, Conference Month continues with my departure Monday for Google I/O in Mountain View. I return Thursday, and then Tuesday of the week after has me off to Toronto for RightsCon.

4/30/2018: Study: 1 in 5 American homes get broadband through smartphones, Yahoo Finance

After filing this write-up of a new Pew Research Center study from a “real” computer, my editor sent back some questions as I was boarding my flight to New Orleans. I had free Internet access on my phone thanks to T-Mobile’s deal with Gogo, so I wound up finishing this post on smartphone-only Internet access on my mobile device. My comment to my editor: “I’ve basically become one with the story.”

5/1/2018: Data do nicely: Metrics that matter, Collision

My first of four panels at Collision had me quizzing Node co-founder Falon Fatemi and Branch Metrics co-founder Mada Seghete about how their firms collect and crunch large amounts of data for various clients. About five minutes in, I realized that I only had 15 minutes’ worth of questions for this 20-minute panel–a clock-management fail I should know to avoid–and started improvising. As I watched the timer tick down and silently implored each of my fellow panelists to keep talking, I thought the situation vaguely reminded me of watching the Caps grinding out a penalty kill.

 

5/1/2018: From 0-$4bn: Building Credit Karma, Collision

Tuesday’s second panel was an onstage interview of Credit Karma co-founder Nichole Mustard. After the morning’s timing troubles, I took care to write down more questions than I thought I’d need, then didn’t have to worry about timing since my panel partner could hold forth on everything I asked about.

 

5/1/2018: Pay attention to those privacy notices flooding your email, USA Today

This column explaining why so many sites, apps and services are rolling out new privacy policies effective May 25 was one of two posts that benefited from an interview I did with the Federal Trade Commission’s Terrell McSweeny–as in, one of my Web Summit co-panelists last year–on her second-to-last day in office.

5/2/2018: The agency of tomorrow today, Collision

I had a great chat with DDB Worldwide’s CEO Wendy Clark about the state of the ad business. This panel also featured some audience questions–routed through the Slido app, so I could pick which ones to answer instead of pointing to somebody in the audience and hoping they wouldn’t begin “this question is more of a comment.”

 

5/3/2018: Why Sprint customers should hope the T-Mobile deal succeeds, USA Today

This column walked readers through four independent assessments of Sprint and T-Mobile’s networks–three of which found Sprint’s to be well behind, even after notable improvements.

5/3/2018: Tech changed consumption: What’s the next disruption?, Collision

My last Collision panel had me quizzing Ticketmaster’s Ismail Elshareef (with whom I’d worked in 2012 when I did a talk at his then-employer Edmunds) and the UCLA Center for Music Innovation’s Gigi Johnson about the state of live music. You’ll hear a couple of shout-outs from me to such current and former D.C.-area venues as the 9:30 Club and Iota.

 

5/3/2018: The Trump administration is pushing hard for smartphone backdoors, Yahoo Finance

I’m not sure what led this recap of recent developments in encryption politics to get 1,280 comments, but I’m not going to turn down that kind of attention.

5/3/2018: The agency that protects your privacy is in for big changes, Yahoo Finance

Most of my notes from the McSweeny interview went into this post, along with a few conversations with outside observers of the Federal Trade Commission.

My no-longer-secret Bitcoin shame

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Bitcoin has infested tech news lately–the cryptocurrency’s unlikely rise in value, its subsequent and unsurprising fall in value, what complete tools Bitcoin zealots can be in front of a reporter, and so on and on. I’ve watched all of this as an unwitting spectator.

Yes, I’m one of those doofuses who forgot a password to a Bitcoin wallet. At least I have a half-decent excuse: CES.

I didn’t go to the gadget show in 2014 planning on investing in Bitcoin, but one of the first events I attended featured a diverse contingent of BTC startups, one of which had a dollars-to-Bitcoin ATM. How could I not gamble a few bucks to earn an anecdote to throw into a Bitcoin explainer?

I put a $5 bill into this thing and followed an exhibitor’s advice to install the Mycelium wallet app on my phone, scan a QR code off the ATM’s screen, and set a 15-character passcode to protect my stash of .00513 BTC.

Guess what I forgot to do as I headed to my next CES appointment?

I then mostly ignored the app, except for the occasional check to see how my investment had decayed. That habit faded, and when I tried resetting my phone the next fall to fix some touchscreen bugginess, I didn’t even think about the risk of losing access to my tiny Bitcoin hoard.

By which I mean, I didn’t even think to open Mycelium until several months after that unsuccessful phone-troubleshooting exercise. Then I realized that I could no longer remember the 15 characters I’d typed on my phone’s screen two years earlier, without which I could not restore the backup I had made right after my ATM transaction.

That’s where things have remained, even as Bitcoin’s value has soared and then plummeted. It’s annoying, but at least I have two things going for me: The app won’t lock me out as I keep guessing the passcode incorrectly, and at the current exchange rate I’m only out $57 or so. I’ve done much worse gambling in Vegas.

Weekly output: “responsible encryption,” Flash and Silverlight

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It’s been another week with less stories to my name than usual. I’ve done more work than the number of links would suggest–over the past two weeks, I’ve filed three pieces that have not yet been posted–but it does look bad.

10/20/2017: Why the Feds want to make it easier for them to get into your phone, Yahoo Finance

I’ve written dozens of posts about the angst of law-enforcement types over the rise of encrypted devices and apps that they can’t search, so for this one I quizzed a few different sources… and came up with the same overall conclusion as before.

10/22/2017: Why Flash and Microsoft Silverlight frustrations just won’t go away, USA Today

I had what I thought would be a decent column with meaningless quotes from publicists at three sites that still ask their users to install Flash or Silverlight–but then a publicist for Major League Baseball told me that they’d move from Flash to HTML5 video for the 2018 season, a fact they had yet to announce.

 

Weekly output: Google phones (x2), SXSL, e-mail encryption

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I just watched the second presidential debate, and I was disappointed but not surprised by the lack of tech-policy banter. You?

yahoo-tech-google-phones-post10/3/2016: Why it matters that Google might be producing its own phones, Yahoo Finance

My suggestion at the end that Google might offer an installment-payment option for the new Pixel and Pixel XL phones–something analyst Jan Dawson suggested to me in an e-mail–panned out when Google introduced just that.

10/4/2016: Google’s new phones, WTOP

I spoke briefly about the Pixel and Pixel XL to the news station. One thing I wish I’d mentioned: These two new phones aren’t waterproof, unlike the iPhone 7 and the Galaxy S7.

10/4/2016: Obama gathers top tech to tackle US problems, Yahoo Finance

I spent most of Monday at the White House, which is not a bad way to while away an afternoon. This South by South Lawn event did not feature free beer (at least during the day) and so fell short of being a D.C. salute to Austin’s South by Southwest festival, but on the other hand SXSW has yet to allow me to see Rep. John Lewis (D.-Ga.) speak.

10/9/2016: How to protect your email from snooping, USA Today

Freelancing for multiple clients can sometimes lead to situations where one client asks you to write about an issue involving another.

Mail encryption has gotten less cryptic, but some usability glitches linger

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I seriously underestimated you all late last year. In a Dec. 7 post about encryption, I wrote that I hadn’t gotten an encrypted e-mail from a reader in years and said I expected that streak to continue.

PGP keysIt did not. Within a week, a dozen or so readers had sent me messages encrypted with my PGP public key (under subject lines like “Have Faith!” and “Challenge Accepted”), and several others have done the same since. That’s taught me that the crypto user experience has, indeed, gotten pretty good in GPG Suite, the Pretty Good Privacy client of choice in OS X.

But at the same time, some awkward moments remain that remind me the woeful state of things in the late 1990s.

Most of the them involved getting a correspondent’s public key, without which I could not encrypt my reply. When it was attached as a file, dragging and dropping that onto the GPG Keychain app had the expected result, but when it came as a block of text in the decrypted message, I (like other users before me) wasted a few mental processor cycles looking for an import-from-clipboard command when I only had to paste that text into GPG Keychain’s window.

I should have also been able to search keyserver sites for a correspondent’s e-mail address, but those queries kept stalling out at the time. One reader did not appear to have a key listed in those databases at all, while I had to remove a subdomain from another’s e-mail address to get his key to turn up in a search.

One more reader had posted his public key on his own site, but line breaks in that block of text prevented GPG Keychain from recognizing it.

The GPGMail plug-in for OS X Mail is in general a pleasure to use. But its default practice of encrypting all drafts meant that I could no longer start a message on my computer and finish it on my phone–and one e-mail that I’d queued up in the outbox while offline went out encrypted, yielding a confused reply from that editor. I’ve since shut off that default.

It’s quite possible that the upcoming stable release of GPG Suite for OS X El Capitan will smooth over those issues. But that version was supposedly almost ready in late September, and there hasn’t been an update on that open-source project’s news page since. I suppose having to wonder about the status of a crucial software component counts as another crypto-usability glitch.

 

Weekly output: encryption explained, OS X autocorrect, DoubleClick dialog

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Yes, I did get your CES PR pitch.

Yahoo Tech crypto FAQ12/7/2015: FAQ: How Encryption Works And Why People Are So Freaked Out About It, Yahoo Tech

The 1.0 version of this column was a detailed look at how encryption works in Pretty Good Privacy and in iOS 8; not for the first time, an editor said I’d gotten too far into the weeds and asked for a rewrite. After this 2.0 version ran, I was pleasantly surprised to have several readers send me PGP-encrypted messages.

If you’d like to know more about this issue, including some of the history behind this debate, see Andrea Peterson’s longer FAQ in the Washington Post.

12/11/2015: Tip: Best Way to Fix OS X’s Autocorrect? Turn It Off, Yahoo Tech

With my USA Today column no longer including a weekly tip at the end, Yahoo was happy to run this tip… which was really more of a rant.

12/13/2015: DoubleClick message should have prompted double take, USA Today

A brief snafu at Google’s advertising subsidiary may not have been sufficient material for a column, but I’d like to think that using it to remind people to be wary of strange requests from even familiar Web sites was a worthwhile exercise.

Weekly output: encryption politics, Thanksgiving tech support

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I did better than I expected at avoiding work e-mail over this weekend, but I did have to set aside time to revise two Wirecutter pieces. On Monday, the latest iteration of our guide to the major wireless carriers went up, covering price shifts at Sprint and T-Mobile and improved international-roaming options at Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Then on Wednesday, we corrected last week’s guide to prepaid and resold wireless service to explain how our pick, Consumer Cellular, had begun wholesaling T-Mobile’s service as well as AT&T’s. I missed that non-trivial change, and I’m still annoyed about the oversight.

11/24/2015: The Paris Attacks Were Tragic, but Cryptography Isn’t to Blame, Yahoo Tech

I returned to the debate over whether tech companies should be required to build in back doors for law enforcement–my last such post ran in September–to argue that the argument for compromised crypto is even weaker when you look at adversaries like the Paris murderers. Who, by the way, hardly bothered to cover their tracks.

USAT Thanksgiving 2015 tech-support column11/27/2015: How to improve family’s Wi-Fi and other tech support tips, USA Today

My original concept of this column was to write a sort of greatest-hits compilation of earlier pieces, but I soon realized that this story could and should note the ways these consumer-tech problems had gotten better or worse since I’d last covered them for USAT. I’m not sure what made this piece so widely shared on Facebook–though having my column run two days early must have helped–but I’m flattered anyway.

Writing this also reminded me that I was sorely overdue to uninstall Oracle’s Java software off one laptop. I had disconnected that program from my browser long ago, but it still didn’t justify its storage footprint.

Weekly output: encryption, wireless carriers, Gear S2, IFA

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I’m home from Germany, but not for long. Tuesday afternoon, I depart for CTIA’s Super Mobility Week show, and two days later I head over to Portland for XOXO. I thought about skipping CTIA’s show, but two nights’ hotel in Vegas and the extra air travel added so little to my trip costs that I decided to go ahead with it. (No, I’m not going to Apple’s event Wednesday in San Francisco; Yahoo and USA Today already have reporters covering it.) Check back next weekend to see if I still think this schedule was a good idea… I already have my doubts.

9/1/2015: What Politicos Don’t Know About Encryption Could Make Us All Less Safe, Yahoo Tech

I filed this somewhat overdue update on the encryption debate (hint: security experts say there’s nothing to debate) Monday evening over one of Canada’s maritime provinces. I’d complain about the WiFi cutting in and out, but it’s important to keep perspective: I wrote from a chair in the sky! With Internet access!

Wirecutter best-carriers guide9/1/2015: The Best Wireless Carriers, The Wirecutter

Didn’t I just update this guide? Yes, I did. But then AT&T revised its prices, Sprint announced it would drop two-year contracts by the end of the year, and some new third-party research came out. I took advantage of the opportunity to redo our usage scenarios to reflect reports of higher average data consumption.

9/3/2015: Hands On: Samsung’s Gear S2 Brings Some Elegance to the Smartwatch, Yahoo Tech

I had about an hour to play with this interesting smartwatch Wednesday evening in Berlin. The lede popped into my head the next morning, in plenty of time for me to file before Samsung’s embargo expired.

9/6/2016: Four trends spotted at the IFA tech conference, USA Today

A few weeks ago, the folks at USAT asked if I could occasionally switch up my column from the usual Q&A format to address issues raised at tech-industry events like IFA. I said that sounded like a reasonable idea, and this is the result. Next weekend will probably see me again hold off on the Q&A to write about whatever I learn about the wireless industry at CTIA’s event.