Tag Archives: disinformation

Weekly output: Comcast advertising report, FuboTV, Apple TV+ promo, autopay discounts, Apple MLS streaming, investor-founder relationships, Maxio and Skillnet Ireland, fighting disinformation, health and location-data privacy

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A month of speaking at conferences–with a one-week break when I came down with a gentle and brief case of Covid–wraps up this week with my short trip to Toronto to lead two panels at Collision.

6/13/2022: Comcast advertising report: Live TV lives on, FierceVideo

I did some fill-in writing at my trade-pub client, starting with this Comcast report on streaming-video advertising.

6/13/2022: FuboTV adds FAST channels from Trusted Media Brands, FierceVideo

My second post at Fierce allowed to mention cat videos in the lede.

6/13/2022: Apple TV+ makes first season of ‘For All Mankind’ free for all, FierceVideo

This day’s work ended with a quick post about one of my favorite Apple TV+ shows.

6/15/2022: Setting up autopay for your broadband or wireless can require careful aim, USA Today

Broadband providers’ inability to document the finer points of their pricing once again served up a story idea for me.

6/15/2022: Apple to Exclusively Stream All Major League Soccer Matches in 2023, PCMag

The story I did for FierceVideo in December of 2019 about D.C. United’s first attempt to go streaming-only looks a little more prescient now that MLS has agreed to have Apple offer live coverage of every match.

6/15/2022: FIRESIDE: Being on speed dial: how founders can best partner with their investors for maximum impact, Dublin Tech Summit

I interviewed Jonathan Heiliger, general partner with Vertex Ventures, about his lessons learned as a founder of tech startups and an investor in tech startups.

Photo of a list of panels on a wall at Dublin Tech Summit, with my second panel of June 15 listed about halfway down.6/15/2022: PANEL: Tales of Digital Transformation, Dublin Tech Summit

My second DTS panel had me quizzing Sally-Ann O’Callaghan, a regional director with the billing-services firm Maxio, and Mark Jordan, chief strategy officer with the tech-training organization Skillnet Ireland.

6/16/2022: Disinformation Experts Warn About US ‘Playbook’ Being Exploited Globally, PCMag

Day two of DTS featured this enlightening discussion between moderator Eric Schurenberg, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy research director Joan Donovan, Kinzen co-founder Áine Kerr, and Logically CEO Lyric Jain
about the challenges of combating disinformation campaigns.

6/17/2022: Senate Bill Would Bar Data Brokers From Profiting Off Location, Health Data, PCMag

I wrote this post around 3 in the morning after realizing that jet lag wouldn’t have me falling back asleep any time soon–a decision that paid off several hours later when a slow security line and the inefficiency of U.S. customs preclearance at Dublin Airport left me with less free time than I’d expected before my flight back to the States.

Updated 6/26/2022 to add the FierceVideo posts I’d forgotten before, an omission I’m going to blame on jet lag. 

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Weekly output: smartphone plans, online misinformation, Twitter perceptions, SpaceX Starship, cord cutting stats, online-privacy bill

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I have a short workweek followed by my first family-reunion Thanksgiving in two years.

Patreon readers got an extra post this week: a look at my attempts to ensure that the panels on which I speak aren’t filled out by people who look more or less like me.

Wirecutter phone-plans guide, as seen in Chrome on a Pixel 3a Android phone11/15/2021 The Best Cell Phone Plans, Wirecutter

This update–the first substantial revision to this guide since the summer of 2020–should not have taken this long, but it’s been a trying year for everybody.

11/15/2021: How Do You Combat Online Misinformation? Katie Couric, Prince Harry Have Some Ideas, PCMag

I wrote about a report on online misinformation from an unusual group of experts.

11/15/2021: We Read Twitter for Entertainment, Trust It for News (Unless We Vote Republican), PCMag

This post covered a pair of Pew Research Center studies about people’s attitudes towards Twitter. The most susprising finding: how many Twitter users misunderstood their own privacy settings.

11/18/2021: Elon Musk’s Starship rocket may launch to orbit in January, Fast Company

The SpaceX founder was scheduled to speak for 30 minutes but spent more than twice as much time at this virtual National Academy of Science meeting. I could have filed a vastly longer story, but I didn’t want to write myself into a bad per-word rate.

11/18/2021: Cord Cutting’s Latest Toll: 1.34 Million Legacy Pay-TV Subscribers Gone, PCMag

I decided to write up this report on pay-TV subscriptions by comparing the numbers involved to cities. Hence: “The top seven cable operators combined to lose 700,500 subscribers, a figure you may find easier to visualize as ‘almost the population of Denver’.”

11/19/2021: Who Owns Your Data? Calif. Congresswomen Try Again With Online Privacy Act, PCMag

The Online Privacy Act reintroduced by Reps. Anna Eshoo (D.-Calif.) and Zoe Lofgren (D.-Calif.) seems to get a lot of things right, but it lands in a Congress that seems singularly incapable of passing even incremental privacy upgrades.

Weekly output: TikTok (x3), Apple TV+, social-media satisfaction, AMC, TV metrics, NBCUniversal (x2), 5G flavors, Disney, Fox, tech journalism, Facebook and Twitter vs. Trump, Roku, Instagram Reels, election security, influence operations online

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This week was kind of nuts. I knew I’d be busy covering breaking news in the mornings for my trade-pub client FierceVideo while one of their reporters was on vacation, but I didn’t factor in how many entertainment and TV companies would be announcing their quarterly earnings. This put a dent in my ability to follow the now-virtual Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences that, were this a normal year, would have had me in Las Vegas this week. (Hacker summer camp friends, I miss you too and will try to catch up on your talks over the next few days.)

8/3/2020: Microsoft gets Trump green-light to buy TikTok, FierceVideo

I started this week by writing a bit about the biggest story in tech this week.

8/3/2020: Apple TV+ comes to American Airlines flights, FierceVideo

Writing about this addition to AA’s in-flight entertainment gave me an excuse to get a few quotes from one of my favorite avgeek bloggers, Seth Miller.

8/4/2020: Survey Shows Facebook Barely More Satisfying Than Comcast, Forbes

I got an advance look at the latest report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, allowing me to have this post up right as the ACSI published these findings.

8/4/2020: AMC’s second-quarter earnings could have been worse, FierceVideo

This was the first of four earnings stories.

8/4/2020: Time spent on TV viewing soars, says Samba, FierceVideo

My editor at Fierce pointed me to this study and asked if I’d heard of Samba TV; I said I had, and that a friend had tried to connect me with their CEO at CES last year.

8/4/2020: Layoffs loom at NBCUniversal, FierceVideo

I wrote up a WSJ report about pending layoffs for my third post of Tuesday.

8/5/2020: Thinking of buying a 5G smartphone? Finding your carrier’s flavor of 5G requires a taste for investigation, USA Today

We had to correct this column because I said a study released in May came out last year, an error I could only laugh about once it was brought to my attention.

8/5/2020: After a disaster movie of a quarter, Disney bets on Mulan, FierceVideo

The big news in Disney’s earnings call: It will debut Mulan in September as a $29.99 extra for Disney+ subscribers instead of sticking to a theatrical release.

8/5/2020: Fox forges ahead despite ad-revenue shortfall in Q4, FierceVideo

The optimism Fox executives voiced on their earnings call about sports returning this fall seemed unfounded at the time.

8/5/2020: Tech journalism, Lobsterclass

My friend Rakesh Agrawal (aka rakeshlobster on Twitter) quizzed me about the state of tech journalism and how startup founders might improve their interactions with the media for the latest in a series of product-management classes he began in May. Our Zoom chat got interrupted a couple of times by incoming WhatsApp calls that I couldn’t answer with “sorry, can’t talk right now” messages because my phone was already in use as my Zoom camera.

8/5/2020: Facebook and Twitter suppress Trump coronavirus video, Al Jazeera

The reason behind those calls: AJ’s English-language channel wanted me to opine about the two social networks taking down Trump shares of a Fox News video in which the president said children are “almost immune” to COVID-19. So at 11 p.m., I put my phone back on the tripod for yet another video call.

8/6/2020: Roku Q2: 43 million active accounts, $43 million loss, FierceVideo

I wrapped up my earnings coverage for Fierce by covering Roku’s quarter.

8/6/2020: First take on Instagram’s Reels: Yes, it’s a TikTok clone, FierceVideo

In addition to gathering quotes from a couple of analysts, I cobbled together my own art for this story by taking screenshots of Instagram’s new TikTok-ish feature.

8/7/2020: What becoming a poll worker taught me about securing the 2020 election, Fast Company

Security researcher and Georgetown Law professor Matt Blaze’s Black Hat keynote gave me an opportunity to share my own experience as a poll worker with a larger audience than this blog ever gets. We had to correct one error after posting; the National Vote At Home Institute, a non-profit whose CEO I quoted in the piece, is based in Denver, not D.C. as listed in its Twitter bio.

8/7/2020: From Russia With Lure: Why We’re Still Beset By Bots And Trolls Pushing Disinformation, Forbes

Stanford Internet Observatory researcher Renée DiResta gave an excellent keynote on day two of Black Hat about influence operations online and how China and Russia’s efforts compare.

8/7/2020: Trump issues executive order to ban business with TikTok, FierceVideo

I scrambled to get an explanation of what, exactly, Trump’s order would ban U.S. companies and users from doing with TikTok, and Public Knowledge’s telecom-law guru Harold Feld came through.

8/7/2020: NBCUniversal reshuffles entertainment leadership, FierceVideo

My week filling in at Fierce wrapped up with this recap of a reorg at NBCU.

8/9/2020: TikTok’s suitors, Al Jazeera

I usually don’t shave on Sundays but had to for this appearance on AJ’s Arabic-language channel to talk about why Microsoft and, reportedly, Twitter, might want to buy TikTok.

Weekly output: Apple Tax on storage, CrowdStrike CEO, Facebook Pages, Rod Rosenstein on security and encryption

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This year is officially in the home stretch, but some of this week’s work almost certainly won’t show up in my bank account until 2019. Remembering your clients’ varying payment schedules is essential to keeping some level of freelance accounting sanity.

11/28/2018: New MacBook Air and Mac mini show the Apple Tax on storage lives on, USA Today

As I’d pledged a few weeks ago, I returned to the subject of Apple’s belated updates to the Mac mini and MacBook Air to take a whack at these computers’ stingy entry-level storage allocations and the steep price to upgrade their solid-state drives. Note the correction on this column: I saw that Apple only offered a 256-gigabyte SSD on the entry-level iMac but stupidly neglected to check the storage options on other configurations.

11/29/2018: CrowdStrike CEO on political infosec lessons learned (Q&A), The Parallax

I talked to CrowdStrike chief executive George Kurtz at Web Summit and transcribed my interview on the flight home. Then this writeup–one not pegged to any breaking news–took a little longer to run.

11/30/2018: Facebook still hasn’t fixed this loophole for fake accounts, Yahoo Finance

This post started with some Thanksgiving tech support that revealed some highly sketchy pages in a relative’s News Feed, and then my inquiries with Facebook led the social network to nuke two pages with a combined 3.4 million Likes. Today, a reader pointed me to several other pages apparently run by the same people behind those two removed pages, so you probably haven’t read my last thoughts on this issue.

11/30/2018: Deputy AG Rosenstein calls on Big Tech to protect users, Yahoo Finance

Deputy U.S. attorney general Rod Rosenstein brought two messages to Georgetown Law’s Cybercrime 2020 symposium–and they contradicted each other to a fair amount.

Weekly output: disinformation, IoT security, do not disturb while driving, GDPR

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I wrapped up three weeks in a row of business travel by going to Toronto for Access Now’s RightsCon conference. This was somehow my first trip to Canada’s largest city, and now I’m already looking forward to returning there next year for Collision.

5/16/2018: The Perfect Storm? Misinformation and Extremist Propaganda, RightsCon

I moderated this discussion with Institute for Strategic Dialogue project coordinator Chloe Colliver, Data & Society media-manipulation project lead Joan Donovan, and Graphika research and analysis director Camille François. It all went well, aside from when I thought the panel only ran for an hour and needed the audience to remind me that we actually had a 75-minute timeslot.

5/17/2018: Internet of (Stranger) Things: Privacy threats of the next generation of vulnerable devices, RightsCon

I’ve been quoting security researcher Bruce Schneier for years, and somehow Access saw fit to have me moderate a panel featuring him–as well as Ryerson University expert-in-residence Ann Cavoukian, Access policy manager Amie Stepanovich, and Atlantic Council fellow Beau Woods. The stage for this panel happened to feature a large fern on either side, so I had no choice but to rip off “Between Two Ferns” for my introduction.

Although RightsCon didn’t record video of either panel, a new client asked me to write up our discussion, so I recorded it on my phone; you can listen to that audio after the jump.

5/20/2018: This new smartphone feature should be used by every driver, from teen to seasoned commuter, USA Today

I wrote a cheat sheet for using the “Do Not Disturb while driving” feature Apple added to iOS 11, as well as the Android Auto app that should be in Google’s standard Android bundle but is not. Neither is all that new, but I don’t always get to write the headlines.

5/20/2018: EU to install sweeping changes to online privacy rules, PBS NewsHour

I did this remote interview with NYC-based NewsHour anchor Alison Stewart about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation from a studio in D.C. before this afternoon’s Nats game. My last appearance on the show came in 2011; I’ll try not to wait so long before a return.

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Weekly output: Facebook privacy, social media vs. disinformation, mobile-app privacy, data breaches

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The Facebook-privacy news cycle doesn’t seem to be letting up, with every other day bringing some ugly new revelation about the social network’s stewardship of our data. I feel like I’m getting the tiniest taste of life as a White House correspondent these days.

4/2/2018: How Facebook should fix its privacy problem, Yahoo Finance

My key suggestions: collect less data, don’t try so hard to maximize engagement, and give U.S. users the same privacy controls that European users will get in May as required by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. On Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wouldn’t commit to extending GDPR controls to the U.S.; on Wednesday, he said he would do just that.

4/2/2018: How Facebook should fight fake news, Yahoo Finance

Headline notwithstanding, this column is as much about Twitter as it is about Facebook–and a lot of it covers how large social networks like those two can’t necessarily adopt the strategies that have helped Wikipedia deter disinformation.

4/3/2018: After you delete old Facebook apps, take a hard look at Uber and Snapchat settings, USA Today

I would have written this piece faster if I hadn’t had the chance to see how the Samsung-ified Settings app on a Galaxy S7 buried a crucial app-permissions interface. Then I spent more journalistic processor cycles rewriting an explanation of how old versions of Facebook’s Android apps collected call and SMS logs.

4/4/2018: We need a federal law protecting consumers from data leaks, Yahoo Finance

This column inspired by Panera Bread’s data breach started in my head with the tweet I used to promote it. Reporting it involved an intersection of my college and professional lives: Stephanie Martz, the National Retail Federation lawyer I interviewed, is a fellow Georgetown Voice alum who graduated two years before me.

Weekly output: IoT security, fake news, online video ads (x2), cheap wireless service, wireless plans, Verizon e-mail

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My sixth SXSW ended in one of the least likely ways possible. As I was sipping a cup of coffee at the United Club at AUS Wednesday morning and wondering how I could still be full from Tuesday’s dinner, I spotted an older gentleman in a wheelchair whose white hair, beard and gravelly voice all reminded me of the last SXSW talk I’d watched Tuesday. Then I saw his jacket, covered with the logos of every Apollo mission. Yeah: Buzz Aldrin.

After taking a moment to tell myself “act like you’ve been here before, man,” I walked over and said “Dr. Aldrin?” He looked up, I said I’d enjoyed his talk, we exchanged some pleasantries, and then I shook his hand, said it was an honor, and wished him and his companion safe travels. You know, as one does when meeting anybody who’s walked on the Moon.

 

3/13/2017: Setting Standards for Digital Privacy, Consumer Reports

CR asked me Friday if I could cover this Monday-morning panel, featuring a CR manager and an initiative CR backs to set standards for the security and privacy of Internet of Things devices. I’m glad they dangled that assignment, since otherwise an insightful discussion on a topic I’ve covered for other clients might have escaped my attention.

3/15/2017: Two fake news writers reveal how they ply their trade, Yahoo Finance

My last file for SXSW covered Yasmin Green’s head-fake of a panel–I thought it would cover her work at Google’s Project Jigsaw to counter violent extremism online. But instead she brought two proprietors of fake news (more accurately called “disinformation”), and then things got weird.

3/15/2017: How OTT Providers Are Targeting, Tracking And Timing Ads, FierceOnlineVideo

I missed this contribution to a package of stories about “OTT” (short for “over the top,” as in video services that ride on your broadband connection) advertising because I was traveling, then spent another two weeks not realizing it had been posted.

3/15/2017: OTT Ad Delivery Case Study: Hyundai’s ‘Skip’ Ad, FierceOnlineVideo

This case study had me tearing my hair out more than once as I struggled to get a quote out of one of the companies involved. Someday, I will learn to put in my interview requests early when I’m dealing with a company that hasn’t figured in my stories before, but late January was clearly not that time.

3/16/2017: Dear Wirecutter: What’s the Best Budget Cell Phone and Plan for Limited Data Use?, The Wirecutter

A Wirecutter reader wanted to know which $200-ish smartphone and $25-$30 plan to get. The first question was easy to answer, but the second required going back to the reader to confirm how much data usage they had in mind.

3/16/2017: Best Cell Phone Plans, The Wirecutter

I spent a good chunk of February revising the guide we’d just put through a complete rewrite, all because the four major carriers had to revive or improve their unlimited-data offerings. The result: While the guide still endorses Verizon as the best choice overall (with the understanding that many people don’t use that much data), we recommend T-Mobile for those looking for an unlimited-data plan.

3/17/2017: What Verizon email users need to know about it getting out of email, USA Today

When four or so readers e-mail with the same question within a couple of weeks, you probably have a column topic on your hands. I suggested to my editors that this would be worth posting earlier than the usual Sunday, and I’m glad they agreed.

Updated 4/2/2017 with the two online-ads stories I’d missed earlier. And updated again 4/17 to remove links to two posts that I’d already covered in the previous Sunday’s weekly-output post. I guess I was a little tired when I wrote this.