Tag Archives: Edward Snowden

Weekly output: megatrends, OneWeb, Andela, Saudi spying at Twitter, Kratsios on Huawei

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My last business trip of the year wrapped up Friday when I came home from Lisbon after my fifth Web Summit conference–my fourth as a speaker. The next time I board a plane for work should be January 5, when I’ll head out for my 23rd CES in a row.

11/6/2019: Predicting tomorrow’s megatrends for a better today, Web Summit

I interviewed HP Labs chief technology officer Shane Wall about how he tries to forecast sweeping trends years in advance and what can lead that exercise astray. Along the way, we got to discuss his custom-made shoes. You’ll be able to see how that topic arose whenever the organizers post video of our session.

11/7/2019: OneWeb wants to blanket the planet in high-speed satellite broadband, Fast Company

I had to write this recap of a Web Summit talk by the CEO of this satellite-broadband firm twice after my first attempt didn’t get saved by Fast Company’s Web-based CMS. I should have known not to write directly into a client’s CMS when at a conference.

11/7/2019: How to win over a developer, Web Summit

In my second panel in Lisbon, I talked to Christina Sass, co-founder of the developer-training firm Andela. Unlike my earlier panel, this one featured audience questions–but routed through a Web app called Slido, which let us pick the ones we wanted and paraphrase them as needed. I prefer that to handing a microphone over to somebody in the audience and hoping they don’t ask a question that’s more of a comment.

11/7/2019: Saudi spying at Twitter, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news network had me on to discuss the arrests of two former Twitter employees for allegedly using their insider access to spy on Saudi Arabian dissidents. I made two points via Skype in a vacant conference room at Web Summit: Lots of tech companies give internal employees too much access (remember Uber’s “god view”?), and you’d be crazy not to think that other governments are trying to recruit their own moles inside U.S. tech companies.

11/9/2019: U.S. CTO: Don’t trust Huawei. Edward Snowden: Don’t trust anybody, Fast Company

The last Web Summit talk I watched wound up neatly dovetailing with the first, in that both U.S. chief technology officer Michael Kratsios and NSA leaker Edward Snowden each voiced grave concerns over untrustworthy communications links. They just didn’t agree on the solution to them.

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Weekly output: NSA and Facebook, phone and tablet storage

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I had my name appear in boldface type below a photo of me on Wednesday (at the bottom of a recap about a book party I attended Tuesday), and on Saturday I finally ended my long streak of not posting any video clips on Twitter’s Vine service. Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet week, with much of my efforts going into stories that won’t surface until next week or later.

7/8/2014: When You’re Tired of Being Mad at Facebook, Remember the NSA, Yahoo Tech

The outsized attention paid to Facebook’s 2012 experiment with manipulating the News Feeds of some users seemed misplaced after the Washington Post’s scoop Saturday that the National Security Agency has been not just collecting but keeping personal data about potentially hundreds of thousands of innocent Internet users. I was pretty confident that mentioning these two controversial topics in the same piece would yield hundreds of comments, but that did not happen.

USAT mobile-device storage column7/13/2014:  Delete it: How to free up space on your phone, USA Today

This column, meanwhile, did not strike me as telling people things they didn’t know–aside from, maybe, that an update to Twitter’s Android app fixes a horrendous storage-eating bug unmentioned in its eight-word release notes. And yet it’s gotten a ridiculous amount of Facebook shares, without the benefit any push from USAT’s own Facebook page. I’m not saying this to brag so much as to admit that sometimes, I have only a foggy idea of what motivates people to read or skip my stuff, much less recommend it to others. I should remember that the next time I’m thinking an editor’s suggestion for a story topic won’t attract an audience.