Tag Archives: Facebook ad transparency

Weekly output: Apple security patches, Facebook ad transparency

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Next week would normally only have four workdays, thanks to Monday being Presidents’ Day, but for me it’s more like three–Friday I start my journey to Barcelona for MWC. I made that trip for the first time 10 years ago, and I’ve learned a few things about both the wireless industry and international travel since.

Patreon readers got a bonus post this week about a business upside of my broadcasting the demise of my USA Today column.

PCMag Apple security-updates post2/13/2020: Update Now: Apple Ships Fixes for Zero-Day Vulnerability in Macs, iPhones, iPads, PCMag

After I’d vented my annoyance–on Twitter, then Mastodon–about Apple repeating its practice of not giving users any heads-up that a security fix patches a zero-day vulnerability, I decided I might as well write about this for a paying client.

2/15/2023: Facebook Promises More Details on Why Certain Ads Show Up on Your Feed, PCMag

This would have been a shorter post, except that thinking that I should remind readers of how Facebook features can take time to show up in your account reminded me that I’d written about one such feature last July that I’d never seen in my own account, which in turn led me to discover that Facebook’s help page about that Feeds tab had incorrect instructions. And apparently nobody at Facebook had noticed that error until I e-mailed their PR department to ask about that.

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Weekly output: Inside the Media Minds, EU copyright control-freakery, WeChat, 5G and IoT, Facebook political-ad rules

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In addition to the exposure below, I may or may not have been on New York’s Fox affiliate WNYW Monday–I did a Skype interview about the music industry’s move away from downloads, but I have no idea if they used it or not. If you happened to watch them Monday night, please let me know either way in a comment.

6/19/2018: EP 7 – Rob Pegoraro/Yahoo Finance/USA Today, Inside the Media Minds

I sat down for this interview with W2 Communications‘ host Christine Blake a month ago–but since I spent most of the time talking about longer-term stuff like my coverage priorities and my worries about technology, it aged reasonably well.

6/20/2018: How Europe’s proposed copyright laws could ruin your search engines, Yahoo Finance

It’s now been over five and a half years since I first wrote about the inane idea of letting newspapers charge search engines for the privilege of indexing their content, and I’ve been covering Hollywood’s demands that the tech industry nerd harder and create some magic solution to copyright infringement since at least 2002. That the European Union is seriously considering copyright-law revisions that would add a link tax and upload filtering suggests that no tech-policy idea is too dumb not to be exhumed and put forth as a sober-minded solution.

6/21/2018: Meet WeChat, the app that’s ‘everything’ in China, The Parallax

I wrote a lengthy explainer about WeChat, the do-it-all social-media platform that largely defines the mobile Internet for Chinese users–Facebook Messenger could only dream of folding in so many functions. Then again, Facebook Messenger offers end-to-end encryption while WeChat offers no such thing.

6/21/2018: 5G and the Internet of Things: How much? How fast? How soon?, CE Week

I led a panel discussion at the CE Week conference with Owl CEO Andrew Hodge, I Luv Wireless managing member Michael Dean, and SureCall sales vice president Frankie Smith. The takeaway: forget latency and bandwidth, better battery life will be the real reward of 5G in connected devices.

6/22/2018: Facebook’s push to kill bad political ads is also hiding regular posts, Yahoo Finance

Facebook now requires ads that address political issues to meet a higher standard of transparency—but in practice, its system has been classifying ads promoting news stories and even everyday commercial offerings as political.