Facebook Login | Rob Pegoraro

After spending five weeks in a row at home, I’ve got this year’s last big trip coming up: Saturday night, I depart for Web Summit. The last time I was in Lisbon for a national election, things did not go so well; please do better next week, America.

10/23/2018: Don’t want Facebook up in your business? Here’s how to cut social networks from signons, USA Today

I wrote this column not long after Facebook revealed its most serious data breach yet, but for reasons unclear to me but most likely related to “everybody’s overworked in journalism,” it did not run until this week.

10/23/2018: Why you shouldn’t replace your cable internet with wireless, Yahoo Finance

I’ve covered the issue of whether you can replace a wired broadband connection with mobile broadband before, but this post brought a couple of extra wrinkles: AT&T and T-Mobile closing loopholes that had allowed unlimited tethering, and the testimony of somebody who’s gone a few years relying only on mobile broadband.

I spent Saturday night at a Washington Post reunion that featured a few old friends from the Weekend section whom I hadn’t seen in maybe 10 years. I really was lucky to have my first home in the paper be among such a cheerful contingent.

4/9/2018: New study finds 66% of shared links on Twitter came from bots, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance look at a new study of Twitter bots by the Pew Research Center. My writeup voiced some skepticism about the tool the Pew researchers relied on to judge whether an account was automated or human.

4/9/2018: Should you still use Facebook login, given all we know?, USA Today

My continuing coverage of Facebook privacy turned to the social network’s widely-used option to sign into other sites with your Facebook credentials. I advised using a password-manager service instead.

4/11/2018: With all we know about Facebook, should you still ‘sign in with Facebook’?, This Morning With Gordon Deal

Host Gordon Deal quizzed me about my Facebook Login column.

4/12/2018: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter

This guide was sorely overdue for an update, having last been revised last March. Although two of the four carriers hadn’t introduced any new hotspots, I did shift my endorsement to a newer Verizon model. Our second-place AT&T pick–the newest hotspot on the market–was going to be more enthusiastic until we learned that the carrier had closed a loophole that allowed unlimited data on its hotspots when added to a phone’s unlimited-data plan. (T-Mobile continues to offer a comparable option, courtesy of its T-Mobile One Plus International add-on.)

4/12/2018: Scenarios, Al Jazeera

This hour-long program had me joining an information-security expert from Doha (Google Translate renders his name as Mohammed Al-Durrani, which Google search results indicate isn’t the right English spelling of the gentleman’s name) and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Mariarosaria Taddeo to discuss Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony and what Facebook should do next. As ever, feedback from Arabic speakers about how the translator made me sound in Arabic is welcome.