Tag Archives: family wireless plans

Weekly output: Falcon Heavy (x2), family-plan wireless math, Strava privacy, Web-site defacements, Tech Night Owl

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This week was more exciting than most: I returned to the Kennedy Space Center for the first time since 2011 to see the liftoff of the most powerful rocket to leave American soil since 1973. I still can’t quite believe that I pulled that off… but I have the photos I took around Launch Complex 39A and the audio of the launch I recorded from the KSC press site to remind me that I did.

2/6/2018: SpaceX successfully launches the world’s most powerful rocket, Yahoo Finance

Two posts about the Falcon Heavy appeared at this Web address. The first was a curtain-raiser I filed late Monday explaining the significance of the Falcon Heavy. The second was a launch story–written in advance so I only had to add descriptions of the liftoff and the subsequent landing of the outer first-stage boosters–that my editors subbed in Tuesday afternoon. I also had a third post mostly ready that you didn’t read: a just-in-case piece about an unsuccessful launch that became irrelevant minutes after 3:45 p.m. Tuesday.

If you didn’t get a chance to see the pre-launch story at Yahoo, you can still read it at the Internet Archive, as shown in the screengrab above.

2/7/2018: The family cell-phone bill: How to find savings on shared wireless plans, USA Today

A reader complained that last week’s USAT column on cheaper alternatives to unlimited data for a smartphone didn’t offer any insight about saving money on shared-use family plans. Dear reader: story assignment accepted.

2/7/2018: The Strava social exercise app can reveal your home address, Yahoo Finance

I was grateful for this chance to redeem my prior Strava coverage: a study by a mobile-security firm that revealed how that exercise-tracking app’s geofenced privacy options can pinpoint a Strava user’s home address instead of obscuring it.

2/10/2018: Kuwait interior-ministry site hacked, Al-Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk (overdubbed live into Arabic) about a recent episode of a hacker in Saudi Arabia defacing the site of Kuwait’s Interior Ministry. There’s a long history of this kind of digital vandalism, and fortunately the host mainly asked me about that instead of Gulf politics.

2/10/2018: February 10, 2018 — Kirk McElhearn and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I talked with host Gene Steinberg about the Falcon Heavy launch, Strava’s privacy issues and Apple’s new HomePod speaker. Gene’s other guest was Kirk McElhearn, who’s long been among my favorite Apple reporters.

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Weekly output: AI anxiety, iOS VPNs in China, side effects of unlimited data, Googling Islam, GDPR and data portability, leaving family wireless plans

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I take a little pride in having made it through all of July without once writing about iPhone 8 rumors.

7/31/2017: AI worries, Al Jazeera

I talked about the recent argument between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg about the possible threat of highly competent, extraordinarily capable artificial intelligences. My take: The machines probably won’t kill us, but they may take some of our jobs.

Yahoo iOS VPN apps post7/31/2017: Apple’s decision to drop privacy apps in China might not be the last of its kind, Yahoo Finance

The eviction of VPN apps from the Chinese-market App Store is something anybody could have seen coming. And as long as Apple leaves itself as the only judge of which apps most users can install on iOS devices, we’ll keep seeing this kind of story play out.

8/2/2017: Study shows unlimited data plans are slowing wireless carrier speeds, Yahoo Finance

A lot of other sites ran with OpenSignal’s new study finding slower speeds at AT&T and Verizon Wireless after their belated reintroduction of unmetered-data plans, but most others didn’t try to compare that firm’s findings with those of other recent tests of the big four wireless carriers.

8/2/2017: Google and searches on Islam, Al Jazeera

My producer asked if I could talk about some recent controversy over Google favoring Islamophobic pages in results for some common queries about Islam. I have to admit I’d missed some of that news, but on closer inspection it fit with past episodes of Holocaust denial creeping up in Google results.

8/2/2017: A massive EU privacy rule could bring an unexpected benefit for US consumers, Yahoo Finance

I hadn’t paid much attention to the European Union’s upcoming General Data Protection Regulation until moderating a panel about privacy issues at CES. But once I started looking at “GDPR” I realized that these EU rules could make a difference here by requiring social networks–hi, Instagram and Tumblr–to let their users take their data with them. I can only hope that this data-portability angle resonated with some readers.

8/6/2017: Options available when it’s time to leave the wireless-family-plan nest, USA Today

I would have filed this column a little earlier if AT&T still had the simple rate-planning tool that let visitors get estimates of different wireless plans; now, you have to step through signing up for service to see what you might pay.