Tag Archives: GDPR

Weekly output: 5G leaders, Mr. Antenna, streaming study, Desi Bundle, Disney’s Star+, Seinfeld coming to Netflix, two-factor authentication, HBO Max on Vizio, Locast logs off, Apple loosens App Store rules for “reader” apps, Nielsen nixed, checking wireless coverage, WhatsApp privacy fine

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I worked a volunteer shift at a COVID-19 vaccination clinic Friday, the fourth time I’ve done so. On this occasion, we had far fewer customers than before, most coming for their second round of Pfizer or Moderna. But a few had yet to get any dose, which meant that they got to choose between those two vaccines or Johnson & Johnson’s; the latter needing a single jab made the difference for one man who said he was only getting vaccinated because his job required it. We also had a few under-18 kids who were limited to Pfizer–and one whom had been brought by her mom on her 12th birthday, so we had to take a minute to sing “Happy Birthday” to her.

8/30/2021: The 5G 50 to Watch Top Ten List, Light Reading

I helped write the bios for this list of top telecom industry executives put together by my trade-pub client. Yes, my last name is spelled wrong at the end of the piece.

8/31/2021: OTA antenna service alleges Vegas station refused to air its ads, FierceVideo

I spent most of this week filling in at my other big trade-pub client. I started by covering an allegation by a broadcast-antenna vendor named Mr. Antenna that a Las Vegas station had quit airing its ads because increased broadcast viewing would undercut its cable-TV income.

8/31/2021: New study finds more Americans splitting their streaming budget, FierceVideo

I wrote up a Leichtman Research Group study finding more Americans signing up for at least three streaming services.

8/31/2021: DistroScale streaming bundle serves up free South Asian channels, FierceVideo

If you didn’t know that “desi” is a term for people of South Asian descent before reading this post, you did after.

9/1/2021: Disney debuts Star+ in Latin America, FierceVideo

Writing this led me to dust off my VPN service for the first time in months to see what pricing this new Disney streaming service would show to a viewer in its target Latin American markets–the press releases I saw didn’t list any.

9/1/2021: Seinfeld coming to Netflix Oct. 1—and in 4K, FierceVideo

I only referenced one Seinfeld catch phrase in this piece, which I thought showed remarkable restraint.

Screengrab of column as seen in USAT's iPad app9/1/2021: Why you shouldn’t rely on texts when using two-factor authentication to sign into accounts, USA Today

I could have written this column at any time in the previous two years, but T-Mobile’s latest data breach made it newly relevant.

9/2/2021: HBO Max app comes to Vizio connected TVs, FierceVideo

This post reminded me how much of HBO Max’s early struggles with getting its apps on streaming platforms.

9/2/2021: After hostile court ruling, Locast logs off, FierceVideo

As I tweeted after this story ran, the broadcasters who succeeded in suing Locast offline might not want to gloat too much. Viewers aren’t getting any less weary of endless pay-TV rate hikes, and telling people without good over-the-air reception to stick with cable will only get less persuasive every year.

9/2/2021: Apple to let video apps point users away from its payment system, FierceVideo

Apple deigning to allow “reader” apps to include one link to their own site shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is in the context of that company’s history of App Store control-freakery.

9/3/2021: Media Rating Council suspends Nielsen accreditations, FierceVideo

My last post for Fierce this week covered an industry group snubbing Nielsen’s audience-tracking work.

9/3/2021: Which wireless carrier has the best coverage where you’re going? Here’s how to find out, USA Today

A friend’s query about ways to see if T-Mobile or Verizon would offer better service than AT&T at his home was followed by my realizing that USAT had yet to cover the FCC’s release of a new and surprisingly helpful map of predicted LTE coverage from the major carriers.

9/3/2021: WhatsApp fined under GDPR, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language channel had me on to discuss WhatsApp getting hit with a €225 million fine for violations of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. The European Data Protection Board’s ruling in this case calls those failures of transparency, but I see the underlying problem as WhatsApp insisting on access to your phone’s contacts list to place a call or send a message to anybody who hasn’t already contacted you in the app.

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Weekly output: 8K TV, tech talk with Mark Vena, Washington Apple Pi

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My workday schedule is about to get disrupted for the next 10 weeks or so: Day-camp season kicks off for our daughter Monday, so I will have a car commute most mornings and many evenings too.

6/17/2019: How TV types are getting ready to sell 8K, FierceVideo

I wrote this report from two events I’d attended in New York the week before: Insight Media’s 8K Display Summit and then an 8K panel at CE Week.

6/17/2019: Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast (6-17-19), What’s Hot in Tech?

I once again joined Moor analyst Mark Vena on his podcast to talk tech–in this case, 8K TV, the next-generation gaming consoles he saw introduced at the E3 show, and Apple’s WWDC announcements. Yes, we talked about the Mac Pro’s thousand-dollar monitor stand. How could we not?

6/22/2019: June 22, 2019 General Meeting: Rob Pegoraro, Washington Apple Pi

I spoke for about an hour before this Apple user group about the state of Web and smartphone privacy, the prospects of Washington agreeing on any government regulation of same, and the state of tech journalism. (That last bit gave me a chance to talk about my Patreon venture–my latest patron-only post there outlines upcoming stories I’m working on for various clients–and do some in-person salesmanship for it.) And as I did when I spoke to the Pi last summer, I brought a bag full of tech-event swag and gave away almost all of it.

Weekly output: debating privacy regulation, United same-day changes

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I feel bad for being so checked out of the NCAA tournament, but once again, my Hoyas have no part in March Madness. My wife’s Hoos are in it, having managed to avoid repeating last year’s improbable first-round collapse–yet I’m still a little leery about getting too invested.

3/19/2019: Approaches to Regulating Technology—From Privacy to A.I., American Action Forum

I debated possible regulatory strategies for protecting privacy with the Charles Koch Institute’s Neil Chilson, the Niskanen Center’s Ryan Hagemann, and the George Mason University Mercatus Center’s Jennifer Huddleston. My fellow speakers suggested that we didn’t really need a new batch of data-protection laws along the lines of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation or the California Consumer Privacy Act, which struck me as an exceedingly optimistic perspective to hold after a year of bad news about Facebook’s privacy failings. But they could very well be right in suggesting that Congress won’t get it together to pass any such bill this year.

3/20/2019: A Comprehensive Guide to United Airlines’ Same Day Flight Change, The Points Guy

I wrote this to share one of the best travel hacks I’ve learned over the past several years: the generous and free same-day change policy at United Airlines, which Gold and higher elites can use to revise itineraries to a remarkably degree starting within 24 hours of departure.

Updated 4/30 because, um, I missed the SDC story when it was published. 

Weekly output: privacy-law prospects, switching wireless carriers, cable and broadband fee inflation, Android messages on your computer

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ces 2019 badgeOnce again, a Sunday in January finds me in Las Vegas for CES. It’s like I’ve been doing this since 1998 or something…

12/31/2018: Why 2019 might finally bring a national privacy law for the US, Yahoo Finance

Writing a story optimistic about the prospects for a national privacy bill makes me feel like Charlie Brown lining up to the kick the football, so if the year ends with Congress having yanked the ball away I’ll be disappointed but not enormously surprised.

12/31/2018: How to Switch Cell Phone Carriers, Wirecutter

This how-to post started with some banter on Wirecutter’s Slack about the mechanics of switching carriers.

1/1/2019: How your TV or broadband bill might creep up in the new year, Yahoo Finance

Just as I predicted a year ago, cable and broadband companies marked the new year with a round of rate hikes. This time around, I focused on increases to the add-on fees that are usually confined to the fine print of ads.

1/4/2019: You can read your Android phone’s texts on your Mac or PC. Here’s how, USA Today

A couple of readers complained that this column didn’t address third-party solutions for reading your texts on your Mac or PC–for example, MightyText, Pushbullet, Pulse SMS. That, I have to admit, is a fair point.

Updated 1/15/2019 to add a link to the Wirecutter how-to post that I’d missed at the time. 

Weekly output: Senate privacy hearings (x2), a split Internet, Chrome vs. Flash, cord cutting, D.C. tech, Chrome sync, Facebook hack

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The last few days of Brett Kavanaugh drama in the Senate really took a hammer to my productivity. Yours too, I’m sure.

9/24/2018: What to expect when Apple, Amazon, and Google get grilled in Congress this week, Yahoo Finance

This was what you saw me talk about the previous Friday on Yahoo Finance’s Midday Movers show. One point I wish I’d made in this post: the absence of customer voices in this hearing.

9/24/2018: China’s Internet, Al Jazeera

I come on at about the 5:30 mark in the linked video to discuss remarks by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt that China’s increasingly-tight control of the Internet inside its borders means we’re now dealing with two Internets.

9/24/2018: Google’s latest Chrome update tightens the locks on Adobe Flash, USA Today

With Chrome now making it harder than ever to run Flash content, I checked in with two Flash holdouts: Intuit’s Mint.com, which requires it to view stock charts, and United Airlines’ “personal device entertainment” inflight service, which demands it to stream most TV shows and movies to a browser.

9/25/2018: Your wireless carrier may stop you from dumping cable TV, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance look at two studies that came out Tuesday: one looking at cord cutters’ motivations, another at how reliably wireless carriers deliver streaming video. The second provided important context to complaints cited in the first, so I wrote up both in this post.

9/26/2018: Are you ready for the spotlight?, DC Startup Week

SilverStrategy founder Tara Silver quizzed me, Technical.ly DC‘s Michelai Graham, and DC Inno’s Kieran McQuilkin about how startups try to get media attention, the state of the D.C.-tech scene, and this region’s odds of landing Amazon’s second headquarters. Update, 10/8: The organizers posted video of our panel to their Facebook page.

9/27/2018: Why now is a good time to reconsider browser-sync options on Google Chrome, USA Today

The latest Chrome release’s barely-documented switch to logging you into the browser if you log into any Google sites both upset some information-security types and gave me an opportunity to write this post, reminding readers that you can add a sync password to stop Google from monitoring and monetizing your Web activity and that Mozilla Firefox’s own Web-activity synchronization comes encrypted end-to-end.

9/27/2018: Tech execs to senators: Regulate us, but not too much, The Parallax

I wrote up Wednesday’s Senate Commerce Committee tech-privacy hearings, noting the questions the senators asked of executives with Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Charter, Google, and Twitter as well as the queries that didn’t come up.

9/29/2018: Facebook hacked, Al Jazeera

I made a second appearance on AJ’s Arabic-language channel (overdubbed live as usual) to talk about the series of bugs that could have let unknown attackers into 50 million Facebook accounts. Unlike my earlier appearance this week, this show doesn’t seem to be online.

Weekly output: whither the small smartphone, medical-device security, Senate privacy hearings

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I watched my last Nats game of the year this afternoon and had scant company in the ballpark, thanks to the chilly temperatures, near-constant rain, and yesterday’s elimination of the team from postseason contention. But even in those crummy circumstances, baseball still offers its less-likely rewards: seeing us turn a 5-2-3 double play, then watching Trea Turner break the franchise record for stolen bases.

(Confession: I wasn’t in the stands after the 5th. I believe that staying for all 18 innings of game 2 of the 2014 NLDS gives me a pass to leave the very-occasional game early.)

9/19/2018: With Apple maxing out iPhone sizes, the small smartphone looks even more endangered, USA Today

If you’re a fan of smartphones small enough to allow easy one-handed use–and to fit into what passes for pockets on many women’s clothing–then the big part of Apple’s iPhone news this year was the quiet discontinuation of the compact iPhone SE. Unfortunately, Android vendors appear even more set on ignoring market demand for smaller devices.

9/20/2018: How weak IoT gadgets can sicken a hospital’s network, The Parallax

I wrote an explainer about how badly-configured or insecure-by-default connected devices can allow remote exploitation, then traversal of a hospital’s network. To get a fuller sense of your risks, replace “hospital’s network” with “your home’s network.”

9/21/2018: Midday Movers: Stocks mixed after a day of record highs, Yahoo Finance

Yahoo Finance runs four live video shows each weekday, and I made an appearance on one of them after an editor basically asked what was taking me so long. I had already been planning on attending Yahoo’s All Markets Summit conference Thursday (I hope my livetweeting from it didn’t get too annoying), so this gave me even more reason to head up to NYC for a few days. I come on at the 40-minute mark, when I talk about a post I have coming up that outlines the questions I hope will be asked at Wednesday’s Senate Commerce Committee tech-privacy hearings–plus what I’m afraid we’ll hear instead.

Weekly output: Stasi Museum, new iPhones

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For the first time since I-don’t-know-when, I didn’t watch an Apple new-iPhone event live. I had planned on doing that in the air on my way to Austin Wednesday for the Online News Association’s conference, but the plane was a regional jet with Gogo WiFi–and I realized after takeoff that I’d forgotten my Gogo password, didn’t have that password saved in LastPass and could not reset it without, you know, Internet access. Then I further realized that a) since nobody had asked me to opine on Apple’s new hardware as of noon, that probably wasn’t going to happen later on, and b) since my upgrade had cleared on this flight, I could skip creating a new Gogo account for the occasion and instead enjoy a leisurely lunch before napping in a chair in a sky.

9/10/2018: Remember Stasi spying to understand the GDPR, The Parallax

The day I arrived in Berlin for IFA, I set aside a few hours to explore the Stasi Museum, a grim monument to the oppressive surveillance of the German “Democratic” “Republic.” I’d prepared myself for the visit by watching “The Lives of Others,” but it was something else to see the physical relics of East Germany’s campaign to take up residence in the heads of its subjects. Writing this gave me a chance to quote a co-worker from 1993: Shane Green, who was a fellow intern at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and went on to work in Berlin and learn about the Stasi’s destruction of privacy before a lot of other Americans.

9/12/2018: Apple’s upcoming iPhones, Al Jazeera

My one bit of punditry–so far!–about Apple’s new phones came late Wednesday morning (or that evening if you watched the Arabic-language channel in in Qatar), an hour and a half before Apple’s event. I did a quick live interview to talk about the prospects of higher prices and a wider array of iPhone models, plus the chances that President Trump would slap a tariff on Chinese-made iPhones.

Weekly output: Michael Chertoff on privacy, TV-streaming rate hikes

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I only had four workdays this week, thanks to Monday being spent in the air on my way back from London to D.C. That said, my productivity was not as bad as this scant list would suggest, since I filed three other posts in those four days… and now I can find out how much more work edits on those posts will entail.

7/12/2018: Ex-Homeland Security chief Chertoff wants EU-style data privacy laws, Yahoo Finance

I spent about half an hour on the phone with Michael Chertoff Wednesday afternoon about his views on various privacy and security issues and came away with far more material than I could fit in this post, as well as a renewed appreciation of the time it takes to transcribe quotes from a recording of an interview.

7/15/2018: As cord-cutting prices rise, here’s what you can do to keep costs down, USA Today

No, rate hikes at such live-TV streaming services as DirecTV Now and Sling TV don’t mean that returning to the embrace of cable or satellite TV–both subject to the same inflationary pressures, both also fond of sticking you with monthly fees to return a tuner box–now makes financial sense for a lot more people.

Another part of the world where I need to use a VPN

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I spent last week in London with my family–yes, actual vacation-esque time! It was great, except for when I was trying to keep up with news from back home.

My first stay across the Atlantic since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation went into force May 25 brought home the unpleasant reality of some U.S. sites’ continued struggles with this privacy law. And instead of experiencing this only briefly in a Virtual Private Network session on my iPad, I got a full-time dose of it.

The biggest problem is sites such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times that have blocked all European access instead of providing the privacy controls required by the GDPR.

That’s not the fault of the GDPR–its provisions were set two years ago–but is the fault of Tronc, the long-mismanaged news firm formerly known as Tribune Publishing. Tronc could afford to pay $15 million to former chairman Michael Ferro after he quit facing charges of sexual abuse but apparently couldn’t afford to hire any GDPR-qualified developers. I hope the LAT can fix that now that Tronc has sold the paper, but it may be a while before I can link to any Tribune stories without annoying European readers.

With my client USA Today, the issue isn’t as bad: It provides EU readers with a stripped-down, ad- and tracking-free version of the site, which you can see at right in the screenshot above. What’s not to like about such a fast, simple version? Well, I can’t see comments on my own columns, and simply searching for stories requires switching to Google… by which I mean, Bing, since right-clicking a Google search result doesn’t let you copy the target address, and clicking through to a Google result will yield an EU-specific USAT address.

The simplest fix for these and other GDPR-compliance glitches was to fire up Private Internet Access on my laptop and connect to one of that VPN service’s U.S. locations–yes, as if I were in China. It seems a violation of the Web’s founding principles to have to teleport my browser to another continent for a task as simple as reading the news, but here we are.