On Saturday I’m traveling someplace new to me–Rio de Janeiro, where Web Summit is hosting a second annual edition of its conference. My part of it will be interviewing 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner and Signal president Meredith Whittaker; last week, I invited Patreon readers to suggest questions for each of those sessions.

4/17/2023: In Speed Showdown, T-Mobile Leads the Pack, and Not Just in 5G, PCMag

Seeing T-Mobile vault to the head of network-comparison tests like this makes me feel old, because I remember when one of the primary ancestors of that carrier did business as VoiceStream and was nobody’s idea of a threat to AT&T and Verizon.

4/20/2023: SpaceX’s Starship Launches Before Exploding 24 Miles Up, PCMag

I once thought I would be able to write this story in early 2022, but I should have given Elon Musk’s optimistic words a much more skeptical hearing. And then the day finally arrived and the giant rocket didn’t make it to staging. I described that as a successful failure, in the sense that SpaceX should now have a wealth of flight data about Starship’s performance, but I didn’t know then that Starship had pulverized part of its launch pad. Or that SpaceX had conducted Starship’s static-fire test in February at only half of the first stage’s thrust.

4/20/2023: T-Mobile Makes a Bid for Hardcore Hotspot Users With New ‘Go5G’ Plans, PCMag

T-Mobile showed up in my coverage again when the carrier introduced two new plans that aren’t named “Magenta” and effectively bracket the previous top-of-the-line Magenta Max plan.

4/23/2023: The war of social media, Al Araby

This Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk about the dueling social-media propaganda campaigns unfolding from both sides of the civil war in Sudan–both of which seem to involve a great deal of deception that benefits from Twitter’s recent “meh” approach to disinformation. I leaned heavily on reports from the Sudanese news site Beam Reports and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab.