After a workweek that I interrupted for an overdue reunion with my skis, I have another abbreviated week coming up. On top of Monday being a holiday, early Friday evening I depart for Barcelona to cover my sixth Mobile World Congress show. If you have any questions about the state of the smartphone–especially outside the U.S. market–the next five days would be a great time to get them to me.

2/12/2018: Surfing the web can leave you open to ad hijackings. A browser fix has been slow, USA Today

I revised earlier coverage of “forced-redirect” ads that hijack your Web reading to note that Google had wound up not activating an advertised defense against this scam in January’s update to Chrome.

2/16/2018: Trump needs to do more to get more Americans online, Yahoo Finance

A year ago, even some skeptics of President Trump voiced cautious optimism that his vaunted infrastructure plan would include a broadband component. This week’s release of that plan–yes, over a year after he took office pledging to rebuild America’s roads, rails, airports and waterways–pretty much crushed those hopes. This post outlines some ways that this plan could have done better.

2/17/2018: Russian social-media indictments, Al Jazeera

For once, I was able to chase down a link to one of my appearances on the news network’s Arabic-language channel. If you can speak Arabic, skip to the 11:15 mark in this evening-news roundup and please let me know how intelligent (or not) the live translation made me sound about the Justice Department’s indictment of 13 Russians and the St. Petersburg troll factory that calls itself the “Internet Research Agency.”