Tag Archives: municipal broadband

Weekly output: LinkNYC, Google renews RCS plea, Chris Krebs at Black Hat, 5G explainer, Cyber Safety Review Board, Web3 security

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After a week on the West Coast, including four days in Las Vegas for the Black Hat security conference, I now have two weeks of not going anywhere. Which is good!

8/8/2022: LinkNYC begins deploying 5G kiosks – but not yet with 5G inside, Light Reading

After too many months of not writing for this telecom trade-pub client, I filed this update on New York rebooting its LinkNYC effort to bring free WiFi and digital city services to individual blocks.

8/9/2022: Google Posts Yet Another Plea for Apple to Support RCS Messaging in iMessage, PCMag

Google makes fair points when it calls out Apple for hindering the quality and privacy of cross-platform text messaging by not supporting the RCS messaging standard in iMessage. But Google hurts its cause by not supporting RCS in Google Voice–or even explaining that hangup. Also unhelpful: Google has yet to ship an API that would let the developers of Signal and other third-party messaging apps support RCS.

Screenshot of PCMag post as seen in Chrome on a Pixel 5a, with a VPN service active.8/10/2022: Ex-CISA Chief’s Advice at Black Hat: Make Security Valuable and Attacks Costly, PCMag

I covered the keynote by former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency head Chris Krebs that opened Black Hat. His talk ended on a self-help note, as he advised his audience: “Life’s too short to work for assholes. So don’t.” And yet Krebs worked for President Trump from 2018 through 2020, when Trump fired him for correctly confirming that the 2020 election was run fairly and securely; that could not have been easy for him.

8/11/2022: What Is 5G, and Does It Actually Make a Difference?, Wirecutter

I wrote yet another 5G explainer, this time for the New York Times’ Wirecutter site.

8/11/2022: How a US Govt Board Helped the Open-Source Community Leap to Patch Log4j, PCMag

As the token Washingtonian among PCMag’s crew of writers, I had to write up this very Washington panel about the first test of the Cyber Safety Review Board–an organization set up as an infosec version of the National Transportation Safety Board.

8/12/2022: Why Is Web3 Security Such a Garbage Fire? Let Us Count the Ways, PCMag

This talk about a series of security meltdowns at blockchain-based sites and services had more than a few unintentional-comedy moments.

8/12/2022: The 14 Scariest Things We Saw at Black Hat 2022, PCMag

My contribution to this recap was the “Startups Shirk Security” section.

Updated 8/21/2022 to add the PCMag Black Hat recap.

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Weekly output: encrypted DNS in Firefox (x2), expanding rural broadband, business turnarounds, optimizing business travel, travel tips

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My calendar this week is much less cluttered than it was a week ago, between SXSW’s cancellation clearing out Friday and (also coronavirus-related) postponement of the DC Blockchain Summit freeing up Wednesday and Thursday.

3/2/2020: Your internet provider knows where you’ve been. How to keep your browsing more private, USA Today

I tackled a fairly esoteric topic–encrypted domain name service–in this column. I don’t know how many people read it to the end, but at least my tweet about the piece seems to have done well

3/3/2020: Why ‘rural broadband’ may no longer be an oxymoron, Fast Company

I wrote up a new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts that offers reasons for hope about expanding rural broadband, plus useful lessons learned from states that have managed to make progress on that front.

3/3/2020: This Morning with Gordon Deal March 03, 2020, This Morning with Gordon Deal

This business radio show had me on talk about the Firefox browsing-privacy news in my column. My bit starts at the 12:45 mark.

3/4/2020: Four companies that reinvented themselves the right way… and won, Signal 360

A friend edits a newsletter Procter & Gamble publishes and asked if I could write about a few examples of companies turning themselves around. That’s not a genre of story I usually do, so I thought it would be fun to write. The results: this look at how Lego, T-Mobile, Yelp and Best Buy managed to dig themselves out of various holes.

3/8/2020: From Bookings to Bandwidth, How to Supercharge Your Business Travel, Frequent Traveler University

I did this talk with travel blogger Tess Zhao twice: a more beginner-oriented version in the morning for attendees of the Travel & Adventure Show at the Washington Convention Center, and then an expert-mode version in the afternoon for FTU DC ticket holders.

3/8/2020: Closing panel, Frequent Traveler University

This gathering for miles-and-points travel enthusiasts wrapped up with almost all of the FTU DC speakers fielding questions from the audience about various flight and lodging hacks and tips.

Updated 3/9/2020 to add a link the Signal 360 post I didn’t find when I did my usual Google News search for pages featuring my name over the last week. 

Weekly output: AR in academia, Yosemite in VR, messaging apps, mobile-app nags, municipal broadband

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I haven’t traveled anywhere for work since the end of June, but tomorrow I depart for Berlin to cover the IFA trade show for my fifth year in a row. My passport has collected a lot more stamps since August 2012 and I know I won’t feel too lost when I emerge from a U-Bahn station, but the prospect of temporarily putting 4,000-plus miles between me and my family still leaves me with mixed emotions.

EdTech AR in academia post8/23/2016: Higher Ed’s Augmented-Reality Ambitions Highlight Infrastructure Requirements, EdTech

This short, technically-inclined piece allowed me to quiz an old Post colleague–Dan Pacheco, now a professor at Syracuse University’s journalism school–and follow up with a University of Maryland professor I met last winter.

8/25/2016: You can visit Yosemite National Park with Obama … in VR, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance look at this virtual-reality tour of Yosemite narrated by President Obama. Having myself immersed in a place I haven’t seen since 2001 filled me with an almost painful level of nostalgia, so I had no choice but to reference a certain Mad Men episode.

8/26/2016: Here’s why email is still the best messaging app, Yahoo Finance

Months after the idea landed in my head, I finally wrote this get-off-my-lawn post about the cognitive load of having too many messaging apps on my phone.

8/27/2016: Avoid downloading mobile apps with these iPhone tricks, USA Today

I spaced about marketing this Q&A item about getting mobile browsers to impersonate desktop browsers because the column went up on USAT’s site on Saturday, not the usual Sunday. Note to my editors: I’ll get into PR mode about it tomorrow morning, I promise.

8/27/2016: Municipal broadband, KGO

I talked to the San Francisco station’s Jason Middleton about the sorry state of broadband competition and the prospects of municipal broadband increasing our choices. Note to myself: The next time a radio host gets my last name wrong, correct that immediately instead of waiting for the right moment.

Weekly output: Blendle, municipal broadband, OS X Calendar crashes

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I spent last week on vacation, more or less, with my wife’s family in the Bay Area. I didn’t succeed in avoiding work completely, but I did manage to compress my laptop time to maybe a day and two-thirds of effort. To carve out a little more downtime, I also refrained from answering non-urgent e-mails; if yours was one of those, I should be able to answer it in the next few days.

Yahoo Finance Blendle review8/10/2016: This ambitious new service wants to be the ‘Spotify of news’ — but falls short, Yahoo Finance

After a few months of trying out Blendle, a news app that lets you make micropayment for news stories, an otherwise slow news week meant it was time to review the service. After the story ran, Blendle spokesman Michaël Jarjour wrote in to say that about two dozen news sites in Germany and the Netherlands had added a special Blendle button that allows readers to pay for a story without leaving that site–a good way to make this app less invisible–and that the company was working to bring the same feature to U.S. publishers.

8/11/2016, We need more high-speed internet, but politicians are blocking the way, Yahoo Finance

I worried that the comments here would skew towards denouncing the socialist evil of collective ownership of the means of watching cat videos, but instead people lined up to complain about their Internet provider.

8/14/2016: Cure a calendar crash on Mac, USA Today

This column was curiously popular with people on my Facebook page–although my share of it only reached 348 people as of now, nine of them gave it a thumbs-up “Like” or the rarer, more coveted “Love” reaction. Was it something I said?

Weekly output: community broadband, worst Windows, talking to startups, Google apps on Gogo WiFi

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Another weekend in which I did not get as much down time as I’d hoped, courtesy of some additional work coming my way. So goes freelance life sometimes… although I remember the same thing happening, without any extra income, when I was a full-time employee.

1/20/2015: Obama’s Community-Broadband Plan: 4 Ways to Understand His State of the Union Pitch, Yahoo Tech

When we posted this story, we all thought municipal broadband would get at least as much of a mention in the State of the Union address as space exploration. Then that didn’t happen. Oops.

1/21/2015: The Worst Version of Windows Is…, Yahoo Tech

Sometimes, I struggle with columns. Not this time: I wrote the whole thing in basically one take, and I had fun doing it.

1/23/2015-1/24/2015: Media Match, Collaborate

I spent about 45 minutes Friday and Saturday hearing a parade of startup founders take three minutes to explain their idea, answer my questions and ask some of their own. As in prior years when I’ve participated in this part of the D.C.-area “entrepreneurship community” Fosterly’s conferences, I came away reminded of how impressive it can be to watch somebody excel at in-person sales, and how often that doesn’t happen.

USAT column on free Google apps on Gogo1/25/2015: Use Google apps over Gogo Wi-Fi for free, USA Today

I got the idea for this on a flight last October, but I held off on writing it up until I’d had enough conversations with enough people at Gogo to be reasonably confident that publicizing this loophole wouldn’t ruin it for everybody. The tip at the end of this avgeek-oriented column about using an Android phone’s GPS on a plane should be familiar to those of you who followed my microblogging experiment at Sulia. But since that startup’s shutdown last October wiped those posts off the Web, I’ve felt no guilt about recycling the ideas behind them.