Weekly output: security attitudes at Black Hat, American Airlines bullish on Boom, Visible changes plans, business cybersecurity worries, Mark Vena podcast

Posted on August 21, 2022 by robpegoraro

With our kid going back to school a week from Monday, this is my last week of day-camp-commute driving for the year.

8/16/2022: As Black Hat security conference turns 25, a lesson: security doesn’t have an end point, USA Today

I didn’t finish writing this recap until leaving Vegas and using that conference’s video-on-demand option to watch the panel I’d most regretted missing.

8/16/2022: American Airlines Puts Down Deposit on 20 Boom Supersonic Overture Jets, PCMag

Once again, Boom Supersonic had news of an airline order for its Overture jet land unaccompanied by news of an engine design, so this time I reminded readers of how long two recent jet engines took to enter revenue service.

8/17/2022: Visible Reshuffles Plans: No More Party Pay, But Solo Service Is Now $10 Cheaper, PCMag

Visible is taking a page out of its parent firm Verizon’s book by having more than one plan with “unlimited” data.

8/18/2022: What Do Business Execs Worry About Most? Getting Hacked, PCMag

A PricewaterhouseCoopers survey finding that business executives worry most about information security shouldn’t be news… except that none of PwC’s previous surveys of suits had found infosec to be their top anxiety.

8/19/2022: S02 E34 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

Recording this week’s episode of the podcast hit a few technical glitches, and for once they weren’t on my end.

Weekly output: watching baseball online, broadband privacy, Apple secrecy, Comcast wireless, Tech Night Owl

Posted on April 9, 2017 by robpegoraro

This week saw me at two Opening Days: On Monday, I attended the Nats’ home opener, and today I kicked off the 2017 lawn-mowing season. In both cases, I’m worried we’re going to fade down the stretch.

4/3/2017: The cheapest way to watch baseball online, Yahoo Finance

For once, I had good things to say about the availability of sports programming online, thanks to many regional sports networks now showing up on services like Sling TV, PlayStation Vue and DirecTV Now. Alas, the Nats’ Mid-Atlantic Sports Network is not among them.

4/5/2017: Broadband privacy, Al Jazeera

I talked about the swift, Republican-led dispatch of privacy regulations for the Arabic news network.

4/6/2017: How Apple’s secrecy can hurt consumers, Yahoo Finance

Apple’s unprecedented revelation of even broad details about the next Mac Pro and iMac kicked off this post about the unhelpful hangup many tech companies–no, not just Apple–have about keeping customers in the loop.

4/7/2017: The hidden details in Comcast’s wireless plan, USA Today

The amount of interest in Comcast’s upcoming Xfinity Mobile wireless service–which will run off Verizon’s network as well as Comcast’s network of WiFi hot spots–is remarkable, given that you’ll need to subscribe to Comcast Internet to use it. Also remarkable: how many details Comcast left out of its opening sales pitch for Xfinity Mobile.

If you look at the comments, you’ll see a complaint from a reader that an accompanying chart didn’t list the correct price for Google’s Project Fi wireless service. That chart now lists the right rate–yes, I do try to read comments, and in this case I sent a quick note to my editors advising them of the error.

4/8/2017: April 8, 2017 — John Martellaro and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I returned to this podcast for the first time since August (had it really been that long?) to talk about Apple’s tepid gesture at transparency, Xfinity Mobile, and the state of broadband privacy and competition.

Weekly output: CES recap, United fleet site, cybersecurity coverage, wireless phone plans, inauguration wireless coverage, T-Mobile One alternatives

Posted on January 22, 2017 by robpegoraro

I got a little extra publicity this week from the Columbia Journalism Review when its editors illustrated their open letter to President Trump from the White House press corps with a photo I took of the White House press briefing room. It’s been flattering to see that people actually read photo credits! I would have liked to see CJR link to the original–I believe that’s a condition of the Creative Commons non-commercial-use-allowed license under which I shared it on Flickr–but the reply I got was that their CMS doesn’t support links in photo credits.

That photo, incidentally, comes from 2014’s White House Maker Faire–exactly the sort of event I don’t expect to get invited to over the next four years.

1/17/2017: Techdirt Podcast Episode 105: The CES 2017 Post-Mortem, Techdirt

I talked with Techdirt founder Mike Masnick about my experience at this year’s show. I did the interview using a podcasting Web app I hadn’t tried before, Cast. My verdict: great UX, but that name is horrible SEO.

1/18/2017: Get to Know Your Airliner, Air & Space Magazine

I finally wrote a story for a magazine I’ve been reading on and off since high school, which is pretty great. The subject: the United Airlines Fleet Website, a remarkably useful volunteer-run database of United planes that I’ve gotten in the habit of checking before every UA flight. The story should also be in the February issue, available at newsstands in the next few days.

1/18/2017: What you should really know about every major hacking story, Yahoo Finance

I put on my media-critic hat to write this post about what too many cybersecurity pieces–and too many mass-media conversations on the subject, up to and including those started by Donald Trump–get wrong.

1/19/2017: The Best Cell Phone Plans, The Wirecutter

We decided last summer that having separate guides for the four major wireless carriers and for prepaid and resold phone plans didn’t help readers who should be considering all of their options. That also imposed extra work on me. The result: a single guide that’s much shorter and will be easier to update the next time, say, Sprint rolls out some new price plans.

1/19/2017: How carriers will keep D.C. online during Trump’s inauguration, Yahoo Finance

The real test of the big four networks came not during President Trump’s under-attended inauguration but the Women’s March on Washingtoh the next day. To judge from the experience of my wife and others, the carriers did not acquit themselves too well: Her Verizon iPhone lost data service for part of the day, and I saw friends posting on Facebook that they couldn’t get photos to upload.

1/22/2017: Am I stuck with T-Mobile’s flagship plan?, USA Today

T-Mobile’s decision to limit its postpaid offerings to the unmetered-but-not-unlimited T-Mobile One gave me an opportunity to provide a quick tutorial on the differences between postpaid, prepaid and resold services.

Weekly output: Donald Trump’s e-mails, French startups, Hillary Clinton’s tech policy, Viva Technology Paris (x6), Spotify vs. Apple, wireless resellers

Posted on July 3, 2016 by robpegoraro

After going 25 years without setting foot in France, I returned to Paris barely a month after May’s horribly-overdue reunion to moderate a round of panels at Viva Technology Paris, a new conference put on by the French business-news group Les Echos and the Paris-based marketing firm Publicis Groupe. They covered my travel costs in return for my not zonking out from jet lag on stage, a commitment I did keep.

6/27/2016: Donald Trump has a big problem with email spam, Yahoo Finance

I filed this last Friday afternoon, but the crush of Brexit coverage at Yahoo left the post farther down the editing queue than normal.

6/27/2016: The thing that holds back French startups? Not the 35-hour work week, Yahoo Finance

I can’t make any jokes about the French work ethic after needing a good month to finish this report from May’s up-close look at the country’s attempts to make itself a tech destination. On the upside, it did inform the very next post I wrote for Yahoo.

6/28/2016: Here’s how Hillary Clinton plans to keep America the world’s tech leader, Yahoo Finance

I hustled to finish this Tuesday afternoon, then found myself with unexpected free time at National Airport as the weather made a mess of my initial itinerary. I wound up going to Paris by way of Frankfurt, but that’s another story in its own right.

6/30/2016: Building the digital state with data, Viva Technology Paris

I interviewed Rufus Pollock, president and founder of the U.K.-based Open Knowledge group, about how much data stays locked up in proprietary formats and behind paywalls.

6/30/2016: Electricity storage: a new frontier, Viva Technology Paris

Having whole-home batteries like Tesla’s forthcoming Powerwall won’t change how we use electricity as much as having battery-backed homes linked on a neighborhood level. At least, that’s what I learned from my talk with Engie innovation program director Mark Akehurst and Sonnen CEO Christoph Ostermann.

6/30/2016: Open partnerships to design new territories, Viva Technology Paris

The initial description of this smart-cities panel might have sounded a little vague, but I wound up having a good conversation with Vinci Energies innovation and development director Lydia Babaci-Victor and HAL24K founder Jérôme Mol about ways to make our cities and towns more self-aware and efficient.

6/30/2016: Will cellular agriculture help to feed us all?, Viva Technology Paris

Sadly, we had no samples of vat-grown food to share at the talk I had with Gilonne d’Origny of New Harvest and science journalist Marta Zaraska. I enjoyed the conversation anyway.

7/1/2016: How will online medicine change our relationships with doctors?, Viva Technology Paris

My other five (!) panels ran just 20 minutes, but this one featuring Doctolib CEO Stanislas Niox-Chateau, Omixy CEO Lavinia Ionita and Push Doctor CEO Eren Ozagir was booked for 30 minutes. Result: We all started to sweat under the lights in an already-toasty venue.

7/1/2016: 3D simulation and the cities of tomorrow, Viva Technology Paris

My other smart-cities panel of the week, featuring Engie’s Olivier Biancarelli and Siradel CEO Laurent Bouillot, was marred by some dead air when the one-minute videos each had brought to show their 3-D city modeling didn’t play promptly. I should have seen that coming and been prepared to talk through the holdup.

7/1/2016: Spotify just turned up the volume on its latest fight with Apple, Yahoo Finance

I wrote this between Friday afternoon’s panels, then had to revise it again after a letter from Apple’s general counsel to Spotify’s made its way to BuzzFeed’s site.

7/3/2016: Name that network: The carriers behind wireless resellers, USA Today

Not for the first time, a question from a friend led to a column that I hope will draw a good amount of search traffic over time.

Weekly output: encryption politics, Thanksgiving tech support

Posted on November 29, 2015 by robpegoraro

I did better than I expected at avoiding work e-mail over this weekend, but I did have to set aside time to revise two Wirecutter pieces. On Monday, the latest iteration of our guide to the major wireless carriers went up, covering price shifts at Sprint and T-Mobile and improved international-roaming options at Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Then on Wednesday, we corrected last week’s guide to prepaid and resold wireless service to explain how our pick, Consumer Cellular, had begun wholesaling T-Mobile’s service as well as AT&T’s. I missed that non-trivial change, and I’m still annoyed about the oversight.

11/24/2015: The Paris Attacks Were Tragic, but Cryptography Isn’t to Blame, Yahoo Tech

I returned to the debate over whether tech companies should be required to build in back doors for law enforcement–my last such post ran in September–to argue that the argument for compromised crypto is even weaker when you look at adversaries like the Paris murderers. Who, by the way, hardly bothered to cover their tracks.

11/27/2015: How to improve family’s Wi-Fi and other tech support tips, USA Today

My original concept of this column was to write a sort of greatest-hits compilation of earlier pieces, but I soon realized that this story could and should note the ways these consumer-tech problems had gotten better or worse since I’d last covered them for USAT. I’m not sure what made this piece so widely shared on Facebook–though having my column run two days early must have helped–but I’m flattered anyway.

Writing this also reminded me that I was sorely overdue to uninstall Oracle’s Java software off one laptop. I had disconnected that program from my browser long ago, but it still didn’t justify its storage footprint.

Weekly output: cross-device tracking, prepaid and MVNO wireless, Justin Bieber Mode, USB-C cables and chargers

Posted on November 22, 2015 by robpegoraro

My business travel for the year officially wrapped up with my return Friday night from a brief but meeting-packed trip to NYC. If I spend any other nights out of town for work before CES 2016, somebody else will need to be paying.

In other news: Welcome, new readers interested in Syrian-refugee politics and/or USB-C accessories! Should you keep reading, each Sunday you will find a recap of where I wrote or spoke or was quoted; at least one more day in the week sees me writing about some other thing that doesn’t fit at my usual outlets.

11/17/2015: Cross-Device Tracking: How the Ad Industry Will Follow You Wherever You Go, Yahoo Tech

A workshop hosted by the Federal Trade Commission Monday gave me an opportunity to write about a topic I’ve been following for a while.

11/19/2015: Best Prepaid and Alternative Cellphone Plans, The Wirecutter

My third guide at this site covers both prepaid and resold (aka “MVNO,” short for “mobile virtual network operator”) wireless service, and it was many months in the making. Please read the comments; I spent part of Friday morning answering the first round of reader feedback, and I’ll be back there Monday or Tuesday.

11/19/2015: Who Should Be On Lyft’s Playlist After Justin Bieber?, Yahoo Tech

Yes, I’m old to cover anything involving Justin Bieber. But after getting a prompt in the Lyft app to partake in this promotion, I couldn’t not write about the weird intersection of the ride-hailing service and the Canadian pop star.

11/22/2015: Some Android users face quandry with USB-C, USA Today

My self-serving motivation to write this column was my own curiosity over when the phone chargers handed out as tech-event swag will feature USB Type-C connectors to match the hardware on my new phone. Before you mention it: Yes, I’m aware of the typo in the headline, and we’ll get that fixed soonest.

Weekly output: EU vs. Google, Tech Night Owl, Sprint WiMax resellers

Posted on December 7, 2014 by robpegoraro

This has been a rotten week for journalism, courtesy of Rolling Stone’s failure to follow the newsroom mantra “if your mother says she loves you, check it out” when reporting a gruesome allegation of gang rape at the University of Virginia. My own week in journalism was better, but I’m not going to say it represented my best work.

12/2/2014: The European Union Wants to Regulate Google —Some More, Yahoo Tech

The EU’s increasingly shrill attacks on Google led to a column in which I sound suspiciously like a Republican (maybe even more than when I’m discussing San Francisco’s screwed-up housing policy). But in retrospect, I should have ended the column on a different note: By acting like the confiscatory villains in an Ayn Rand novel, the EU invites us to dismiss all of its critiques of Google, even the ones that might have a grounding in the facts.

12/6/2014: December 6, 2014 — John Martellaro and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

Host Gene Steinberg and I talked about the present and possible future of the Apple TV, net-neutrality politics, Windows 10, 4K TV and a few other things.

12/7/2014: 4G me not: WiMax isn’t LTE and is going away at Sprint resellers, USA Today

I don’t always get to write my own headlines, but my editor at USAT appreciates the help and I don’t mind making the effort–especially when this kind of wordplay pops into my head. The research involved in this piece about companies reselling Sprint service will also play into an upcoming story about wireless broadband.

Weekly output: Turkey and Twitter, activity trackers, MVNOs

Posted on April 6, 2014 by robpegoraro

This week provided a rare excuse, however tangential, to apply some of my Georgetown book learning on things like international relations and European history.

41/2014: Turkey Blocks Twitter. Could It Happen Here? It’s Come Close Already., Yahoo Tech

I’d been wondering how I could cover the strange campaign by Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdoğan against Twitter and social media in general, and then I realized how many of their actions matched up with things that have been done or advocated in the U.S. (Fortunately, Erdoğan complied with an unfavorable court ruling and ended the block on Thursday.)

4/1/2014: Activity trackers, WTOP

The news station had me on to talk about the utility of activity-tracking wristbands, pods and apps. I had a brief deer-in-the-ON-AIR-lights moment when I realized I was about to mix up the names of a few phone apps… but you can’t hear it since WTOP’s site seems to have stopped archiving each day’s broadcasts on an “ICYMI” page. Hence there’s also no link.

4/6/2014: How wireless service resellers stack up, USA Today

A query from a friend became the kick in the rear I needed to conduct an overdue evaluation of the pros and cons of some major wireless resellers: Consumer Cellular, Credo Mobile, Net10, Republic Wireless, Straight Talk and TracFone.

Weekly output: Apple coverage, Xbox One, CTIA, MVNOs and the lack of broadband wholesaling

Posted on May 26, 2013 by robpegoraro

A long weekend is a good way to end a second workweek spent mostly out of D.C. (I did get home from CTIA in time to sleep in my own bed Thursday night, except it was Friday morning by the time our weather-delayed flight pulled up to the gate at National.)

5/20/2013: Looking for love, or a business icon to shower with adulation, BusinessJournalism.org

My old Post colleague Phil Blanchard writes a column for the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, and in this week’s post he quoted my thoughts what makes so much Apple coverage vapid and vaporous.

5/21/2013: Xbox One: So That’s Why ‘Xbox’ Sounds So Vague, Discovery News

Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One don’t-call-it-a-game-console has the ambitious goal of becoming the new interface for TV, but how will it do better than the last big-name attempt to get the cable or satellite box out of the picture–Google TV?

USAT CTIA report

5/23/2013: At CTIA, smaller phone vendors take center stage, USA Today

This is my first–and, if there’s any justice in the world, my last–piece to be illustrated with a photo of Jennifer Lopez. (Credit for that goes to Verizon Wireless, which announced a marketing deal with her Viva Móvil phone-retail chain at CTIA.)

As you can see in the comments, one of the vendors I mentioned either gave me the wrong info about its water-resistant treatment for phones or I misunderstood them–it’s not quite clear which. I invited their PR guy to leave a comment about those while I forwarded his request for a correction, and he surprised me a bit by accepting the invitation.

5/24/2013: Wireless Says “MVNO” To Resellers, Residential Broadband Just Says No, Disruptive Competition Project

I was struck by how many interesting resellers of the major carriers’ networks showed up at CTIA, and then it hit me: Why is this kind of wholesaling so common in wireless and so rare in residential broadband? I asked around and came up with a few theories that may explain it.

I’d usually have my USAT Q&A listed here, but they’re holding that for Monday. I trust you all can hold out that long.

On Sulia, I posted a bunch of items from CTIA: for instance, Lopez’s appearance, a Bluetooth-controlled deadbolt lock, and the absence of most big-name vendors. I also noted how Flickr’s otherwise-welcome changes can leave Flickr Pro users feeling a little unloved and–D.C. commuters take note–reported that non-Verizon phones now work in a lot more of Metro’s underground stations, maybe all of them.

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

Tag Archives: MVNO