Tag Archives: New York

Weekly output: gadget customer satisfaction, Google Pay fact-checking rewards, right to repair, Mozilla browser-choice report, AI image generators

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Through two years of building back my business-travel schedule, one frequent destination from the Before Times had remained off my calendar until this week: New York. My overdue reunion with NYC allowed an equally belated inspection of Penn Station’s Moynihan Train Hall (one thing I didn’t expect was how great it would be to see the sky through that glass ceiling as I ascended the escalator from the tracks) and not enough time to wander around that other city on the Northeast Corridor.

9/20/2022: Amazon Sees Uptick in Consumer Satisfaction With Its Fire Tablets, Kindles, PCMag

I got an advance look at the latest survey by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which suggested that Amazon’s e-readers and tablets have been winning some fans in the last year.

9/21/2022: Some Google Pay Users Offered Tiny Bribes to Check Transaction Data, PCMag

I decided to try to sell this story after Google prompted me in Copenhagen to verify that its app had correctly recorded a transaction at a ticket-vending machine in that city’s central train station–which should be among the easier paperless transactions to confirm.

Photo shows the slide identifying me and my fellow panelists: Lisa Kemp of Sims Lifecycle Solutions, Ildar Manoprov of WCell, and Dylan Jackie of Back Market.9/21/2022: Right to Repair Panel, BackForum

The gadget-resale platform Back Market had me moderate a panel at its one-day conference in Brooklyn, in return for which they covered my Amtrak fare from and back to D.C. This was originally going to be a one-day trip, but after Qualcomm invited me to an auto-tech event it was hosting the next day (with lodging covered), I opted to stick around NYC through Friday morning.

9/22/2022: Mozilla says users are being denied browser choice. It’s not that simple, PCMag

My first prominent endorsement of Mozilla Firefox happened 18 years ago, and yet I still found this report that browser’s developers to be surprisingly unpersuasive. 

9/25/2022: Why This Online Archivist Isn’t Feeling Much Angst About AI-Generated Art, PCMag

After arriving at Union Station late Friday morning, I bikeshared over to the Wharf for the conference hosted by The Atlantic that was a fixture in my Before Times calendar. The talk by the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott immediately struck me as material for a post, and then I had a moderately mind-expanding talk with him an hour and change later.

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Weekly output: Google’s password help, Twitter suspensions in Egypt

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NEW YORK–This evening finds me here for the Ascent conference, at which I have four panels to moderate Tuesday and things to learn all Monday. Yes, that means I will miss both NLDS games at Nationals Park. Since the team hasn’t done all that well when I’ve been in the stands for a potential division-series clinch, maybe that’s good?

10/2/2019: This new Google tool protects you against dangerous passwords, Fast Company

Along with a fair amount of other tech journalists, I got an advance on Google’s announcement Monday of changes to warn Chrome users about exposed, reused or easily-guessed passwords. Having seen how a similar feature in the 1Password password manager has helped make me less stupid about site logins, I think this is a good move by Google. But I also expect that many users will freak out when they see Chrome telling them that their password has been compromised in a data breach.

10/3/2019: Twitter suspensions in Egypt, Al Jazeera

I appeared on the Arabic-language news channel to talk about reports of Egyptian dissidents’ Twitter accounts being suspended. My take: Twitter has a serious problem with being fooled by coordinated, bad-faith campaigns to get accounts suspended for alleged-but-not-real violations of Twitter’s rules. The anchor then asked why Twitter hadn’t answered AJ’s questions, and I said that most social-media companies are chronically bad at explaining their own decisions. Many have hangups with just speaking on the record.

Weekly output: Microsoft, Kleos, finding exoplanets, Firefox tracking protection, Hollywood-style storytelling, fighting wildfires, NRO, Kitware, NSA, NGA

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This week’s list has a pronounced military-industrial-complex look, thanks to the four days I spent covering the Geoint 2019 conference in San Antonio on a contract gig for my occasional client the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. I now know much more about the business of geospatial intelligence, which can only help the next time I write about topics like location privacy for a consumer audience.

This coming week will also have me out of town, this time to NYC to speak on a panel about 5G and smart cities at the CE Week conference, attend a one-day event about 8K television, and meet up with a few friends. And that should put a cap on my work travel until at least early July, maybe all the way to early August.

6/3/2019: Better Tools for ISR Management, Trajectory Magazine

As part of the work USGIF paid for, I wrote a series of profiles of Geoint 2019 exhibitors. This one covered a software firm in Redmond, Wash., that you may have heard of before.

6/3/2019: ISR for Maritime Security, Trajectory Magazine

This exhibitor profile covered a far smaller company, Luxembourg-based Kleos Space.

6/3/2019: The Search for Exoplanets, Trajectory Magazine

I wrote up an interesting talk by SETI Institute data scientist Jeffrey R. Smith about the challenges involved in processing the imagery collected by the exoplanet-detecting satellite TESS.

6/4/2019: Firefox browser blocks sites and advertisers from tracking you online by default, USA Today

Mozilla gave me an advance on the Tuesday-morning introduction of a version of the Firefox browser with tracking-protection capabilities on a par with those in Apple’s Safari. Note that if you’re upgrading from an existing installation, you may not have this new default active; to change that, adjust your settings as I outlined in a tweet.

6/4/2019: What the Intelligence Community Can Learn from Hollywood, Trajectory Magazine

This panel got closer to a CES keynote than anything else I saw in San Antonio, thanks to a presentation by The Third Floor CEO Chris Edwards about how that virtualization studio uses 3D-rendering tools and augmented-reality interfaces to create worlds for movie and TV productions. The takeaway: The intelligence community needs to learn these techniques too, not least because our adversaries will use them against us.

6/4/2019: The Power of Real-Time Data for Firefighting, Trajectory Magazine

This otherwise-fascinating panel about using geospatial data to fight wildfires such as last year’s Camp Fire in California featured a glaring example of failed clock management: CalFire research data scientist Rachael Brody and Clark University graduate student Jaclyn Guz didn’t get to speak at all.

6/4/2019: Government Pavilion Stage Highlights, Trajectory Magazine

My part in this roundup was a recap of a talk by Troy Meink, geospatial intelligence systems acquisition director at the National Reconnaissance Office, about that black-budget agency’s increasing openness to working with smaller private-sector companies.

6/5/2019: From Sensors to Answers, Trajectory Magazine

My last exhibitor profile covered the imagery-analysis firm Kitware.

6/5/2019: Teamwork and a Talent Pipeline are Key to NSA’s Future, Trajectory Magazine

I didn’t know before this week that the National Security Agency helps run cybersecurity camps for K-12 students, but this talk by U.S. Cyber Command executive director David Luber got me up to speed on that.

6/5/2019: Government Pavilion Stage Highlights, Trajectory Magazine

My coverage wrapped up with a recap of a panel featuring National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency associate directors Jennifer Daniels and Maj. Gen. Charles Cleveland. My lesson learned from writing this: If you’re going to record audio of a panel, don’t do that from halfway back in the audience.