Weekly output: Apple Pay and Google Pay are still NFC, Planet Labs, William Hurley on quantum computing

Posted on June 2, 2019 by robpegoraro

SAN ANTONIO–An unusual business arrangement brought me here. A few months ago, the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation asked if I’d be interested in covering their Geoint 2019 Symposium for their magazine. They’d cover my travel costs and pay me a flat fee to file a couple of posts a day. That differs from my usual article deals–it’s more like I’m simulating being a staff writer for a week–but USGIF is a good client and offered a good rate. So hello again, Texas.

5/31/2019: Clearing up confusion on payments: If a retailer takes Apple Pay it also takes Google Pay, USA Today

The long-anticipated arrival of NFC mobile payments on a few NYC bus and subway lines gave me my latest reason to remind readers that headlines only mentioning Apple Pay or Google Pay wrongly suggest a proprietary exclusivity. Unfortunately, NFC is a vague and lifeless abbreviation. On reflection, my friend Ed Bott’s suggestion of “tap to pay” would be an excellent substitute.

6/1/2019: Daily Imagery for Analytic Insight, Trajectory Magazine

My Geoint 2019 coverage started with some short profiles of exhibitors that I filed in advance–the first being the satellite-imagery firm Planet Labs.

6/2/2019: Quantum Computing Will Change Everything, but Not Without Your Help and Patience, Trajectory Magazine

Strangeworks founder and CEO William Hurley (aka “whurley”) talked about quantum computing Sunday morning and gave a refreshingly unhyped take on the technology’s perspective.

Weekly output: mobile payments, Black Hat security, travel tech

Posted on August 12, 2018 by robpegoraro

I left Black Hat feeling a little overwhelmed–not because of how little time I had to take in things between my arrival in Vegas Tuesday afternoon and my departure Thursday night, but because of how many fascinating briefings I had to miss because I was attending others. And then there’s everything I missed by flying home before DEF CON…

8/6/2018: Hang on, Apple: Phone payments still need work, USA Today

Seeing all the hype over Apple announcing that CVS will finally succumb to reality and accept Apple Pay (meaning you can also pay with any non-Apple phone that does NFC payments) got me feeling cranky enough to write this reality-check post. I’ve since received an e-mail from a reader saying he’s had no problem paying for stuff with his iPhone in Mexico, contrary to a statement in the column based on an incorrect reading of Apple and Google support documents. I’ve asked my editors to correct that part.

8/9/2018: Black Hat attendees are surprisingly lax about encryption, The Parallax

As I was putting together my Black Hat schedule, I got an invitation to tour the network operations center supervising the conference’s WiFi. I thought that visit would allow me a chance to look at a lot of blinking lights, but instead it provided up-close evidence of some horrifyingly slack security practices among a minority of Black Hat attendees.

8/11/2018: Welcome and Keynote with Rob Pegoraro, Frequent Traveler University Washington, DC

After years of profiting from tips shared in various frequent-flyer forums, I had a chance to give back when FTU host Stefan Krasowski asked if I’d like to talk about my travel experiences to open this two-day program of seminars about airline and hotel loyalty programs and other sorts of travel hacking. We had a great conversation about freelance business-trip economics, the gadget accessories I take on the road, two underrated virtues of United elite status, and my worst airport-transit experience ever. My only regret: Since I couldn’t stick around for the rest of the day, I didn’t have a chance to meet the other FTU speakers, a few of whom I’ve been reading for years.

Weekly output: mobile payments, FCC regulations, Apple and the FBI, flash drives to North Korea, smart cities, Apple at 40, fiber Internet hardware fees

Posted on April 3, 2016 by robpegoraro

I wrote three of the stories below before this week–in one case, months before this week–so don’t get the wrong idea about my personal productivity over the last six days.

Yahoo Tech mobile-payments post 3/29/2016: Don’t take my money: Why mobile payments haven’t taken off — yet, Yahoo Tech

In what I can only call epic timing, I had to have one of my credit cards reissued only hours after I filed this last week. Some joker had somehow obtained the number and used it for an online transaction at a random Ukrainian merchant. That’s the scenario that mobile payments could have prevented–if the unknown merchant that lost my card’s digits had accepted NFC phone payments, which is nowhere near a sure thing.

3/29/2016: Shining the Spotlight on the FCC: How Rules Impact Consumers and Industries, American Action Forum

I moderated a debate about the Federal Communications Commission’s recent regulatory initiatives with AAF’s Will Rinehart, Public Knowledge’s Meredith Rose and Tech Knowledge’s Fred Campbell. Rose and the other two come at this topic from different perspectives, as you can see below, but we had a civil and entertaining exchange.

3/29/2016: Lessons from the Apple-FBI fight, Yahoo Tech

When I wrote this, it still seemed possible that the FBI might disclose the vulnerability it exploited to unlock the phone used by one of the San Bernardino murderers. That now seems exceedingly unlikely. My hunch is that the Feds have bought themselves a short-term advantage that’s likely to set them back in the long run.

3/30/2016: New use for old flash drives: Subverting the regime in North Korea, Yahoo Tech

This story came about because I set aside a couple of hours on my last day at SXSW to tour the show floor and therefore came across this fascinating demo. The idea of smuggling flash drive into the “Democratic” “People’s” “Republic” of Korea might seem a wildly optimistic exercise in slacktivism, but two experts on North Korea told me it’s worth doing.

3/31/2016: The Internet of Things Drives Smart Transportation Projects, StateTech

I filed this piece about interesting smart-city projects in Chicago and Washington quite some time ago, but the story got held up for various reasons until the appropriate “publish” button was finally clicked this week.

4/1/2016: Apple turns 40, Al Jazeera

The news network’s Arabic channel had me on (overdubbed in Arabic by a translator) to talk about Apple turning 40. I answered a question about the state of the company post-Steve Jobs by saying that its hardware looked as innovative as ever, but its services remain a mess.

4/3/2016: Hardware fees not just for cable Internet, USA Today

Your e-mails asking about cable-modem costs at U-verse (note: not a cable system) got me thinking, and then I realized that AT&T’s mandatory hardware fee for its fiber service makes most cable operators’ price structure look reasonable.

Updated 4/4, 8:26 a.m. to add Friday’s Al Jazeera interview.

Weekly output: net-neutrality politics, secure smartphones, wireless charging, MWC, Apple Pay

Posted on March 8, 2015 by robpegoraro

I gave myself an extra day to explore Mobile World Congress, yet I still ended this year’s pilgrimage to Barcelona wishing I’d had more time to check out all the gadgets/services/apps on display. It appears I need to work on my MWC clock management.

But I did come home with a significantly larger Evernote file and a packed camera memory card (see the results on Flickr), plus some ideas about how I can better cover the show next year.

3/3/2015: How Comcast, Verizon, and the Rest of Big Telecom Blew the Net-Neutrality Battle, Yahoo Tech

I’d had this column in mind since President Obama’s surprising switch to advocating a Title II reclassification of Internet providers as “common carrier” telecom services. Which is another way of saying that I should have had this finished before I got to MWC instead of wrapping it up in the press room Monday afternoon.

3/4/2015: The Big Problem with the Secure New Smartphones of the Snowden Era: Other Phones, Yahoo Tech

A look at the absence of PGP-encrypted messages in my inbox should be reminder enough about how hard interoperability is. But seeing three different smartphone platforms at MWC that may not be able to talk securely to one another was instructive too.

3/5/2015: Wireless Charging May Not Be Doomed To Irrelevance, Yahoo Tech

MWC left me slightly more optimistic about the prospects for wireless charging being something that people look for in a new mobile gadget, then use regularly once they buy it. And yet: I was able to charge my own, Qi-compatible phone wirelessly all of one time.

3/5/2015: 7 Things We Learned About the Future of Technology at MWC 2015, Yahoo Tech

I contributed a graf or three to this recap of the show. I also had a photo of mine show up in Jason Gilbert’s look back at MWC’s weirder sights.

3/8/2015: Is Apple Pay not NFC?, USA Today

Some grumpiness over press coverage treating Apple Pay as a species separate from NFC payments got me to start asking a few questions, leading to a column in which JetBlue PR essentially left some of its earlier statements inoperative.

Weekly output: MCX vs. NFC, wireless carriers, OS X Yosemite

Posted on November 3, 2014 by robpegoraro

I completely spaced on writing this earlier tonight, so this post comes to you early Monday morning instead of in my usual Sunday afternoon/evening timeframe.

10/28/2014: Why Some Stores Won’t Take Apple Pay, and How to Punish Them, Yahoo Tech

Did I mention all the clueless anti-Apple rage directed at this post covering the blocking of NFC mobile payments at CVS and Rite Aid? Yes, I did. I’m still shaking my head about all that. I mean, it’s quite the stretch to say that a story illustrated with a photo of my own Android phone is all about Apple; my own brain is incapable of such gymnastics.

10/30/2014: The Best Wireless Carriers, The Wirecutter

I updated this guide to account for a round of changes in Verizon’s pricing, some price cuts in some of AT&T’s shared-use plans and a few other shifts in the industry.

11/2/2014: Yosemite tips: Turn off translucency, tune up notifications, USA Today

The story I wrote this week that actually was all about Apple wasn’t too complimentary either, since it led off with a suggestion that you undo one of OS X Yosemite’s key visual features. (So far, I am pleased overall with this release, but check back in a month.)

Updated 11/5/14 to add the Wirecutter update that I had missed earlier.

Apple Derangement Syndrome

Posted on October 30, 2014 by robpegoraro

I thought Tuesday’s Yahoo Tech column about stores blocking Apple Pay and other NFC-payment apps would provoke some emotional reactions from angry iPhone users. I was wrong.

Instead, the comments thread, Twitter and my inbox lit up with denunciations of me for being an Apple shill. One typical tweet: “Pathetic apple fanboy. You’re not fooling anyone. How much did apple pay you for that trash?” Another Twitter interlocutor suggested I get Ebola, providing me an overdue opportunity to try Twitter’s block function.

In e-mail, where you don’t have to worry about what onlookers think of your foaming at the mouth, things were even less civil. One fellow whose e-mail signature identified him as a technology consultant decried my enabling “Apple Octopus pot culture,” whatever that is. A particularly incensed reader managed to drop seven f-bombs into the first four sentences.

And all of this was about a column that explained how blocking NFC inconveniences Android and Windows Phone users as well as anybody with an iPhone 6 to 6 Plus, and which led off with a photo of my own Android phone getting rejected at a CVS.

But no, basic logic or reading comprehension isn’t necessary when one is in the grip of Apple Derangement Syndrome. And expecting readers to take a minute to learn that I’ve never owned an iPhone and am responsible for gracing the Washington Post’s site with the sarcastic query “why does Steve Jobs hate America?”… man, that’s just crazy talk.

Apple has always had people who dislike its products and its attitude, but this full-on, frothing hate seems a more recent development. I can only guess that’s because if you think this phenomenally successful company really will take over the world, it must be stopped by any means necessary and you can’t wait a second longer to act.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with Google many times, most recently when a German media exec suggested the gang in Mountain View applied, I kid you not, North Korean media-manipulation techniques. And only a decade ago, Microsoft Derangement Syndrome was much more of a thing than it is now.

But there’s never been such a thing as Palm Derangement Syndrome, Dell Derangement Syndrome or Nokia Derangement Syndrome. Don’t you feel sorry for those companies now?

Nexus 4 long-term evaluation

Posted on October 12, 2013 by robpegoraro

About seven months ago, I turned on a new Android phone and started installing and configuring my usual apps. That’s not an unusual event for me, except this time it was a phone I’d bought for the sum of $327.94. I’ve been using this Nexus 4 every day since, so I’ve gotten to know this device a little better than the average review model. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Battery: This was my number-one concern–a loaner model had tested poorly in this area, and it was only after I found a loaner Nexus 4’s battery life workable during Mobile World Congress that I decided to go ahead with the purchase. Seven months later, I’m surprised by how rarely the phone’s battery has gotten into the red.

I’ve learned to put this phone on WiFi whenever possible (that extends its battery life considerably) and I’m more careful about recharging it if I’m sitting down than I once was. But this experience has me a little more skeptical about relying too much on any one battery-life benchmark. I mean, if a phone can make it through SXSW without dying or needing a recharge every few hours, its battery life can’t be that bad.

Android: I love using the stock Android interface, without any spackled-on layers of interface from a phone vendor and without any bloatware locked in place unless I root the device. I also love not having to wait more than a few days for an Android update to land on the phone. I’m trying to think of what would get me to buy a non-Nexus Android phone… still thinking… let me get back to you on that.

Camera: This is the weakest part of the phone, even if it’s not enough to induce buyer’s remorse. The lack of optical image stabilization makes this 8-megapixel camera clumsy at most outdoor photos after dark, and its shutter lag is just bad enough to make taking pictures of our toddler or any other fidgety subject (like, say, a monkey) a trying task.

In this camera’s favor, it can take some great photos, and not just with the sun overhead. One of my favorite shots involved early-morning sunlight streaming into the National Airport; I suspect the aging Canon point-and-shoot I had with me would have had trouble balancing that exposure. The Nexus 4’s also done well with food porn, sunsets, panoramas and photo spheres.

Bandwidth: The Nexus 4 doesn’t have LTE, and I don’t care. T-Mobile’s HSPA+ routinely hits 15-Mbps download speeds in the Speedtest.net app. LTE can run faster still, but when my phone’s mobile broadband matches my home’s Fios access I’m not going to mope about the difference. (Those mean things I wrote about carriers marketing HSPA+ as “4G”? Maybe not so much.)

T-Mobile’s coverage is not what I’d get with Verizon. It can also be frustrating to have the phone lose a signal inside a not-large building. But I’m saving about $50 a month compared to what VzW charges. And since this phone is an unlocked GSM phone, I can also pop in any other GSM carrier’s micro-SIM card–as I did when I went to Berlin last month for IFA.

Storage: As the price I mentioned should have indicated, I cheaped out and got only the 8-gigabyte version. So far, that hasn’t been an issue–I still have almost a fifth of the 5.76 GB of user-available space free–but at some point I may have to delete some of the apps I’ve installed and then forgotten about. If I could pop in a microSD card, I wouldn’t have that concern. But I can’t.

Durability: Considering how beat up my older phones have gotten, I worried a little about buying a phone with a glass front and back. But I’ve babied this thing (I never put it in a pocket with change or keys) and after seven months it still looks pretty sharp. You need to hold it up to the light, as in the photo above, to see any faint scratches. I remain paranoid about dropping it–which may explain why I haven’t. Should I buy Google’s bumper case anyway?

Extras: You may not be surprised to read that after seven months, I have yet to buy anything with the Nexus 4’s NFC wireless. I have, however, used that feature to install apps, look up data and stage quick Android Beam file transfers. This phone’s Qi cordless charging has also gone unused at home, although I’ve verified that it works at a couple of trade-show exhibits.

Any other questions? I’ll take them in the comments.

Fortnightly output: Google and ITA, Android APIs, digital-TV converter boxes, cable-box power use, NFC, Android File Transfer

Posted on June 16, 2013 by robpegoraro

I had originally thought I’d post my usual weekly summary last Sunday, but then I remembered that I was on vacation–and besides, it would have been a short list then. So instead you get a two-for-one special, and I get a chance to use “fortnightly” for the first time on this blog.

6/4/2013: Remember When Google Was Going To Annex The Travel-Search Industry?, Disruptive Competition Project

One of the first ideas I pitched to the DisCo people was a look back at the predictions of doom that we all heard–and that I found somewhat credible–when Google proposed to buy the travel-search firm ITA Software. When I finally got around to writing it, I was surprised to see how little of a dent Google has made in the market for airfare queries.

6/5/2013: Google I/O Android News: Location, Location, Location (Plus Cloud Messaging and Bluetooth), Software Quality Matters

A friend edits this blog, hosted by the software-testing firm SmartBear, and was looking for a report about the new Android application programming interfaces Google had unveiled at I/O. This was a lot more technical than I usually get, but I’m glad I did it. And I’m looking forward to seeing apps built on these new APIs, in particular those involving location services.

6/9/2013: How to get an analog TV set back on the air, USA Today

A friend on Facebook had bought a flat-panel set just before they all started shipping with digital tuners and wanted to know what her options were. And so, once again, I wrote a how-to piece about tuning in digital signals. I didn’t want to leave out cable subscribers, so I added a tip about a new initiative by major cable and satellite providers to ship boxes that use less electricity–which won’t help existing subscribers unless they ask for an upgrade.

6/16/2013: What exactly is ‘NFC’ wireless?, USA Today

My phone includes a Near Field Communication transmitter, and I’m still waiting for a chance to use it outside of specialty environments like tech trade shows. This column explains why, and adds a tip about Google’s Android File Transfer app for Macs that is really a plea for Google to update the thing so it doesn’t fit in so poorly with OS X.

I didn’t post anything on Sulia while I was out (thought about it, decided not having a work obligation outweighed passing up a week’s worth of stipend). But before and after my travel, I summed up a briefing about that cable-box efficiency program, compared the AT&T and Sprint versions of the Galaxy S 4, explained how car2go was more useful to me in Portland and Seattle than back home in D.C., and reviewed an Android app that can get a GPS fix on your position from 32,000 feet up and at 550 miles an hour.

Conference badge design best practices

Posted on May 29, 2013 by robpegoraro

I spend an unhealthy amount of my time walking around strange places with a piece of paper suspended from my neck by a lanyard, courtesy of all of the conferences on my schedule. A partial selection from the last 12 months: CES, CTIA, Demo, Google I/O, IFA, Mobile World Congress, ONA, SXSW, Tech Policy Summit and TechCrunch Disrupt.

This experience bothers me more than it should, because almost everybody screws up the basic job of designing a conference badge. And it shouldn’t be that hard–these things only have to perform three functions:

Tell other people who we are.
Store relevant information we’d need to know throughout the event.
Give us a place to stash business cards.

And yet. At most conferences, you’ll immediately see people whose badges have anonymized their wearers by flipping around to show the reverse side. You can fix this by printing the same information on both sides of the badge (see, for instance, SXSW), but it’s easier to have the lanyard attach to both sides of the badge instead of leaving it dangling from the center (something Macworld badges got right).

The design of the front of the badge should also be easy to solve, but many events botch that job too: first name in large type, last name in smaller type, organizational affiliation. Adding your city and Twitter handle helps but isn’t always essential.

What about the back? Too many badges just leave this valuable real estate blank. At a minimum, it should list the event’s WiFi network and, if necessary, password. And if the schedule is compact enough to fit on one page, why not add that as well? But if that requires turning the badge into a booklet–like at last year’s I/O–you should think about just posting the schedule in a lot of places around the venue.

Some badges now embed NFC tags. At this year’s I/O, for instance, tapping mine with my Android phone opened up a link in the Play Store to Google’s I/O attendee app; when event staff did the same, their phones would bring up my registration information. That’s not a bad feature to have, but don’t make it mandatory to participate in some parts of the event.

Finally, what contains the badge? The multiple-pocket, wallet-esque badge holders some events provide are overkill–too big, too many spots to misplace a card or a receipt–and usually eliminate the informational utility of the reverse side. A simple clear vinyl holder should provide sufficient room to hold a bunch of business cards to hand out to other people.

Thank you for your attention to this, event planners of the world.

Weekly output: WebKit, Mobile World Congress (x3), Tech Night Owl, Facebook scams, e-mail nags

Posted on March 3, 2013 by robpegoraro

This has been a really good week. Tiring (courtesy of a few days of walking around Barcelona for Mobile World Congress and well over 24 hours spent in airplanes and airports), but good.

2/25/2013: In Mobile, It’s A WebKit World And We Just Browse In It. Is That Okay?, Disruptive Competition Project

I wrote a long, wonky piece on the state of competition in mobile-browser layout engines, in which the open-source WebKit code used by Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome has pretty much locked up the market. Is an open-source monopoly okay? At first, I thought it might be–then I changed my mind.

2/27/2013: Plus-sized phones dominate wireless trade show, USA Today

I like filing from a new dateline. Here, circumstances found me writing this Android-centric overview of Mobile World Congress for USAT’s site. Note the inevitable Android-versus-iPhone flame war in the comments–and a couple of futile attempts by me to restore some perspective there.

2/27/2013: My Fellow Americans, We Really Do Have A Strange Wireless Market, Disruptive Competition Project

Ten years ago, I was tired of hearing people yammer on about how the U.S. should have called it a day and adopted the same GSM wireless standard as Europe and most of the rest of the world. Here, I explain how I got that wrong–and how the peculiarly carrier-driven market here does not serve customers well. Big oversight in the piece: not mentioning the controversy over the recriminalization of phone unlocking in the States.

2/28/2013: The Wide, Wild World Of Phones, Discovery News

A higher-level recap of MWC for Discovery News that objects to some of the more dubious trends the show spotlighted in the wireless industry. I really don’t know where some Android vendors are coming from these days.

3/2/2013: March 2, 2013 — Chrysta Olson, Rob Griffiths, Jeff Erwin, Lysa Myers, and Rob Pegoraro Tech Night Owl Live

Tune in to hear me discuss the state of the wireless business as seen before, during and after MWC. Bonus: host Gene Steinberg’s confused silence after my lame attempt at dropping a comedic reference to the Gadsden Purchase.

3/3/2013: Q&A: How to avoid Facebook scams? Be a skeptic, USA Today

A friend fell for an old Facebook scam, then made up for spamming me with a bogus ad by documenting how it seemed to work. My column wraps up with a tip about minimizing noisy notifications from social networks that I might have credited to Clay Johnson’s book The Information Diet, except that my own info-diet has not yet granted me the time to read it.

I used most of this week’s updates on Sulia to share observations from MWC, many of which wound up being ingredients in later stories about the show–for instance, first impressions of the enormous Asus Fonepad and the open-source Firefox and Ubuntu mobile operating systems. I also related PayPal president David Marcus’s skeptical view of Near Field Communication smartphone payments and how the Washington Nationals are blowing off NFC with their new electronic season-ticketing system.

Rob Pegoraro

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

Tag Archives: NFC