Tag Archives: OneWeb

Weekly output: Starlink to exit beta, Mark Vena podcast, Texas social-media law challenged, iOS 15/iPadOS 15 help

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This coming week has something unusual on it: business travel to a conference. I’m flying to Miami to moderate two panels at Seatrade Cruise Global, a cruise-industry gathering at which I was supposed to speak last spring before the pandemic forced its cancellation. Then I led one video panel at Seatrade’s virtual gathering in April, which went well enough for the organizers to bring me to Florida.

9/20/2021: Elon Musk says his Starlink satellite internet is coming out of beta, Fast Company

Since pretty much every other tech-news site was also covering SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announcing (in a reply to somebody else’s tweet) that Starlink would exit its beta status in October, I took some time in this piece to compare this broadband satellite constellation’s progress to the slower pace of OneWeb and Amazon’s yet-to-launch Project Kuiper.

9/22/2021: S01 E10 – SmartTechCheck Podcast by Parks Associates, Mark Vena

I rejoined this industry analyst’s podcast with fellow tech journalists Stewart Wolpin and John Quain to talk about Apple and Google knuckling under to Russia by removing the “smart voting” app of dissident Alexei Navalny’s party, Starlink’s service, commercial space travel, and Apple’s iOS 15 and iPadOS 15.

Screenshot of the story as seen in Safari on an iPad mini 5.9/23/2021: Tech Policy Groups Mess With Texas, Sue Over ‘Unconstitutional’ Social Media Law, PCMag

This is the first thing I’ve written for PCMag in several years, but you won’t have to wait nearly as long to read my next piece there. I’m now going to be writing short explainers about tech-policy news at that site. Yes, this debut item on two tech-policy groups suing to overturn the blatantly-unconstitutional Texas law banning large social media platforms from most forms of content moderation runs about 700 words, which is not exactly short even if a lot of it consists of extended quotations from the law and the lawsuit filed by the Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice. I’ll try to be more economical with my prose the next time.

9/25/2021: How to fix some foibles of iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, USA Today

After seeing the reaction to my cranky tweet about iPadOS 15 wrecking my carefully tended arrangement of app icons (even before the Verge’s Chris Welch lent it some extra publicity by embedding it in a story), I pitched my editors at USAT about a column offering advice to people irked by some of the changes in this release. One angle I had to cut from the piece: how the iPhone and iPad versions of Safari are in some ways catching up to mobile browsers like Firefox (which moved its controls to the bottom last August) and Chrome (which added tab groups last May).

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Weekly output: talking tech to non-techies, Off-Facebook Activity, Starlink, Bezos hacking

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After spending the last three weeks at home, I’m off to New York Thursday morning to speak at a conference. I’m glad that the Greater Good Gathering saw fit to invite me for a second year, and I’m looking forward to spending a couple of days around my dad’s college neighborhood.

1/29/2020: How to deliver a technical presentation to a non-technical audience, Functionize

My friend Wayne Rash interviewed me for this piece about conveying technical points to a non-technical audience; in my answers, I leaned heavily on my experience talking about information security to a user group in November.

1/30/2020: Off Facebook Activity, Al Jazeera

I explained Facebook’s overdue introduction of a tool that lets you check its tracking of you across other sites and apps.

1/31/2020: SpaceX’s fast broadband satellite just got a little closer to reality, Fast Company

I’m always happy to have an excuse to write about space. This time around, the subject was SpaceX’s constellation of Starliink satellites, each of which might bring always-on broadband to far more places than today. Emphasis on “might”: SpaceX has yet to talk about the cost of this service or even if it will require living with data caps.

1/31/2020: Bezos iPhone hack, Al Jazeera

For the second week in a row, I talked about reports of Saudi Arabia hacking the phones of people that government doesn’t like, in particular the iPhone of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Weekly output: megatrends, OneWeb, Andela, Saudi spying at Twitter, Kratsios on Huawei

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My last business trip of the year wrapped up Friday when I came home from Lisbon after my fifth Web Summit conference–my fourth as a speaker. The next time I board a plane for work should be January 5, when I’ll head out for my 23rd CES in a row.

11/6/2019: Predicting tomorrow’s megatrends for a better today, Web Summit

I interviewed HP Labs chief technology officer Shane Wall about how he tries to forecast sweeping trends years in advance and what can lead that exercise astray. Along the way, we got to discuss his custom-made shoes. You’ll be able to see how that topic arose whenever the organizers post video of our session.

11/7/2019: OneWeb wants to blanket the planet in high-speed satellite broadband, Fast Company

I had to write this recap of a Web Summit talk by the CEO of this satellite-broadband firm twice after my first attempt didn’t get saved by Fast Company’s Web-based CMS. I should have known not to write directly into a client’s CMS when at a conference.

11/7/2019: How to win over a developer, Web Summit

In my second panel in Lisbon, I talked to Christina Sass, co-founder of the developer-training firm Andela. Unlike my earlier panel, this one featured audience questions–but routed through a Web app called Slido, which let us pick the ones we wanted and paraphrase them as needed. I prefer that to handing a microphone over to somebody in the audience and hoping they don’t ask a question that’s more of a comment.

11/7/2019: Saudi spying at Twitter, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news network had me on to discuss the arrests of two former Twitter employees for allegedly using their insider access to spy on Saudi Arabian dissidents. I made two points via Skype in a vacant conference room at Web Summit: Lots of tech companies give internal employees too much access (remember Uber’s “god view”?), and you’d be crazy not to think that other governments are trying to recruit their own moles inside U.S. tech companies.

11/9/2019: U.S. CTO: Don’t trust Huawei. Edward Snowden: Don’t trust anybody, Fast Company

The last Web Summit talk I watched wound up neatly dovetailing with the first, in that both U.S. chief technology officer Michael Kratsios and NSA leaker Edward Snowden each voiced grave concerns over untrustworthy communications links. They just didn’t agree on the solution to them.