Weekly output: Android 14, Qualcomm and “5G NR-Light,” SpaceX COO, 1Password, Mark Vena podcast

Posted on February 12, 2023 by robpegoraro

All of my writing this week appeared over two days, and I wrote most to all of three of them on a single day–a pace that may have contributed to a couple of dumb mistakes in one of them.

2/8/2023: Google Releases First Android 14 Developer Preview, PCMag

Google gave me an advance on the announcement of the first developer-preview release of the next major version of Android. I took care to remind readers that their own Android phones might see Android 14 some time after it lands on Google’s Pixel phones–or might not ever see it.

2/8/2023: Qualcomm starts connecting the dots on 5G NR-Light, Light Reading

I got another advance briefing for Qualcomm’s news of an upcoming lower-power, cheaper and smaller X35 modem intended for connected gadgets that don’t need full 5G speeds. But Qualcomm was weirdly stingy on details about this hardware, such as any hard numbers for its size or power consumption.

2/8/2023: SpaceX COO Teases Starship 33-Engine Test Fire on Thursday, PCMag

I spent Wednesday and Thursday at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference, where SpaceX chief operating officer and president Gwynne Shotwell shared some news about that company’s giant Starship rocket during an onstage interview. I rushed to write that up but in the process I identified Shotwell’s onstage interlocutor as former congressman Mike Rogers of Alabama, not the Mike Rogers of Michigan who did the honors. And between writing the first paragraph and the third one, I somehow decided that Starship had 31 engines in its first stage, not the correct 33.

2/9/2023: 1Password to Offer Passkey-Only, No-Password Logins, PCMag

The PR people at 1Password gave me an exclusive on their news of an upcoming move to offer subscribers the option of authentication via the new passkeys standard–with no master password needed for this password-manager service.

2/10/2023: S03 E45 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

My contribution to this week’s edition of my industry-analyst friend’s podcast was to discuss Washington’s escalating conflict with large tech companies, as seen in such developments as the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Google and President Biden’s (brief) calls for digital-privacy regulations in the State of the Union address.

Weekly output: lunar construction, Verizon 5G goals, Twitter trust-and-safety warning, 1Password upgrade, Comcast rate hikes, Google Messages encryption

Posted on December 4, 2022 by robpegoraro

My week has an unusual road trip coming up–to Wallops Island, Va., where Rocket Lab plans to conduct the first U.S. launch of its Electron rocket Friday evening. This is a much smaller vehicle than the others I’ve been privileged to see lift off, but driving to the Eastern Shore’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport is also a lot simpler than traveling to the Kennedy Space Center.

In addition to the stories below, Patreon readers got to read my first impressions of Mastodon, the federated alternative to Twitter on which you can find me as robpegoraro@journa.host.

11/29/2022: Company That 3D-Prints Houses on Earth Lands Lunar Construction Contract, PCMag

I had read before about Icon Technology’s ventures into 3D printing walls of houses on Earth, so when I got an advance copy of their news about getting a contract to do much the same thing on the Moon, they had my interest.

11/29/2022: Verizon’s response to T-Mobile trash-talking: Just you wait, Light Reading

I interviewed Verizon network exec Brian Mecum while at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii last month, and he had some interesting things to say about 5G features that the carrier is not rushing to deploy.

11/29/2022: Former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief: ‘If Protected Tweets Stop Working, Run’, PCMag

I watched Kara Swisher’s interview of Twitter’s former trust-and-safety chief Yoel Roth, and almost none of it gave me any more confidence in Elon Musk’s ability to right the ship he has bought with $13 billion loaned from banks that presumably want to get it back.

12/1/2022: 1Password Can Now Save Your ‘Sign in With’ Logins, PCMag

This new feature at the password manager I use (courtesy of this Toronto firm providing free service for journalists) addresses a real issue I deal with. As in, I’ve opened a few accounts on my iPad using the “Sign in with Apple” option there, then can’t quickly access them on my Android phone or Windows laptop because it would require signing into the Apple account that I don’t use on those devices and jumping through Apple’s two-factor authentication checks.

12/2/2022: What to know before you open your Comcast TV or internet bill: Rates are going up (again), USA Today

TV Answer Man writer Phillip Swann tipped me off to the TV fee increases with a Nov. 26 post, and then Comcast PR let me know about the broadband rate increase.

12/2/2022: Google Messages Gets End-to-End Encryption for Group Chats on Android, PCMag

This would have been a quick writeup of some Google news shared in advance, but ensuring that readers would get a clear look at the tangled backstory of Google’s attempt to upgrade messaging from SMS–and get Apple to play along–always eats up some words.

Weekly output: Google password manager updates, Android and iOS location-privacy advice, Android developers lawsuit

Posted on July 3, 2022 by robpegoraro

If you’re visiting my city for the Fourth of July, welcome to the nation’s capital! Please enjoy your stay; if you’re still weighing different options for where to watch the fireworks, I’d like to think my advice from 2015 still holds up.

6/30/2022: Google Updates Password Manager With New Security, Management Tools, PCMag

Writing this quick post reminded me of how often Google struggles to provide feature parity between its Web and mobile apps.

7/1/2022: How to block – or blur – your location from your smartphone’s apps, USA Today

I think I’d pitched some version of this column to my editors not too many months ago, but having the topic of location privacy come up in my user-group talk last weekend reminded of that story idea and helped me focus it.

7/2/2022: Google offers Android developers $90 million settlement, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on (overdubbed live) for the first time in several weeks to talk about Google offering a $90 million settlement to Android developers who had complained about the cut it takes of digital app transactions. I told viewers that while Google has shown a non-trivial amount of greediness in its supervision of the Play Store, at least it allows for alernative app stores–something Apple does not.

Weekly output: 2021 pay-TV trends, 2020 in review, Comcast drops Norton security bundle

Posted on January 3, 2021 by robpegoraro

Today is Jan. 3, 2021, but I can’t blame you if it may feel more like Dec. 34, 2020.

12/30/2020: Four Pay-TV Plot Twists To Watch In 2021—And For Pay TV To Hate, Forbes

My last Forbes post for 2020 looked at possible future developments in both traditional and streaming pay TV, most of which are bad.

12/31/2020: SmartTechCheck Podcast (12-31-20), Mark Vena

I joined the podcast of this Moor Insights & Strategy analyst with my fellow tech journalists John Quain and Stewart Wolpin to discuss what pandemic-wracked 2020 taught us about the state of tech. Early on, we pointed to the ability of video calling to replace some face-to-face meetings–and then we kept running into video or audio glitches.

1/3/2021: As Comcast drops one computer security plan, what – if anything – should you replace it with?, USA Today

This column started with an e-mail from a reader asking what he should do about Comcast ending its free bundle of Norton anti-malware apps. I’d seen the advice of my Wirecutter colleagues that paying for anti-virus software is no longer a good idea, but I turned to my friend Sean Gallagher–who edited a little of my earlier writing at Ars Technica and now works as a threat researcher for the security firm Sophos–for added context. The result: a column about a Comcast policy change that can’t really fault everybody’s favorite cable giant for taking something away from subscribers, because it wasn’t doing them that much of a favor in the first place.

Weekly output: password peril, mobile-hotspot help, Facebook’s Oversight Board

Posted on May 10, 2020 by robpegoraro

I had been holding out hope that I could return to business travel, even if just once before fall or winter, to cover America’s return to launching astronauts to space–SpaceX’s Demo-2 test flight of its Crew Dragon capsule, scheduled for May 27. I’d put in for a press pass and had a confirmed assignment from a name-brand client, and I was willing to figure out how I’d not lose money on the trip later on. But on Monday, I got the e-mail that many other journalists received, saying that NASA could not accommodate me at the Kennedy Space Center because social-distancing dictates required drastically limiting the number of press on site.

I’m not surprised and I’m not that upset. I’ve already seen three launches from the press site at KSC–the penultimate and final Space Shuttle launches and the February 2018 debut of the Falcon Heavy rocket–and that’s three more than I had any reasonable expectation of seeing 10 years ago.

5/5/2020: We still stink at passwords, and there’s really no excuse, Fast Company

I got an advance look at a study published by LastPass, the password-manager service that I used to use. The study confirmed earlier reports that people reuse way too many passwords but reported curiously high adoption of two-step verification–but did not gauge how many of us now employ password managers.

5/8/2020: All of the COVID-19 Data Upgrades That Cell Phone Carriers Are Offering, Wirecutter

I inventoried the ways that the big four wireless carriers as well as their prepaid brands and their major resellers have made it easier to share your smartphone’s bandwidth with nearby devices via its mobile-hotspot function. As you can see in the comments, it looks like I got one service’s information wrong; Google Fi has raised the limit at which it will slow down your connection, but not in a way that will lower most customers’ bills.

5/9/2020: Facebook’s Oversight Board, Al Araby

As one third of a panel discussion on this Arabic-language news network, I talked about Facebook’s new Oversight Board and its odds of changing things at the social network. My main point: While this equivalent of a Supreme Court is empowered to reverse Facebook decisions to take down or keep up content, Facebook’s automated rankings of the priority of content appear to be outside its orbit.

Weekly output: Google’s “security hold,” how to read wireless-carrier rankings

Posted on July 28, 2019 by robpegoraro

Both posts this week had me circling back to topics I’ve covered before and learning something new, which is always nice.

7/25/2019: Locked out of your Google account? Why it can sometimes take days to get back in, USA Today

Once again, I tried to shed some light on how Google goes about resolving a forgotten password for a Google account. This time, I got the company to document a hitherto-undocumented “security hold.” Alas, much of the process here remains mysterious, and the reader in question here may have only gotten her account back so quickly because I inquired on her behalf.

7/26/2019: Why so many wireless carriers seem to have “America’s best network”, Fast Company

My work updating the Wirecutter guide to smartphone service required me to spend a lot of time with studies ranking the performance of the big four wireless carriers, so I decided to write an explainer about how these surveys get their results and how you should interpret their findings. That effort revealed a couple of finer points about these projects that I was able to add to the Wirecutter update, which should be up any day now.

First impressions of 1Password

Posted on May 31, 2019 by robpegoraro

After several years using the same password-manager service–and then paying for its premium version–I’ve spent the last few weeks trying an alternative.

I can credit a sales pitch that included the italicized phrase “completely free” for this departure: 1Password’s offer of a free membership to journalists, in celebration of World Press Freedom Day this May 3. But I was also overdue to spend some time in a password manager besides LastPass.

So far, I’m impressed by the elegance of the interface but a little put off by how persnickety 1Password can be to set up. You don’t just create a username and password, you also have to type in a complex and random secret key to get going.

Having read this Toronto-based firm’s documentation of how this extra step helps ensure that a successful guess of your password still won’t compromise your account, I get where they’re coming from. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it to just anybody, especially not when LastPass’s free version suffices for many casual users.

Further time with 1Password’s Mac, Windows and Android apps has revealed other things I like:

Importing my saved passwords from LastPass was as simple as advertised (and 1Password having a documented export format should ease any possible future switch away from 1Password);
Its Watchtower feature taps into the Have I Been Pwned data-breach index to warn you if you’re using passwords that have already leaked from other sites;
You can unlock the Windows app using Microsoft’s Windows Hello biometric authentication (but not after a restart of the app or the PC).

This time has also surfaced one thing I don’t like: an incomplete approach to two-step verification that seems to require choosing between running an authenticator app on your smartphone or employing a weird Yubikey implementation that requires running a separate app instead of just plugging a standard USB security key. That’s no better than LastPass’s inflexible notion of two-step verification.

I’d like to see 1Password improve that and support the WebAuthn standard for security-key confirmation. But I’m prepared to give them some time, based on everything else I’ve seen so far.

Weekly output: Twitter bots, Facebook Login (x2), WiFi hotspots, Facebook privacy

Posted on April 15, 2018 by robpegoraro

I spent Saturday night at a Washington Post reunion that featured a few old friends from the Weekend section whom I hadn’t seen in maybe 10 years. I really was lucky to have my first home in the paper be among such a cheerful contingent.

4/9/2018: New study finds 66% of shared links on Twitter came from bots, Yahoo Finance

I got an advance look at a new study of Twitter bots by the Pew Research Center. My writeup voiced some skepticism about the tool the Pew researchers relied on to judge whether an account was automated or human.

4/9/2018: Should you still use Facebook login, given all we know?, USA Today

My continuing coverage of Facebook privacy turned to the social network’s widely-used option to sign into other sites with your Facebook credentials. I advised using a password-manager service instead.

4/11/2018: With all we know about Facebook, should you still ‘sign in with Facebook’?, This Morning With Gordon Deal

Host Gordon Deal quizzed me about my Facebook Login column.

4/12/2018: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter

This guide was sorely overdue for an update, having last been revised last March. Although two of the four carriers hadn’t introduced any new hotspots, I did shift my endorsement to a newer Verizon model. Our second-place AT&T pick–the newest hotspot on the market–was going to be more enthusiastic until we learned that the carrier had closed a loophole that allowed unlimited data on its hotspots when added to a phone’s unlimited-data plan. (T-Mobile continues to offer a comparable option, courtesy of its T-Mobile One Plus International add-on.)

4/12/2018: Scenarios, Al Jazeera

This hour-long program had me joining an information-security expert from Doha (Google Translate renders his name as Mohammed Al-Durrani, which Google search results indicate isn’t the right English spelling of the gentleman’s name) and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Mariarosaria Taddeo to discuss Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional testimony and what Facebook should do next. As ever, feedback from Arabic speakers about how the translator made me sound in Arabic is welcome.

Weekly output: Chris Vickery, post-phishing advice, hyperloop competition

Posted on August 20, 2017 by robpegoraro

It was a back-to-work week after the previous week’s time off. In addition to what you see here, I filed a USA Today column that should go up tomorrow morning and a thousand-word feature that won’t run for a few more weeks.

8/15/2017: How companies leave your data online without your knowledge, Yahoo Finance

This post was the product of my one work appointment while on vacation in the Bay Area, a conversation with data-breach detective Chris Vickery.

8/17/2017: These college students are vying to build Elon Musk’s hyperloop, Yahoo Finance

I drove up to College Park Tuesday morning to see the test hyperloop pod that this UMD team is taking to a SpaceX-hosted hyperloop competition at the end of this month, then used part of my resulting writeup to discuss the overall feasibility of the hyperloop concept for transporting people. In the process, I got to employ a quote that I’ve had sitting in Evernote since last November.

8/18/2017: You got phished. Now what?, USA Today

This ran about a week after I filed it, thanks to my original e-mail not being addressed to the right editor and the right editor a) missing my re-send of that e-mail and b) being really busy. Fortunately, phishing and e-mail security in general are both evergreen topics, so this summary of the advice I gave to a friend’s dad was at no real risk of getting scooped.

Rob Pegoraro

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

Tag Archives: password manager