As you may have noticed, I did not go to Wallops Island, Va., this week to see a rocket launch, because Rocket Lab first delayed the first U.S. launch of its Electron Rocket from Dec. 9 to Dec. 13 to avoid forecast bad weather and then pushed it from Tuesday to Thursday because of an airspace-clearance issue. Unfortunately, the weather forecast for Thursday doesn’t look good either, so I fully expect this launch to slip once again.

12/5/2022: Global Telecom Companies Struggle to Deliver on Human-Rights Commitments, PCMag

I wrote up the latest report from Ranking Digital Rights, a project that grades tech and telecom companies on the commitments they make to uphold human rights and on how well they document their compliance with those commitments.

12/6/2022: Oversight Board: Facebook ‘Cross-Check’ System for VIPs Is ‘Flawed in Key Areas’, PCMag

Meta’s equivalent of a Supreme Court–a level of accountability that Twitter could desperately use now–issued a scathing report about Facebook and Instagram’s “cross-check” program adding an extra level of review for posts by VIP users.

12/7/2022: Here’s what T-Mobile has learned about stealing home broadband customers from Big Cable, Fast Company

I got an advance look at a report T-Mobile commissioned about its fixed-wireless service for homes, including some interesting details about how much data these subscribers have been using on this data-cap-free service.

12/9/2022: With or Without Elon, Social Media Content Moderation Is Still Complicated, PCMag

I thought writing up an hour-long panel at a conference hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology would take an hour, tops. That was not the case.

12/9/2022: Twitter’s abandoned-accounts plan, Alhurra

This U.S. government-funded Arabic-language news channel had me on the first time since 2019 to discuss Elon Musk’s intention to reclaim 1.5 billion Twitter usernames that had been abandoned for an unstated number of years and let other people grab those handles.

12/9/2022: Elon Musk: Twitter to Put 1.5 Billion Abandoned Handles Up for Grabs, PCMag

Talking about this abandoned-accounts plan made me want to find out more about it, so I researched and wrote this post for PCMag–and along the way discovered, with a major assist from a reader, that the 1.5 billion number seems entirely plausible.