Weekly output: the CIA’s SXSW sales pitch, Amazon unveils Project Kuiper receivers, NASA’s plans for privately owned space stations

Posted on March 19, 2023 by robpegoraro

This week went by fast, between my spending the first two days of it in Austin for SXSW and then spending all of Wednesday at the Satellite 2023 conference in downtown D.C. And then St. Patrick’s Day came around–which this year reminded me of how great it was to return to Ireland last summer, the first trip I made there with my Irish passport.

3/15/2023: The CIA’s SXSW Sales Pitch: We Need Your Help, Please Come Work for Us, PCMag

Four Central Intelligence Agency executives gave a talk at SXSW Monday afternoon with an interesting wrinkle: If you resent ubiquitous digital surveillance and want to find ways to defeat it, our agents and assets in hostile countries could use your help.

3/15/2023: Amazon’s Project Kuiper Satellite Receivers Cost Less Than $400 to Make, PCMag

If Satellite 2023 had not been scheduled on top of SXSW, I could have watched Amazon’s Tuesday-morning keynote in person and filed this post Tuesday afternoon. Instead, I wrote up the company’s news about its upcoming Project Kuiper constellation of low-Earth-orbit broadband satellites after reading Amazon’s blog post and reading press accounts of the talk.

3/17/2023: Here’s how NASA plans to replace the International Space Station—by becoming a private company’s tenant, Fast Company

This story started out with my watching a few panels about NASA’s plans for “commercial LEO destinations” at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference in early February, spending the next two weeks lining up interviews with most of the companies bidding for this work, having MWC force me to set aside the work for a week, finally filing the story the night before I headed out for SXSW, and then having my editor not look at the piece until after SXSW because he was also busy at the festival.

Weekly output: Google location-privacy lawsuit, Mozilla privacy-minded gift guide, Artemis I launch, Astranis, Mark Vena podcast, Qualcomm “Always-Sensing Camera,” FCC broadband moves

Posted on November 20, 2022 by robpegoraro

My trip to Hawaii this week was less enjoyable than the phrase “my trip to Hawaii” (and event host Qualcomm covering airfare and lodging expenses) would suggest, thanks to my laptop suffering a screen and maybe motherboard-level malfunction that left it unusable from Wednesday on.

11/15/2022: Google to Pay Almost $392M to Settle 40-State Lawsuit Over Location Tracking, PCMag

I wrote this from my hotel room during the lightly-scheduled first day of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit.

11/16/2022: If You Care About Your Privacy, Don’t Buy These Tech Gifts, PCMag

I got an advance copy of Mozilla’s announcement of this update to its Privacy Not Included gift guide, making it easy to write this as well in conference idle time.

11/16/2022: NASA Successfully Launches Artemis I, PCMag

I assumed somebody else would cover the long-awaited debut of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, but seeing nobody claim that in my client’s Slack workspace led me to raise my hand–and then writing this from Hawaii made it easier to follow a post-launch press conference that started around 5 a.m. Eastern.

11/17/2022: Astranis’s MicroGEO is a high-flying new take on satellite broadband, Fast Company

I wrote about one of the companies spotlighted in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards.

11/17/2022: S02 E40 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

I joined this podcast by positioning my phone on a travel tripod parked atop a trash can atop a table on the balcony of my room. And then somebody had to fire up a circular saw on the ground floor of the hotel…

11/18/2022: How Qualcomm’s ‘Always-On Camera’ Became Its ‘Always-Sensing Camera’, PCMag

With my laptop inoperable, I wrote this on a Qualcomm Snapdragon-powered Lenovo Thinkpad x13s that a company rep had handy. Writing this post in Chrome on a laptop with a processor architecture not supported in that Windows x86-only browser was a bit of an adventure, and now I want to do a longer-term test of a Snapdragon laptop–not just because my own laptop is on the fritz.

11/18/2022: FCC Publishes New Broadband Map, Votes to Require ISP ‘Nutrition Labels’, PCMag

I wound up writing this post in the Google Docs app on my phone, a dreadful experience that left me wanting to ice my thumb.

Weekly output: chip shortage (x2), cybersecurity survey, satellite broadband, soccer-playing robot, Xfinity Mobile, Elon Musk bought Twitter, MRI mind reading

Posted on October 31, 2022 by robpegoraro

I’m off to Lisbon tonight for Web Summit–the eighth time I’ve covered this conference and the seventh time I’ve traveled to it as a speaker (with the organizers picking up lodging and airfare). This, however, is the first time in my experience that the conference doesn’t overlap with Election Day.

I gave Patreon readers got an advance look at my agenda in a post there Friday; the rest of y’all will get to find out as the week progresses.

10/24/2022: As chip shortage starts to ease, factory-level fixes will take longer, USA Today

Usually, I suggest story topics to my USAT editors, but this time one of them asked if I could tackle this topic.

10/24/2022: People Still Think Their Smart Speakers Are Eavesdropping on Conversations, PCMag

I got an advance look at a survey the Chubb insurance company had done, which both revealed some disturbing beliefs and practices among respondents and shared some dubious security advice.

10/26/2022: Do We Need to Rethink Existing Rules About Satellite Internet Interference?, PCMag

I went to a lunchtime panel Tuesday at the New America think tank about this wonky topic and came away with both a free lunch and notes for this post.

10/27/2022: And The Chip Shortage Lingers – What It Means For Your Next Car Purchase, KTRH

This Houston radio station wanted to quiz me about the USAT column. The link here points to a story they did based in part on a quick phone interview I did Wednesday morning with KTRH’s Jeff Biggs, but I assume H-town listeners also heard me on the air at some point.

10/25/2022: Soccer-playing robot, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me–in their D.C. studio for my first time since early 2020–to discuss an IEEE Spectrum story with the eye-catching headline “Goalkeeping Robot Dog Tends Its Net Like a Pro”

10/27/2022: Comcast Puts Up ‘Over 5 Million Served’ Sign for Xfinity Mobile, PCMag

I wrote about a Comcast service that people seem to really, really like.

10/29/2022: Elon Musk owns Twitter now, Al Jazeera

I returned to AJ’s studio for a spot about the possible ramifications and downsides of the world’s richest man owning Twitter.

10/30/2022: mind reading via MRI, Al Jazeera

Researchers at the University of Texas demonstrated an ability to reconstruct the mental language of subjects via MRI measurements–just not word for word. The anchors wanted to know if this technology could be abused by tyrannical governments; I said that since you need to have the subject inside an MRI machine, the government would need to detain the person first, and tyrannical governments already have ways to compel people to talk. The researchers also found that “subject cooperation is required both to train and to apply the decoder.”

Weekly output: Starlink, spectrum coordination, flight delays (x2), T-Mobile and Verizon 5G home broadband, Mark Vena podcast

Posted on August 7, 2022 by robpegoraro

About one year later than I’d planned, I’m flying to Las Vegas Tuesday to cover the Black Hat information-security conference. Two big factors in my deciding to go ahead with that trip this year: My kid is now vaccinated and boosted, while I had Covid barely seven weeks ago.

8/2/2022: SpaceX’s Starlink has soared, but a course correction may be on the horizon, Fast Company

More weeks ago than I’d like to admit, one of my editors asked if I could do a more in-depth look at the progress of SpaceX’s Starlink low-Earth-orbit broadband constellation. A day after this piece ran, Reddit’s ever-informative r/starlink served up new evidence of capacity issues at this service: a new rate plan in France that cuts the monthly rate in half but imposes a 250 GB threshold for possible speed deprioritization.

8/2/2022: 2 Key Federal Telecom Agencies Promise to Play Nice With Wireless Spectrum, PCMag

Two federal offices about two miles apart in D.C. pledged to work better together in spectrum planning. That might seem like an obvious thing to do, but the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration last updated this memorandum of understanding in 2003.

8/3/2022: Don’t Get Stranded: How to Watch for Flight Delays and Get Around Them, PCMag

A discussion on PCMag’s Slack workspace about coping with travel hiccups led to me asking if I could write this story, and not just because I’d like to recoup my added travel costs from my unplanned extra night in Toronto in June.

8/3/2022: How Verizon ‘fixed wireless’ and T-Mobile home broadband is converting cable customers, USA Today

After a reality-check interview with an analyst who reminded me that fiber scales so much better to meet demand than fixed wireless can, this column on the progress of T-Mobile and Verizon’s 5G-based home broadband got a bit less enthusiastic about its potential.

8/4/2022: S02 E32 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

My main contribution to this discussion was talking about my Starlink story, but if you watch the video of the podcast you can also see me scowl at a Lightning cable.

8/5/2022: DOT Moves to Strengthen Rules on Refunds for Flight Changes, Cancellations, PCMag

Speaking of travel delays, I returned to the subject to cover a set of proposed Department of Transportation rules that would clarify what counts as a significant schedule change and a cancelled flight–and require either non-expiring trip credits or straight-up refunds for travel canceled because of a future pandemic.

Weekly output: Wing drone deliveries around Dallas, Project Kuiper launch contracts, Peacock MLB deal, Mark Vena podcast

Posted on April 10, 2022 by robpegoraro

This week allowed me to dust off (literally!) the suit that I think I last wore in April of 2019, thanks to the Consumer Technology Association’s Digital Patriots dinner. The event was great, but I did realize that I’d forgotten how that kind of outfit adds two more pockets in which you can forget where you stashed your glasses.

4/4/2022: Drone Deliveries From Alphabet’s Wing to Take Flight Around Dallas, PCMag

I covered this announcement about the start of drone deliveries for some residents of some Dallas suburbs.

4/5/2022: Amazon’s Project Kuiper Tips Massive Satellite Launch Deal, PCMag

Writing about this enormous launch contract allowed me to use some quotes from the notes I took at the Satellite 2022 show in D.C. last month.

4/7/2022: Peacock Gets Exclusive Lineup of 18 Sunday Morning Baseball Games, PCMag

Baseball fans may need to sign up for yet another streaming service to see their team’s games–or, as I noted in this post, they can “watch” a game on the radio.

4/9/2022: S02 E15 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

Baseball streaming video figured heavily in this week’s episode of the podcast, which is itself available in video form.

Rob Pegoraro

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

Tag Archives: satellite broadband