Total CES PR pitches received this week: 119 (not counting e-mails from the Consumer Electronics Association itself).

12/10/2013: Q&A With Rep. Jared Polis (D-Co.), DisCo Policy Forum 2013

At the Disruptive Competition Project’s one-day conference, I quizzed one of the few representatives in Congress with a tech-startup background (he co-founded the e-greeting-card company Blue Mountain Arts site bluemountainarts.com) about issues like patent reform, NSA surveillance, immigration policy, and the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Left unanswered: Why I still get all of my Christmas cards in paper form.

12/12/2013: Evolution of ID Theft, State of ID Theft

I discussed trends in identity theft at the National Consumers League’s first conference devoted to the subject with Verizon security director Andy Bonillo, Hart Research Associates v.p. Abigail Davenport, Allan Friedman of the Brookings Institution, and assistant U.S. attorney general Zach Intrater. Surprising thing I learned: ID theft can be a slow and arduous line of work.

12/13/2013: #TabletChat Tablet Usage in Business Twitter Chat, IDG Mobility

Another busy hour of debating the finer points of tablet usage. I realized halfway through that I should have been performing my chat-host duties on a tablet instead of a tablet–not for intellectual-integrity reasons, but because I was eating lunch as I typed, and it’s easier to wipe crumbs off a screen than to brush them out of a keyboard.

12/13/2013: Unlocking Phones Is One Thing, Unlocking DMCA Regulatory Capture Is Another, Disruptive Competition Project

The major wireless carrier’s agreement to unlock paid-up phones–and to tell their customers when they’ve unlocked that option–has some serious limits, but it still represents a remarkable reversal of where we were 11 months ago, not to mention five years ago.

12/15/2013: Tips on charging devices with your laptop, USA Today

A reader asked a simple question–how do I know if my laptop will charge my phone when asleep–that did not have a simple answer. The column also includes a reminder to check your laptop’s touchpad settings.

On Sulia, I questioned a dubious cable-industry Web ad campaign, shared details of a conversation I had with FreedomPop’s COO about my tepid review of its service, decried the communication breakdown behind Twitter’s quickly-reversed weakening of its “block” feature, pointed readers to an interesting password-testing site mentioned at NCL’s ID-theft conference, and denounced the idea of Sprint angling to buy T-Mobile.

12/17/2013: Corrected Polis’s bio and added a link to video of the ID-theft panel.