Monday will be my first workday spent entirely in D.C. since mid December. I’m both attending and speaking (as in, quizzing futurist Amy Webb) at the State of the Net conference at the Newseum. “SOTN” is always a good tech-policy talkfest, and you can watch the proceedings live at its site.
1/22/2018: What you need to know about the government’s renewed surveillance law, Yahoo Finance
This explanation of the National Security Agency’s “Section 702” authorization to spy on foreign-intelligence suspects from within U.S. territory should have run in December. But once again, CES Advent left me with too little bandwidth to write the post then.
1/23/2018: How a gang of crooks hijacked your web browser, Yahoo Finance
One of the companies that I talked to for a December post on the plague of “forced-redirect” ads offered me an advance look at a study they’d done of a racket that not only inflicted these ads on readers at scale but set up its own network of fake ad agencies to get their fake ads on real networks. We updated the post a couple of days later to note that the report no longer mentioned two ad networks as being especially willing to do business with con-ad artists.
1/24/2018: Net neutrality app is a lesson in Apple’s App Store power, USA Today
I’ve been writing about Apple’s use and misuse of its App Store review authority for almost as long as I’ve been writing about net neutrality, so an episode involving Apple rejecting an app designed to help users spot net-neutality violations was an obvious topic.
Rob Pegoraro 