Weekly output: Internet Assocation, Mercedes EQS, NextGen TV in D.C., DJI investment ban, TikTok hysteria

Posted on December 19, 2021 by robpegoraro

I did not plan to spend so many hours this week in a fruitless search for at-home COVID tests–the worst kind of holiday shopping ever.

12/15/2021: After Microsoft and Uber Flee, The Internet Association Logs Off, PCMag

This post gave me an excuse to dust off some notes from IA events I’d attended in the Before Times.

12/16/2021: Like an Electric Spaceship: Hitting the Road in the Mercedes-Benz EQS, PCMag

The EQS 580 I test-drove around Tysons was, at $120,000, easily the most expensive vehicle I have ever taken out for a spin. This was a fun post to write, even if dealing with Tesla fanboys on Twitter afterwards was not so much fun. (Remember, the block button is there for a reason; online malcontents are not entitled to waste your time.)

12/16/2021: ‘NextGen TV’ Broadcasts Now on the Air in DC, PCMag

Almost five years after I first wrote about this upgrade to broadcast television, NextGen TV (originally known as “ATSC 3.0”) is finally on the air in Washington, courtesy of Howard University’s WHUT hosting the signals of the four major network stations here. Another thing that’s changed since the early days of this standard: Compatible sets have gotten much cheaper, even if some major manufacturers continue to sit out NextGen.

12/17/2021: Feds Ground All US Investments in DJI, PCMag

Once the lede for this popped into my head, the rest pretty much wrote itself. Which is a good feeling!

12/18/2021: TikTok school-threat hysteria, Al Jazeera

As my friend Mike Masnick wrote at Techdirt, this wasn’t really a TikTok story but a pack-journalism story: Traditional media outlets raced to cover an alleged post or posts threatening violance against schools without ever pointing to specific posts making such a threat. Note that TikTok says they couldn’t find any such thing.

Daily newsletters I delete every day–only after reading them

Posted on March 7, 2021 by robpegoraro

If you don’t want your inbox to start filling up with newsletters, you probably shouldn’t become a journalist. Even if you decide not to sign up for daily updates from one organization or another, the PR people at that organization will probably make that decision for you.

But newsletters exist for a reason, that being that they can make it easy to catch up on developments you missed over the last day, week or month. So whether or not I opted in to get somebody’s daily update, I usually don’t click the “unsubscribe” link if the newsletter covers my own occupational interests–and skimming and deleting takes very little out of my time.

Really good newsletters, however, earn not just a quick glance at a subject header and the first headline or two, but start-to-finish reading. I want to talk about two in particular that help keep me current about my fellow scribes.

Morning Consult Tech: Morning Consult, a data-intelligence firm with offices in D.C., New York and San Francisco, puts out this recap of tech-policy headlines before 9 a.m. weekday mornings. It’s an impressively comprehensive summary of recent work that covers publications beyond the usual boldface news names–the left-wing magazine Mother Jones and Vice’s tech-news site Motherboard have each gotten shout-outs. In addition to those two- or three-sentence story blurbs, each message features an events calendar that in the Before Times was a good way to ensure my work social calendar didn’t stay empty as well as a modest amount of self-promotion for the parent firm’s work. My only real complaint is predictably vain: I wish this newsletter would spotlight my own work more often.

Muck Rack Daily: This GIF-laden, moderately gossipy message arrives weekday afternoons from New York-based Muck Rack, which provides tools for PR types, lets journalists post their own portfolios (writing this post reminded me of how overdue I was to update my own), and used to and hopefully once again will host get-togethers for reporters at such events as CES and SXSW. As you can see from Friday’s e-mail, each one revisits the day’s top stories as interpreted through journalists’ tweets–a not-dumb move by the senders to play off of our own vanity–and illustrated by pop-culture GIFs that I occasionally recognize. Here I should note that my father-in-law receives this newsletter, which every now and then leads to him sending me a nice look-who-they-featured e-mail.

If you work on either one of these newsletters, feel free to take a bow. And please don’t be offended when I add that I delete each newsletter after reading, because my inbox is crowded enough already without my squirreling away copies of these and other daily dispatches.

Weekly output: CES recap, cable’s 10G pitch, making Congress smarter about tech policy, whither “GIS”

Posted on January 27, 2019 by robpegoraro

We’re now more than halfway through this presidential term, which is crazy to think about considering that January 2017 sometimes feels like it happened five years ago.

1/22/2019: Techdirt Podcast Episode 196: The CES 2019 Post-Mortem, Techdirt

For the fourth year in a row, I joined Techdirt editor Mike Masnick on his podcast to compare notes about CES.

1/24/2019: How cable wants to speed up your internet access, Yahoo Finance

The cable industry chose CES week to announce its “10G” initiative for 10-Gbps broadband, which helped ensure that I couldn’t get around to unpacking how much of his plan isn’t new until a couple of weeks later.

1/24/2019: These people are trying to make Congress smarter about tech policy, Yahoo Finance

I’ve had this story on my to-do list for months, but the arrival of a new class of TechCongress fellows finally pushed me to research and write it.

1/25/2019: The Changing Nature of GIS, Trajectory Magazine

I returned to my occasional client to write this wonky article about how cloud services and mobile devices are democratizing geographic information systems in much the same way that they’ve opened up online publishing.

It’s been a trying week to keep a politically open mind

Posted on October 6, 2018 by robpegoraro

For years, one of the non-obvious pleasures of writing about tech policy has been knowing that the good and bad ideas don’t fall along the usual right/left lines.

I might not want to hear Republicans like Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) and former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R.-Utah) say a single word about Benghazi, but they were right on a lot of intellectual-property issues. At the same time, I have not enjoyed seeing Democrats I otherwise find clueful like Sen. Pat Leahy (D.-Vt.) repeat entertainment-industry talking points.

But as the past couple of years and these past few days in particular have reminded me, the GOP looks different these days. When a Supreme Court nominee can snarl about left-wing conspiracies in a way that invites the description “Justice Brett Kavanaugh (R)” as the White House rushes through an investigation of sexual-assault allegations against him, and then all but one Senate Republican approves… well, that didn’t happen under President George W. Bush, as awful as things got then.

As a voter, I find nothing to like about what’s now the party of Trump. I’m struggling to think when I might once again cast a contrarian vote for a Republican for Congress in my deep-blue district–especially since my current representative lacks his predecessor’s history of questionable financial transactions.

But at the same time, it’s not good for my health to turn into a ball of rage, and I don’t want to respond to a bout of tribalism on the Republican side by returning the favor. So I’ve been trying to keep a few thoughts in mind.

One is that coherent political philosophies can deserve respect, but blind loyalty, an unprincipled will to power or rank bigotry do not. I may not agree with your notions on government power or individual responsibility, but if I see you speaking and acting in accordance with them, I can at least try to understand where you’re coming from. If, however, you’ve abandoned past positions because they conflict with fact-starved Trump talking points, why should I take you seriously?

If the logic of your current policy positions boils down to “this will help my team,” the same response applies. And if you spout racist or misogynistic nonsense, crawl back under your rock.

A second is that today’s Republican Party and conservatism aren’t the same thing, as one of this year’s dumber tech-policy debates illustrates. It’s become fashionable to describe (groundless) GOP complaints over social-network bias in terms of unfairness to “conservatives,” but the people doing the whining are solidly in Trump’s corner and back such Trump moves as imposing a hidden tax through massive tariffs and propping up dying resource-extraction industries–neither the stuff of small-c conservatism.

A third is that Democrats left alone can still screw things up. Living in D.C. in the mid 1990s, I had the privilege of helping to pay Marion Barry’s salary with my taxes; I know the risks of unchecked one-party rule. We still need a party that can point out that market forces can solve some problems on their own and that abuse of power isn’t just a sport for big business.

I assume it will take at least one electoral wipeout to break Trump’s spell on the Republican Party and let it try to recover that role–as that bomb-throwing liberal George Will wrote in June. In the interest of not trying to pretend I have no opinion on things I see everyday, I will admit that seeing such a beatdown would not make me sad.

Weekly output: Social-media privacy settings, Trump tech policy, D.C. Entrepreneur, Tech Night Owl

Posted on July 18, 2016 by robpegoraro

This has been another awful news week for civilization in general. When are things not going to suck around here?

7/14/2016: How to see if your apps know too much about you, Yahoo Finance

This was my first and, I hope, last piece to riff on Pokemon Go–I don’t have the time to play the game, so my contribution to the growing genre of Pokemon coverage was to remind people of how to check to see what sort of access their apps have to their social-media identities.

7/15/2016: Tech execs weren’t being totally fair when they trashed Trump’s tech policy, Yahoo Finance

The early reaction in the hundreds of comments on this piece: How dare these 1 percenters tell us how to vote? Maybe Trump isn’t the only one with an image problem…

7/15/2016: Interview w/ Rob Pegoraro of USA Today and Yahoo Tech, D.C. Entrepreneur

George Mocharko interviewed me for his podcast about tech issues, which aired at 2 p.m. Friday on Arlington’s low-power FM station WERA.

7/16/2016: July 16, 2016 — Kirk McElhearn and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I talked with Gene Sternberg about Apple’s aging computing lineup, Hillary Clinton’s e-mail setup (my friend Sean Gallagher wrote a great explainer of that for Ars Technica this week), Trump’s tech policy and other issues.

Weekly output: 2015 tech fails, apps versus mobile sites, 2015 in tech policy, CES newbies, OS X Keychain, how to read CES stories

Posted on January 3, 2016 by robpegoraro

A few stories I’d filed earlier went up this week, lending a false sense of my output. Tomorrow, I depart for my 19th CES in a row, and even after all that experience I’m still not quite sure what I’ve signed up for.

12/30/2015: Tech fails: The year’s worst consumer gadget calamities, USA Today

My editors elected to run the column that appeared online last week in Wednesday’s print edition. Can’t lie; that’s still neat.

12/30/2015: Tip: Does That Site Really Deserve To Be An App On Your Phone?, Yahoo Tech

I’ve had this topic on my story-ideas list for a while, and now it’s finally posted.

12/30/2015; The Year in Technology Policy: It Wasn’t All That Bad!, Yahoo Tech

My latest take on this evergreen end-of-year topic found me in a better mood than usual.

12/31/2015: Tip: How to Cut Old Passwords Out Of Apple’s Keychain, Yahoo Tech

Like my other tip this week, this was something I’d had on my mind for a while.

1/1/2016: CES 2016 Survival Guide: What Newbies Need to Know, Yahoo Tech

You’ve read earlier versions of this how-to here in 2011 and 2013. This time around, I think I did a better job of monetizing my thoughts.

1/3/2016: How to read the hype of CES, USA Today

This weekend’s column takes another break from the usual tech-Q&A format to offer advice about interpreting the impending deluge of CES coverage.

Changes with my Yahoo and USA Today columns

Posted on December 5, 2015 by robpegoraro

Astute readers should have noticed that my Yahoo Tech column did not run as usual this Tuesday. At least, I assume they did, even if none actually e-mailed to ask about its absence.

Yahoo Tech columnist But in case any such curiosity exists, what happened is that management there decided that having me write one long story a week on Tuesday had stopped being a good fit.

On the one hand, the frustrating failure of tech-policy news to break exclusively on Mondays often meant I had to wait most of a week to offer my input. On the other hand, we weren’t running any other weekly columns. The original concept, as David Pogue explained in his introductory video, was to have five columnists who each wrote on an assigned workday–but various forms of attrition left me the only one still on that newspaper-ish schedule.

So instead of seeing one long story from me each Tuesday and then maybe an extra item, you should expect to see more, shorter posts every week. Next week, for instance, should feature three posts from me, counting the one I filed Friday that hasn’t been posted yet.

Meanwhile, over at USA Today my column will be a little shorter starting this weekend: We’re going to drop the tip-of-the-week item that ran at the end of each Q&A segment. I liked coming up with those info-morsels, but they were too easy for readers to overlook, given that we had no easy way to advertise them in the headline.

That doesn’t mean I’m out of the weekly-tip business–but if I resume writing such a thing, it would probably be somewhere else online.

Back at USAT’s site, you’re also more likely to see me use my space to offer my perspective on a major tech event–see, for instance, my recent reports from the IFA tech trade show and the Web Summit conference.

Any other questions about how I’ve been making my living lately? Ask away in the comments.

Weekly output: 2013 tech policy, 2013 predictions, Facebook contacts, Facebook privacy, headphones

Posted on December 30, 2012 by robpegoraro

The last workweek of the year ends with one new freelance client.

12/26/2012: Commentary: A Tech To-Do List for Washington in 2013, PBS NewsHour

I wrote a guest post for the NewsHour’s Rundown blog about the tech-policy issues I’d like to see Washington tackle next year–and how much of those tasks might actually get accomplished.

Surprise, surprise: Congress has already disappointed me. First it rejected measures that would impose a minimal level of transparency on the use of warrantless wiretapping of communications involving individuals overseas. Then it dropped an amendment that would force prosecutors to obtain a warrant to request e-mail stored online for longer than 180 days.

12/28/2012: Reverse Predictions For 2013, Discovery News

Are you as bored of thinly-sourced evidence for the impending arrival of an Apple HDTV as I am? Then please read this post, in which I cast a skeptical gaze on that and six other tech forecasts for the coming year.

12/31/2012: Tip: Sync Facebook friends with Mac contacts, USA Today

This week’s column–marking the start of my second year doing it–began when I was trying to update my address book. A friend’s Facebook data revealed that she had moved to Oakland; her Christmas card had her street address, but when I typed that into the Facebook-sourced home-address field in my Mac’s Contacts app, my edits vanished once I closed out of the record. I have since turned off Facebook contacts synchronization, as I suggested I might in the column.

No timestamp or link on this last one, as it’s print-only: I wrote a listicle for Reader’s Digest covering a few reasons why one pair of headphones might cost 18 times as much as another, and it should have begun appearing on newsstands a week or two ago. I finally remembered to look for it this Sunday and grabbed a quick shot of the piece; it’s on page 56, if you’d like to read it for yourself.

Weekly output: RapidShare, tech policy, e-mail privacy, Windows 8

Posted on November 18, 2012 by robpegoraro

There’s a new client in my list this week: a blog called the Disruptive Competition Project, set up this summer by the Computer & Communications Industry Association. (Back then, GigaOM and Techdirt separately noted its launch in the context of other attempts to connect the tech industry to Washington.) I’m going to be writing a couple of posts a week there about various aspects of tech policy through at least the end of the year.

11/13/2012: In Conversation: Daniel Raimer of RapidShare, Future of Music Summit

I’ve been going to and occasionally speaking at the Future of Music Coalition’s annual summits since their debut in 2001. This year, I got a chance to interview the chief legal officer of the Swiss data-locker service RapidShare–a company that has gotten a lot of heat for enabling copyright infringement but says it’s working to stop people from employing it for that purpose. I had to condense my questions after Raimer took too long with his PowerPoint, but I did hit the points I wanted in the time I had left (beginning at about 13:50 in the clip below).

11/13/2012: Patents, Broadband, Privacy: Now That The Election’s Over, Can We Talk About Tech Policy?, Disruptive Competition Project

Back in 2008, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain put together lengthy, detailed descriptions of their tech-policy goals; this year, Obama and Mitt Romney barely mentioned the subject. This has been bothering me all year (earlier this fall, I unsuccessfully pitched an article along these lines to a couple of sites); in this post, I tried to outline where the absence of a campaign conversation on tech policy leaves us in three key areas.

11/16/2012: How Your Secret E-Mail Can Give You Up, Discovery News

I wrote this in part because e-mail security has been catapulted into the headlines, courtesy of the Petraeus/Broadwell scandal, but also because I thought it was a good idea to remind people that no technology measure can stop the recipient of your message from doing whatever he or she wants with it, while also summing up other risks to your privacy in e-mail. But I should have spelled out how encrypting your e-mail won’t close most of these vulnerabilities (even if most people can’t be bothered to try that).

11/17/2012: How to add a Start menu to Windows 8, USA Today

This is the first Windows-centric piece I’ve written for USAT in a while. It leads off with advice about ways Windows 8 users can either replicate the program-launching functions of the Start menu or outright restore that feature (for what it’s worth, I will see if I can get by with filling out the taskbar with shortcuts to programs), then wraps up with a tip about Win 8’s helpful system-refresh and reset tools.

Rob Pegoraro

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

Tag Archives: tech policy