#mark-vena — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: LocalSend, Mark Vena podcast, AST SpaceMobile launch

I hope you all are enjoying the liminal time between Christmas and New Year’s–or, as I’ve come to think of it over the last 25-plus years, my last moments of occupational tranquility before work returns with force in the form of CES.

(I’ve used some of that semi-idle time to write an extra post for Patreon readers about the free trips that I didn’t take in the last quarter of this year.)

12/22/2025: This Free App Makes Transferring Files Between Devices Ridiculously Easy, PCMag

Quizzing LocalSend’s developer via e-mail taught me a lesson in how namespaces and nations can mix. As in: He goes by Tien Do Nam, in Vietnam last names come first, he lives in Berlin, so I thought to ask for his surname. He replied that the correct full name is Do Nam Tien, while his German documents list him as Tien Do Nam.

12/24/2025: Ep 117 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Trump’s impact on tech, AI data centers and energy, FCC and Google, Mark Vena

As the token Washingtonian on this podcast, I took up the first item on the agenda. My take on President Trump’s tech policy wasn’t all bad–it looks like the government is in line to save tens of billions of dollars in broadband-buildout costs, assuming that Amazon Leo satellite broadband comes online on schedule–but I can’t call it anything close to good overall.

12/24/2025: AST SpaceMobile Launches Its Most Powerful Direct-to-Cell Satellite Yet, PCMag

Was I going to use this post as an opportunity to remind PCMag readers about India’s impressive spaceflight ambitions? Absolutely.

#AirDrop #ASTSpaceMobile #BEAD #BlueBird #broadbandBuildout #D2D #directToDevice #directToCell #IndiaSpaceProgram #LocalSend #lowEarthOrbitBroadband #LVM3 #MarkVena #QuickShare #satelliteBroadband #Starlink #TienDoNam

Weekly output: AI data centers, Stasi Museum, Sneakers, Brendan Carr on censorship, Mark Vena podcast

After a week at home, I’m back on a plane early Monday morning for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. That company is covering my airfare and lodging, its usual arrangement for the event it hosts at a high-end resort, and I’ll include a disclosure about that in all the copy I file about the summit.

In other business-travel news, Patreon readers got a bonus post this week from a trip that they helped underwrite: a recap of the Online News Association’s conference in New Orleans.

9/15/2025: AI’s Dirty Secret Lies in Fossil Fuels Powering the Future of Artificial Intelligence, Worth

I missed this story when it was published because (ahem…) an editor spelled my last name wrong in the byline, leading to it not showing up on my author page. But anyway: Even if you’re as late to discovering this online as I was, I encourage you to read it and remember two questions to ask about any new data-center project: Will its electricity come from burning polluting fossil fuels, and are its owners paying for new generation capacity to avoid stressing the existing power grid?

9/15/2025: Berlin’s Stasi Museum Offers Uncomfortable Lessons About Surveillance, State Coercion, PCMag

Even though my previous visit in 2018 happened with the same president in the White House, the museum’s exhibits hit in a much different way this time.

9/16/2025: Why the Robert Redford Classic ‘Sneakers’ Is a Favorite in Cybersecurity Circles, PCMag

I had borrowed a DVD of this 1992 flick from my local library in March, which turned out to be good timing for the piece that I realized I needed to write the day after Redford’s death.

9/19/2025: The FCC Chairman Was Against Censorship Before He Was for It, PCMag

As I’ve written more than once here before, I hate abuse of power, and the chance to call it out gets me awake in the morning.

9/19/2025: EP 115 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple’s Awe Dropping Event, new iPhones and IFA 2025 takeaways, Mark Vena

My major contribution to this episode was discussing the popularity of balcony solar power in Germany–and its absence in the U.S.

12/11/2015: Updated the post to add a post that had escaped my attention in a particularly embarrassing manner. 

#balconySolar #BrendanCarr #EastGermany #hackerMovies #JimmyKimmel #MarkVena #Qualcomm #RobertRedford #SnapdragonSummit #Sneakers #StasiMuseum #surveillance #TooManySecrets

Weekly output: Mark Vena podcast, Verizon customer service, AI fair use, Comcast ditches data caps, Aurora’s autonomous trucks, age verification for porn sites, Universal Service Fund, Trump tariffs

The first half of this year is almost in the books, which means I’m thinking of a few longer pieces that I’d meant to have seen published and paid for by now but instead have yet to start writing.

Patreon readers got an extra post from me this week: a recap of how Uber rides in Mexico City helped me realize how much trouble cheap Chinese EVs are going to cause for Tesla.

6/23/2025: Ep 112 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple WWDC 25, Apple Intelligence, OpenAI device, Trump phone, Mark Vena

I suggested that this podcast cover the exercise in commercialized cult worship that is Trump Mobile. Two days after we recorded the show, that site’s description of the T1 phone that it plans to sell changed from “proudly made right here in the USA” to “brought to life right here in the USA.”

6/24/2025: Verizon Touts Upgraded Customer Service Push: Will It Make a Difference?, PCMag

Put me down as a skeptic of the difference that customer service can make in broadband: I can’t remember when I last called either my wireless carrier or my Internet provider for help.

6/24/2025: Judge: It’s Fair Use to Train AI on Books You Bought, But Not Ones You Pirated, PCMag

I found this case interesting for two reasons: It did not involve any claims of AI plagiarism and it allowed for a distinction between training AI models on purchased content and training it on pirated material. That last point should have Silicon Valley nervious, since so many large firms–hi, Meta–could not resist taking that copyright-infringing shortcut.

6/26/2025: Comcast’s New Plans Dump the Data Caps, PCMag

This is a post I have wanted to be able to write for years. I guess seeing enough subscribers flee for unlimited-data offerings of fiber and fixed-wireless services had a persuasive effect on Comcast’s management that my own posts denouncing this exercise in abuse of market power did not.

6/27/2025: Aurora hits a self-driving trucking milestone, Fast Company

One of my editors suggested that Aurora launching commercial deliveries via its self-driving trucks meant it was time to revisit the company I’d profiled for Fast Co. last summer. Conveniently enough, Aurora’s president Ossa Fisher was one of the speakers at Web Summit Vancouver, allowing me to interview her IRL during that conference.

6/27/2025: Sorry, Pornhub Fans: Supreme Court Upholds Texas Age-Verification Law, PCMag

I had this case on my list of opinions to look for on the Supreme Court’s site Friday morning, with an idea that my lede would have to reference Avenue Q’s “The Internet Is For Porn” regardless of the outcome. I’m surprised nobody else seems to have gone with that. After publication, my editor added statements about the decision from a few interested parties.

6/27/2025: That ‘Universal Service Charge’ on Your Phone Bill Isn’t Going Away, PCMag

As I was working on a post about the Texas case, I saw this opinion pop up and realized that I should write about that as well. In the hours that passed, my inbox accumulated comments from a variety of groups–including telecom trade associations that in other scenarios want the government to butt out–applauding this decision.

6/28/2025: For Electronics Makers in Latin America, the Roller-Coaster Ride Is Worse Than Just Paying a High Tariff, PCMag

I started writing this piece from my hotel in Mexico City hours before my departure and then needed another week to check with NielsenIQ to see if they had any stats about the effects of tariffs on the country and then find time to finish and file the thing.

#ageVerification #AITraining #Anthropic #Aurora #autonomousTrucks #autonomousVehicles #Comcast #ComcastDataCaps #copyright #dataCaps #ElectronicsHomeMexico #FirstAmendment #LLMs #MarkVena #podcast #SupremeCourt #tariffs #UniversalServiceFund #USF #VerizonCustomerService #VerizonSupport #Vz #Xfinity

Weekly output: broadband satisfaction, Google I/O announcements (x2), Mark Vena podcast, Android XR, Google Beam

I got back from one part of the West Coast Thursday night and I’m heading to another part Tuesday morning. But while my travel plans have included Google I/O since 2010, Web Summit moving its Collision conference to Vancouver and rebranding it as Web Summit Vancouver has put that city in my schedule for the first time since an epic ski trip to Whistler in 2004.

5/20/2025: In the ISP Race, Fiber Is Still Tough to Beat, But Don’t Discount These Upstarts, PCMag

My first post of the week, written Monday off an embargoed copy of the American Customer Satisfaction Index‘s latest survey results and filed from my flight to SFO that evening, unpacked more bad news for cable broadband.

5/21/2025: Google’s ‘AI Mode’ Is Coming for Us All, PCMag

I wrote part of this, based on Google’s embargoed announcements, on Monday’s flight, part from my Airbnb after jet lag had me awake before 6 a.m., and part from my seat at Shoreline Amphitheatre before the start of Google’s keynote.

5/21/2025: Google’s New Flow Moviemaking Tool Can Turn You Into AI Scorsese for $250/Month, PCMag

I finished writing this after the keynote had begun, so the copy I filed had quotes from Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s keynote remarks.

5/21/2025: Ep 110 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple’s upcoming WWDC 25, Google I/O and “Apple in China”, Mark Vena

I made a rare outdoors appearance on my industry-analyst friend’s podcast, logging on from a picnic table in between I/O exhibits in Shoreline’s parking lot.

5/22/2025: Google Glass Reborn? I Tried Android XR Smart Glasses, and One Thing Stood Out, PCMag

Waiting out a lengthy queue to try Google’s new connected eyewear proved to be an excellent use of my time Tuesday afternoon.

5/23/2025: Google’s Futuristic Beam Tech Almost Made Me Forget I Was on a Video Call, PCMag

I missed some press-specific previews of this holodeck-esque video-conferencing system Tuesday but was able to squeeze in a demo Wednesday afternoon.

#ACSI #android #AndroidXR #broadband #GoogleAI #GoogleBeam #GoogleIO #IO #MarkVena #MountainView #WebSummitVancouver #YVR

Weekly output: Most Innovative Companies (x2), Simbe Robotics, Starlink at the White House, T-Mobile’s 5G speed record, Trump tries to fire FTC Dems, Verizon satellite messaging, Mark Vena podcast, Tools for Humanity

Months of on-and-off work for one of Fast Company’s most involved projects, the annual Most Innovative Companies list, finally yielded published copy this week. You can imagine my relief at that. This coming week should not feature nearly as many bylines for me, in part because I will be out of the office Thursday afternoon for one of the most important rites of spring: the Washington Nationals’ home opener.

3/18/2025: The most innovative companies in manufacturing for 2025, Fast Company

Some of the companies honored in this part of the MIC list were obvious calls, but more involved a lot of back-and-forth deliberation between me and my editors.

3/18/2025: The most innovative companies in robotics and engineering for 2025, Fast Company

I don’t cover the robotics industry all the time, but I spend enough time covering it to feel a little more at home judging what ranks as innovative in that sector.

3/18/2025: These retail robots travel through store aisles, scanning shelves for inventory and insights, Fast Company

Simbe Robotics earned a nod in last year’s MIC list, and this time around we elected to run a separate story about this startup’s work optimizing retail.

3/18/2025: Report: Starlink Tries to Fix White House’s Wi-Fi Woes, PCMag

The New York Times report about a deployment of Starlink broadband at the White House–which should neither be remotely necessary nor provide fiber-competitive speeds–didn’t mention how often Elon Musk has described Starlink as a rural-first solution. But I have those notes and made sure to surface quotes from them in this piece.

3/19/2025: T-Mobile Claims New 5G Download Speed Record, PCMag

My conversation with T-Mobile’s tech president Ulf Ewaldsson at MWC two weeks earlier helped me put this speed test in context.

3/19/2025: Trump Attempts to Fire the FTC’s Democratic Commissioners, PCMag

After I’d filed this report about Trump ignoring established law and a 90-year-old Supreme Court ruling to try to fire Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission, my editor improved it by suggesting I remind readers of the chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that suggests curbing the FTC’s statutory independence.

3/20/2025: Verizon Opens Non-Emergency Satellite Messaging to Galaxy S25, Pixel 9 Users, PCMag

Because I was swamped Wednesday covering the FTC news, I didn’t get to this news until Thursday–by which time Charter and Comcast had announced that their wireless services, based on resold Verizon capacity, were also getting Skylo satellite roaming for customers with Galaxy S25 and Pixel 9 series phones.

3/20/2025: Ep 108 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Skype, NVIDIA GTC, MWC, BYD “fast charging”, Mark Vena

I spent most of my time in this episode of the podcast talking about what I saw at MWC, but the closing discussion of EV charging let me drop in a reference to The Cannonball Run that amused my fellow cinephiles.

3/21/2025: Bot or Not? To Prove You’re Human, Look Into This 8-Inch Orb, PCMag

Almost a month after I talked to Tools for Humanity’s chief architect Adrian Ludwig at Web Summit Qatar–during which that startup signed up a notable new partner and I developed a deeper understanding of what it’s trying to do with this identity scheme–the piece finally made it online.

#AlvaroBedoya #carrierAggregation #DOGE #ElonMusk #FTC #GalaxyS25 #MarkVena #MIC #MostInnovativeCompanies #Orb #Pixel9 #RebeccaSlaughter #satelliteMessaging #SimbeRobotics #Skylo #Starlink #TMobile #TallyRobot #ToolsForHumanity #verizon #WorldID #WorldNetwork #WorldCoin

Weekly output: Arc Boats, data brokers, Mark Vena podcast, New Glenn, Starship, TikTok

Ideally, the week after CES would be a relaxing time with at least one day spent entirely disconnected from work. Because we don’t live in an ideal world, my week instead featured the Supreme Court blowing up TikTok and SpaceX blowing up the second stage of its giant Starship rocket.

And on top of that, I wrote a post Wednesday for Patreon readers sharing further observations from CES.

1/13/2025: This Speedy Electric Sport Boat Leaves Internal Combustion in Its Wake, PCMag

My CES coverage almost wrapped up with this report of a fun outing on Lake Mead on a battery-electric boat–“almost” as in I have a couple of other stories that began with notes and quotes from that trade show, but which can’t be finished without additional reporting.

1/13/2025: Even the Experts Have Trouble Getting Data Brokers to Stop Tracking Them, PCMag

After covering ShmooCon Saturday, I spent part of Sunday watching that hacker conference’s closing panels remotely and part of it writing a recap of Yael Grauer’s talk about the futility of trying to opt out of data brokers without any help from the federal privacy law that Congress keeps failing to pass.

1/15/2026: Ep 106 SmartTechCheck Podcast — CES recap, TikTok, Zoox, TSMC, Apple, Mark Vena

I joined my industry analyst friend Mark and my fellow tech journalists Stewart Wolpin and John Quain for this CES recap.

1/16/2025: Blue Origin’s Giant New Glenn Rocket Reaches Orbit on Its First Try, PCMag

The 1 to 4 a.m. launch window that Blue Origin apparently picked to minimize interference with air traffic maximized interference with my sleep–especially when the first attempt on Monday morning saw five resets of the countdown clock before finally getting scrubbed a little after 3 a.m. The second one resulted in a successful launch at 2:03 a.m., but then writing the post (and eyeing my bleary-eyed copy carefully before pasting it into the CMS) had me up until after 3 a.m. anyway.

1/16/2025: SpaceX Catches a Booster But Loses an Upper Stage on Starship’s Seventh Flight, PCMag

About 17 hours after watching one rocket launch Thursday, I watched a second one that was not so successful–and not in the way that I’d thought Starship’s seventh test might go awry, a failed booster catch.

1/17/2025: Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, Finds No First Amendment Violations, PCMag

I wrote more than 500 words of background material in advance, plus ledes and closing sentences that would go with a court opinion against TikTok or for it. That let me get a completed story filed within half an hour of the court’s mercifully brief opinion getting posted at 10 a.m. Friday. That afternoon, I added another section with reactions from various parties, including two of my favorite tech-policy experts who also happen to be among two of the fastest sources I know to answer an e-mail request for comment.

#ArcBoats #BlueOrigin #ces #dataBrokers #electricBoat #FirstAmendment #LasVegas #MarkVena #NewGlenn #Shmoocon #SpaceX #Starship #SupremeCourt #TikTok #YaelGrauer

Weekly output: Snapdragon Windows software compatibility, Qualcomm’s connected-car ambitions, Snap Spectacles ’24, Mark Vena podcast, Bluesky business plans, Qualcomm 8-core Snapdragon X Plus benchmarking, election security

Before I get to my usual list of what got published under my name this week, I need to vent about what did not get published by the Washington Post this week: the endorsement of Kamala Harris that, by multiple accounts, was quashed by imported-from-London publisher Will Lewis at the direction of owner Jeff Bezos. The insultingly vapid explanation by Lewis can only be read as Bezos attempting to grovel for a lesser spot for his businesses on Donald Trump’s enemies list.

This is a craven betrayal of the legacy of Katharine Graham, who defied the threats of Richard Nixon and his lackeys while the Post published the Pentagon Papers and documented Nixon’s Watergate crimes.

Jeff Bezos, you are no Kay Graham.

10/22/2024: Qualcomm Moves to Ease Windows on Snapdragon Compatibility Concerns, PCMag

My first post from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit covered a series of moves to address one lingering concern of that company’s rollout of fast and battery-friendly laptop processors: compatibility with existing Windows apps and peripherals. Reminder: Qualcomm covered my airfare and lodging on this trip.

10/24/2024: Qualcomm Revs Up Connected-Car Ambitions at Snapdragon Summit, PCMag

Then I filed a much longer post unpacking Qualcomm’s pitch to automakers to use its connected-car platforms. It was weird to see the only in-person endorsements from automakers in Qualcomm’s day-two keynote come from Chinese manufacturers.

10/25/2024: Snap Spectacles ’24 First Look: AR Glasses That Aren’t Vaporware, PCMag

I tried out these augmented-reality glasses Monday afternoon but didn’t have time to write about them until Thursday morning–the first-world problem of being at a conference with a packed schedule six time zones to the left of my editors.

10/25/2024: Ep 70 SmartTechCheck Moment — Ruminations on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2024 in Hawaii, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst pal Mark Vena and other analysts Mike Feibus, Francis Sideco and Dave Altavilla to record a podcast from a lawn at the Wailea Beach Resort, Qualcomm’s venue for the summit.

10/25/2024: Bluesky Readies Subscription Option, Says It Won’t Be Like X Premium, PCMag

I hustled to write this short post from Maui’s airport before a flight to Los Angeles that I didn’t even realize would have no WiFi for most of the flight over the Pacific.

10/27/2024: Qualcomm’s 8-Core Snapdragon X Plus, Tested: A Competitive, Cheaper Chip, PCMag

The research for this post began with a benchmarking session Qualcomm hosted at IFA about seven weeks ago, after which my editor and I were respectively slammed with travel and other schedule conflicts–while, conveniently enough, laptops with these new processors had not yet shipped.

10/27/2024: Election security, Alaraby

I appeared via Zoom on this Arabic-language news channel to share some details from my experience as an Arlington County poll worker.

Updated 10/28/2024 to add a link to my TV hit.

#benchmarks #Bluesky #connectedCars #electionSecurity #Hawaii #MarkVena #Maui #pollWorker #Qualcomm #SnapSpectacles #SnapChat #SnapdragonSummit #SnapdragonX #X #Xitter

Almost two weeks in Pacific time, starting with Black Hat and ending with some family time in the Bay Area, should have ended at around 9 p.m. Sunday. But the line of thunderstorms that swept through the D.C. area and shut down ramp operations at Dulles for a chunk of the evening had other ideas, which is why we got a free tour of IAD during a two-hour wait for a gate and why I’m now typing this sentence from baggage claim after midnight Monday.

8/13/2024: How Hughes Network Systems could bring satellite terminal manufacturing down to Earth, Light Reading

I visited Hughes’ new factory the day before I flew out to Vegas for Black Hat two weeks ago, then wrote this piece on Monday to include some news about Hughes’ contract to manufacture terminals for the low-Earth-orbit satellite-broadband firm OneWeb that Hughes PR gave me in advance.

8/13/2024: Patreon to Creators: Sorry, We Have to Let Apple Take a Cut of In-App Support, PCMag

I could not have written this story the way I did had I not set up shop on Patreon over five years ago and supported other creators on that platform. Some definitions of journalistic ethics would call that being too close to the story, but sometimes there’s no replacement for lived experience in a subject.

Later that day, I followed up by writing a post for Patreon readers explaining that I was not going to eat Apple’s cut, which meant that they could choose between paying about 43 percent extra (an increase Patreon calculated to ensure that creators would earn the same from a patron regardless of where they signed up) or following my advice to sign up on the Web.

8/15/2024: Come Out and Play: An Oral History of the HFStival, Washingtonian

I enjoyed the hell out of revisiting some of my favorite RFK memories with Washingtonian’s Andrew Beaujon over a long phone interview in May. I also enjoyed seeing my one quote from that conversation follow extended testimony from musicians in some of my favorite D.C. indie-rock bands of that era: the Dismemberment Plan, Jawbox, Tuscadero and Velocity Girl.

8/15/2024: Ep 104 SmartTechCheck Podcast — HEB and Apple Pay, Google news, desktop PC thoughts, BlackHat, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast to share my thoughts on Black Hat and to compare notes with fellow tech scribes John Quain and Dwight Silverman.

8/16/2024: Court: Calif. Child-Safety Bill Turns Businesses Into ‘Censors for the State’, PCMag

One state’s law about online child safety getting blocked by a federal appeals court might not seem like national news, but California is a very large state and the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act has already inspired similar laws in other states and a bill that passed the Senate last month.

8/17/2024: Court Stops Disney-Fox-WBD ‘Venu’ Live Sports Service on Antitrust Grounds, PCMag

Friday gave me a second opportunity to digest a fairly lengthy court ruling and explain it to readers, this time one that halted the rollout of a sports streaming service on antitrust grounds.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/08/19/weekly-output-hughes-network-systems-manufactures-in-maryland-apples-app-store-tax-hits-patreon-creators-hfstival-mark-vena-podcast-calfornia-online-child-safety-law-stayed-venu-sports-streami/

#AgeAppropriateDesignCode #AppStore #AppStore30_ #BlackHat #Fubo #FuboTV #HughesNetworkSystems #MarkVena #NetChoice #OneWeb #Patreon #sportsStreaming #Venu

Sunday started with Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and is ending with Kamala Harris as the increasingly likely Democratic presidential nominee. I am struck by the selflessness involved in somebody at the apex of political power assessing the circumstances and the stakes and deciding that they require taking himself out of contention–and how well that grace, however grudgingly it may have come, compares to Donald Trump’s incessant self-worship. As Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic: “Biden’s decision reflected a determination to put the fate of his country ahead of his personal vanity, a choice Trump is inherently incapable of making.”

7/15/2024: Automation Lessens Zombie Account Risks, FedTech

I last wrote for this publication in 2017, but I must have left a decent reputation there for an editor to e-mail me in April to ask if I could do a story about how government-IT types can ease staff transitions between administrations.

7/17/2024: Boost Mobile Unwraps New Plans As 5G Network Buildout Chugs Along, PCMag

We had to correct this post because I had missed how Boost’s most expensive plan does not include mobile hotspot use, even though two of its three cheaper options include it. Which is a dumb pricing game for any wireless carrier to play, but especially one that touts “simplified pricing” in its pitch for its new plans.

7/17/2024: On Speed, T-Mobile Is First in Mobile Broadband, AT&T in Home Internet, PCMag

Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest family of apps, offered me an advance on their latest connectivity report. I’m still confused by how they assessed only AT&T’s fiber service next to all of Verizon’s broadband options.

7/18/2024: Google Ships Fourth And (We Hope) Last Android 15 Beta, PCMag

This was the fifth time this year that I’ve written a short post about an incremental step in Android 15’s development cycle for PCMag.

7/19/2024: Prior to Microsoft Meltdown, CrowdStrike Exec Warned of ‘Single Point of Failure’, PCMag

As I read about the worldwide IT meltdown sparked by CrowdStrike’s epic failure of a driver update, I remembered seeing a CrowdStrike executive declaring at a Washington Post event in early June that “A resilient digital architecture should be able to weather a storm.” Awkward!

Patreon readers got a bonus post related to this story, in which I recounted the continuing utility of keeping notes in a searchable digital format but also revealed that I still have paper notepads from more than 25 years ago–and recently got some unexpected use out of one.

7/19/2024: Ep 103 SmartTechCheck Podcast–CrowdStrike, innovation drought, foldable phones and robotaxis, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast to talk about a grab-bag of tech topics, one of them being Waymo’s robotaxis as I experienced them in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/07/21/weekly-output-zombie-accounts-boost-mobile-broadband-isp-ratings-android-15-beta-crowdstrike-mark-vena-podcast/

#5G #Android15 #ATTFiber #BoostMobile #CrowdStrike #federalIT #MarkVena #Ookla #Speedtest #TMobile #wirelessCarriers #zombieAccounts

After a weekend spent mostly indoors to avoid temperatures that hit or neared triple digits Saturday and Sunday, I’m flying to Los Angeles Tuesday for a grab-bag of reasons that include trying out Waymo’s robotaxi service there (which may make me feel like I’m living in the future), covering VidCon Anaheim (which is all but assured to make me feel old).

Patreon readers got an extra post from me Friday: my thoughts on reading Siddharth Kara’s brutal report on cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, and then comparing that to Apple and Tesla’s supply-chain transparency reports.

6/18/2024: Google’s Third Beta of Android 15 Is Out, and It Has Some Handy New Security Features, PCMag

The fourth piece I’ve writen about the next version of Android had the least news about new features, because at this point in the development cycle Google is basically done announcing new features.

6/19/2024: Billionaire Frank McCourt Shares His Vision for a Decentralized, User-Owned TikTok, PCMag

I had thought this session could yield a good post, and it did not disappoint–even if McCourt’s answers onstage glossed over large parts of his “Project Liberty” proposal.

6/19/2024: What does AI mean for remote work?, Collision

My first panel at Collision–featuring Bhavin Shah, founder and CEO of Moveworks, and Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures–was the last one added to my schedule and featured the largest audience, thanks to its spot on the event’s center stage.

6/20/2024: 1Password Adds New Account Recovery and Device Addition Options, PCMag

I need to revise this post with some extra details about the new device-addition user experience that 1Password’s PR folks provided Friday afternoon.

6/20/2024: Robots and humans: Partners in progress, Collision

Clock management can be tricky with three other speakers on stage (Erik Nieves, CEO of Plus One Robotics; Tessa Lau, co-founder of Dusty Robotics; and Etienne Lacroix, founder and CEO of Vention), but I managed to end this thing within 10 seconds of schedule. My fellow speakers helped immensely by sharing some enlightening anecdotes (for instance, Lau noting that Dusty’s construction-site-markup robots often get nicknamed “WALL-E” by human co-workers) and not stepping on each other’s lines.

6/20/2024: Revolutionizing email collaboration, Collision

At 25 minutes, this session was unusually long by Web Summit standards. And Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra was unusually poised and on-message in his answers to my questions about this paid e-mail service’s new AI features.

6/21/2024: Ep 101 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Qualcomm, Surgeon General warning, Apple WWDC recap, TikTok, Mark Vena

I had just enough time after getting home from Dulles to get lunch and get in a nap before joining this podcast recording.

6/22/2024: Rob Pegoraro Visits Washington Apple Pi, Washington Apple Pi

I had expected this would be an in-person talk like the one I did last June, but instead I spoke to the members of this longtime computer user group via Zoom. That meant I could not give away any tech-event swag but did allow me to share links to the stories I mentioned in Zoom’s chat window.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/06/23/weekly-output-android-15-project-liberty-and-tiktok-ai-and-remote-work-1password-robots-and-humans-superhuman-e-mail-mark-vena-podcast-washington-apple-pi/

#1Password #Android15 #Collision #DustyRobotics #EverywhereVentures #FrankMcCourt #MarkVena #Moveworks #PlusOneRobotics #ProjectLiberty #remoteWork #Superhuman #TikTok #Toronto #userGroups #Vention #WAP #WashingtonApplePi #Waymo #WebSummit

This week featured vastly less travel than last week, but it also afforded me the rare experience of hearing an executive-branch appointee burst into song. And at the end of it, I carved out some time to write a post for Patreon readers about how certain PR pitches come with either a request or a stipulation that I cover the subject for a particular outlet.

4/23/2024: T-Mobile Adds New Fixed Wireless Plans: One for Home, One for the Road, PCMag

Of all of T-Mobile’s announcements Tuesday, the unlimited-data version of its new Away fixed-wireless plan was easily the most interesting.

4/23/2024: FTC Votes to Ban Non-Compete Clauses, PCMag

I wrote an update to the post I’d filed more than a year earlier when the Federal Trade Commission had started this rule-making process, explaining the particulars of the new FTC rule and noting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s plans to sue to overturn this ban.

4/25/2024: Feds Try Breaking Out Into Song to Get People to Take Ransomware Seriously, PCMag

I spent Wednesday at a conference in Washington hosted by the Institute for Security and Technology, then wrote this recap Thursday that led off with Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly singing a bit from an upcoming remake of Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just A Bill.”

4/27/2024: Ep 99 SmartTechCheck Podcast – TikTok, smartphones and children, FCC broadband labels mandate, Mark Vena

I joined my tech-analyst friend’s podcast to discuss the new law requiring TikTok owner ByteDance to sell that social platform, the FCC’s broadband-labels regulation, how harmful smartphones might be to kids, and other tech topics.

Updated 5/5/2024 to add a link to the Patreon post.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/28/weekly-output-t-mobile-adds-fixed-wireless-plans-ftc-bans-non-compete-clauses-ransomware-prevention-mark-vena-podcast/

#cybersecurity #fixedWireless #FTCNonCompeteBan #informationSecurity #infosec #JenEasterly #MarkVena #nonCompeteClauses #ransomware #SchoolhouseRock #TMobile #TMobileHome5G #TMobileHomeInternet

I got too old years ago to elbow my way into Irish bars on St. Patrick’s Day, but I do fly the Irish flag from our front porch alongside the latest in a series of American flags that have graced our house since weeks after we moved in almost 20 years ago.

3/11/2024: Uber App Now Tracks Carbon-Pollution Savings From Some Rides, PCMag

I got an advance copy of Uber’s press release, but seeing this new feature live in my copy of the ride-hailing company’s app helped me discern its limits.

3/12/2024: Uber CEO at SXSW: ‘Our Competition Is Car Ownership’, PCMag

After watching this panel featuring Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Austin mayor Kirk Watson, I wrote my second post about Uber for this week.

3/14/2024: On Third Try, SpaceX’s Starship Reaches Space Before an Explosive Re-Entry, PCMag

I revised this post a day after I wrote it to reflect updates from SpaceX and space experts (for example, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell) that clarified that Starship didn’t achieve orbital velocity on this launch, contrary to a tweet from Elon Musk.

3/15/2024: Ep 97 SmartTechCheck Podcast TikTok and Congress, Elon Musk and YouTube, and SXSW highlights, Mark Vena

I shared a SXSW debriefing on this episode of my tech-analyst friend’s podcast.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/03/17/weekly-output-uber-apps-carbon-pollution-math-uber-and-austin-spacex-starship-test-flight-mark-vena-podcast/

#Austin #carbonFootprint #DaraKhosrowshahi #KirkWatson #MarkVena #SpaceXStarship #sxsw #Uber

I have only two days this upcoming workweek that aren’t blocked off completely, Monday and Thursday. Tuesday I’ll be working the Virginia primary election (hard to believe it’s been almost four years since my first long day as a poll worker), Wednesday I’m covering the  ACA Connects telecom-industry conference, and Friday I fly to Austin for SXSW.

In addition to the stories below, I wrote a bonus post for Patreon readers recapping some of the more interesting things I saw at MWC.

2/26/2024: Google Brings Gemini to Messages App in AI-Flavored Android Feature Drop, PCMag

The first story I filed from Barcelona is one that I could have written from home–Google PR gave me an embargoed copy of the announcement of these new features. But I did appreciate being able to try them out in person at Google’s MWC exhibit during a press breakfast Monday morning.

2/25/2024: 2 Wheels, 3 Cameras, One 5G Radio: Orbic Debuts Connected E-Bike at MWC, PCMag

Writing about a 5G-connected e-bike was not in any of my MWC plans, but the nice thing about large tech events like this is that they can serve up surprises that justify making your way to an exhibitor’s corner of the show floor.

2/28/2024: Cyber diplomacy for the next era of connectivity, Compiler Pop-Up Series: The Barcelona Edition

I moderated this panel discussion between a trio of diplomats–Steve Lang, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international and communications policy, Vassiliki Gogou, a cybersecurity expert with the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, and Maite Arcos, director general of the ESYS Foundation–at an event hosted by Compiler. That’s a new non-profit tech-policy publication supported by the Hewlett Foundation and founded by Mike Farrell, a longtime information-security journalist.

2/28/2024: NTT Docomo ‘Feel Tech Animal’ Exhibit Had Me Walking a Virtual Dog, PCMag

This virtual-reality demo was another thing not in my MWC plans until another attendee suggested I check it out.

2/29/2024: Bluesky Adds Hashtag Support, Better Account Portability Than Mastodon, PCMag

I saw the news about this on my way to the airport in Barcelona early Thursday morning, pitched a post about it in PCMag’s Slack workspace, and got a go-ahead from my editor before I’d cleared security in BCN. Then I wrote the post during my layover in Zurich.

2/29/2024: At MWC, AT&T and AST execs talk up space-based possibilities, Light Reading

The interviews for this piece happened Monday, but I didn’t finish writing it until Tuesday and then my overworked editor, also at MWC, needed a little more time to get this published. And then we had to correct it because I didn’t look close enough at the transcription of the interview provided by Google’s Live Transcribe app to notice that I’d jotted down a different number for the capacity of AST’s NextGen satellites in the notes I took on my laptop.

3/1/2024: Facebook Finds New Way to Unfriend Publishers by Nixing News Tab, PCMag

Writing this post became a little more fun when I realized that Facebook had not only gotten rid of the option to put the News tab among the basic shortcuts in its iPhone and iPad app, it had also left up old documentation that directs users to a nonexistent part of the settings interfaces on those apps.

3/1/2024: Ep 96 SmartTechCheck Podcast MWC, Qualcomm FastConnect 7900, Apple kills car project, SCOTUS, Mark Vena

I shared my impressions of MWC at my industry-analyst friend’s podcast in which we also discussed such recent tech plot twists as Apple closing down its car project and the Supreme Court taking up what strike me as flagrantly unconstitutional Florida and Texas laws that would compel social platforms to publish speech that they might find repulsive.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/03/03/weekly-output-android-feature-drop-5g-connected-e-bike-infosec-diplomacy-feel-tech-animal-demo-bluesky-supports-hashtags-att-and-ast-spacemobile-facebook-to-nix-news-tab-mark-vena-pod/

#AndroidFeatureDrop #ASTSpaceMobile #ATT #Barcelona #BCN #Bluesky #cybersecurity #eBikes #FacebookNews #hashtags #infosec #MarkVena #MobileWorldCongress #MWC #NTN #satelliteToPhone #virtualReality #wireless

I filed my last copy for this week at 10 p.m. Friday, and then it was a delight to have Saturday be my first legit work-free day since… um, Jan. 1.

1/16/2024: Don’t Engage: ‘Pig Butchering’ Scams Start With a Text, End in Financial Ruin, PCMag

One reason I couldn’t unplug from work last Sunday: I had to watch my friend Sean Gallagher’s very good walkthrough of pig-butchering scams at the ShmooCon information-security conference in D.C. I did, however, opt to watch the livestream of his talk that morning instead of heading over to the Washington Hilton for the third day in a row.

1/17/2024: NextGen TV Airwave Upgrade Flies Under the Radar at CES, PCMag

This CES recap ran several days after the show ended because I needed to verify some Consumer Technology Association forecasts of sales of NextGen-equipped TV sets. And because I needed some uninterrupted time to finish writing the thing.

1/19/2024: Biden Admin OKs $150 Million in Grants to Fix Broken Public EV Chargers, PCMag

I spent Thursday afternoon at the Washington Auto Show’s public-policy day and came away with this update on the Biden administration’s latest efforts to ease electric-car adoption, in which I also noted how the White House’s plan to underwrite a nationwide network of fast chargers on highways has yet to yield much usable hardware. I ended the post by calling out ignorant remarks by two Republican congressmen on a panel that afternoon in which they characterized EVs as some sort of big-government plot.

1/19/2024: Ep 96 SmartTechCheck Podcast CES 2024 Recap, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast to compare notes about CES with Mark and my fellow tech scribe Stewart Wolpin–who drew on his deep knowledge of the business with a recap of the slow and halting adoption of color TV when our host asked about bumps in the road to EV adoption.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/01/21/weekly-output-pig-butchering-nextgen-tv-ev-charging-mark-vena-podcast/

#ATSC30 #batteryElectricVehicle #broadcastTV #ces #consumerElectronicsShow #electricCarCharging #EVCharging #MarkVena #NextGenTV #overTheAirTV #pigButchering #Shmoocon #WashingtonAutoShow

Merry almost-Christmas, everyone! I hope your gadget gifts don’t require prolonged firmware-update installations, repeated reboots, or lengthy tech-support interactions–but if they do, please let me know, because there might be a story in that.

12/18/2023: X Lands in the EU’s Crosshairs Over Questionable Policies, Lax Oversight, PCMag

Much of the reaction to the European Commission opening an investigation of the former Twitter for alleged violations of the Digital Services Act has focused on how EU law’s strict provisions over taking down illegal content invite abuses of government power. (See, for instance, my friend Mike Masnick’s dissent at Techdirt.) But the EU’s case also cites areas of misconduct outside of content moderation that speak to a comparable level of carelessness.

12/19/2023: Google Play Store Settlement Should Get You at Least $2, PCMag

The more time I spent reading the fine print about Google’s $700 million settlement (and looking at the fine print in its last quarterly-earnings filing that reported a cash and cash-equivalents balance almost 44 times as large as that sum), the less I liked it.

12/21/2023: How Urban Retail Can Bounce Back, Worth

I filed this feature about how urban retail can deal with challenges of crime and a reduced daytime-worker population back in October–before the National Retail Federation retracted a claim that organized retail crime made up almost half of all “shrink” from stores in 2021. But I hadn’t leaned on that report published in April and instead went with 2022 data on shrink in an NRF report posted in September that didn’t quantify “ORC.” Fortunately, no such qualms have surfaced since publication about the part of this piece (also available in Worth’s Q4 2023 print edition) that endorses mixed-use development to ensure that city neighborhoods don’t rise or fall depending on how many people sit down at desks in offices each morning.

12/22/2023: Twitter Alternative Bluesky Makes Posts Publicly Viewable, PCMag

The social platform that’s become my primary replacement for Twitter took a big step towards exiting its closed-beta status–which should be followed early next year by Bluesky letting anybody sign up, CEO Jay Graber told my Fast Company editor Harry McCracken last week.

12/23/2023: SmartTechCheck Podcast S03 E69, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast (also available in video form) for the first time since October to talk about our choices for the biggest tech stories of 2023. Since somebody else had picked Musk’s disastrous stewardship of what I sometimes like to call “Xitter,” I brought up the rise of fixed-wireless 5G home broadband.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/24/weekly-output-eu-vs-x-google-play-store-settlement-urban-retails-future-bluesky-updates-mark-vena-podcast/

#Bluesky #BlueskyButterflyIcon #BlueskyPublicView #DSA #ElonMuskTwitter #EUDigitalServicesAct #GooglePlayServiceFees #GooglePlaySettlement #GooglePlayStoreSettlement #MarkVena #NoMa #shoplifting #sideloading #TwitterContentModeration #urbanRetail #XContentModeration