#websummitrio — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: IOWN, eSIMs, Android sneak peek, Ranking Digital Rights, Web3, data ownership in Brazil, Elon Musk’s DOGE detour, blanding, passkey adoption, Google’s AI Mode, Read AI bundles two more AI platforms

Even subtracting the posts written in previous weeks (the first and second links below) and the time I spent moderating panels at Web Summit Rio (the fifth, sixth and eighth links below), this was a busy week. And yet I wish I’d had time to write about one more thing: the brutal ruling that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers handed down Wednesday against Apple in the long-running Epic v. Apple case. In that opinion, which essentially destroys a large part of Apple’s rent-seeking App Store strategy, the judge condemned multiple levels of Apple duplicity that included one vice president lying under oath and concluded that Apple thinking “this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation.”

Patreon readers got an extra post from me this week: a recap of how Web Summit Rio highlighted the useful and cringe-inducing-to-outright-offensive sides of cryptocurrency advocacy.

4/28/2025: NTT’s IOWN pitch: long on possibilities, sometimes short on metrics, Light Reading

I wanted to get an outside perspective on the sales pitch I got from NTT at its Upgrade 2025 conference in San Francisco in mid-April (for which the Japanese telco covered my travel expenses), and the one I got from my tech-analyst pal Mark Vena pointed out some non-trivial gaps in NTT’s presentation.

4/28/2025: Why You Should Use eSIMs When Traveling Internationally, AARP

Most of the research for this happened during MWC Barcelona in early March, but various hangups in AARP’s story-assignment machinery held up the piece for a while.

4/28/2025: Why Wait? Google Teases Android 16 Sneak Peek Ahead of I/O, PCMag

This was one of the shortest posts I’ve ever filed for PCMag, owing to the lack of details in this Google announcement.

4/28/2025: More Breakdowns Than Breakthroughs in Latest Big Tech Digital Rights Scorecard, PCMag

The Ranking Digital Rights project posted its first assessment in about two and a half years of the commitments tech companies make to uphold human rights. Spoiler alert: This survey found no heroes.

4/28/2025: Does Web3 represent an opportunity or a risk?, Web Summit Rio

The last panel this conference asked me to moderate came first on the schedule–and then I went from having two fintech investors to quiz to having one, Kaszek partner Santiago Fossatti. My worries that I’d have to improvise at length to fill this timeslot evaporated once I saw how he’d answer my questions at length.

4/29/2025: Owning your own data, Web Summit Rio

I’ve been watching and moderating Web Summit panels about data ownership and privacy for years, but this one–featuring Brittany Kaiser, co-founder of the Own Your Data Foundation; Rodrigo Assumpção, CEO of Brazil’s social-security firm Dataprev; and Gustavo Franco, former governor of Brazil’s central bank–outlined some real-world steps happening in Brazil to make that vision a working reality that might yield some modest extra income for citizens who opt in.

4/30/2025: 100 Days of DOGE: Is Elon Musk’s Protective Layer of Sycophants Thinning?, PCMag

I wrote up a very good panel featuring New York Times tech reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, in which the authors of the book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter unpacked how Musk has given the federal government the same treatment he inflicted on Twitter.

4/30/2025: AI and the rise of blanding, Web Summit Rio

Title notwithstanding, this panel with Camila Moletta, CEO of More Grls, and Lisa Smith, global executive creative director of Jones Knowles Ritchie, was less about AI than about graphic design in advertising.

5/1/2025: 75% of People Are ‘Aware’ of Passkeys, But Are They Actually Using Them?, PCMag

I wrote up an embargoed copy of a survey about passkey adoption that had some stats that confused me, so I e-mailed the publicist to get more context and then quoted his explanation in the post. After publication, the PR guy asked if we could take his name out of the story because he works for an outside PR firm; I replied that my editor would probably be fine with that (which was true), but that he needed to make that request upfront instead of incorrectly assuming some default setting of anonymity for PR types.

5/1/2025: Google Drops AI Mode Waitlist, Adds Shopping Tools: Here’s How to Try, PCMag

I filed my last copy for April from my hotel room in Rio a little before midnight on April 30. Being able to put one last bit of work on a monthly invoice can be a powerful motivation.

5/2/2025: Why Have One AI Service When You Can Have 3? Read Bundles GPT-4.1, Claude, PCMag

I didn’t have this on my story-possibilities list for Web Summit, but I got into a conversation with the CEO and publicist of the AI service Read on a shuttle from the convention center back to the hotel, which led to the publicist asking if I’d like cover Read’s imminent announcement of it bundling two other AI services, which led to my quizzing Read CEO David Shim in the speaker lounge Wednesday.

#advertising #AIMode #blanding #Brazil #cryptocurrency #dataOwnership #Dataprev #DrumWave #eSIM #eSIMs #GoogleAISearch #IOWN #NTT #owningYourData #passkeys #photonics #ReadAI #Rio #WebSummitRio #WorldPasswordDay

My least-replicable travel hack is now saving me money, not just time

The passport that I’ve taken for much of my international travel since the spring of 2017 finally has some stamps in it–courtesy of the Brazilian border officers in São Paolo who did the honors with my Irish passport at the start and end of my trip for Web Summit Rio this week.

While I had traveled to Rio on my U.S. passport the previous two years, Brazil has since rolled out its e-visa program for U.S., Canadian and Australian citizens. Applying for one of these 10-year travel permissions costs $80.90 and, per numerous reports from travelers, requires time and patience to deal with glitches and delays in the approval process.

Traveling with my Irish passport, however, required nothing beyond scanning it into the United app’s Travel-Ready Center, having a check-in agent at Dulles eyeball that before issuing my boarding pass for last Saturday’s flight, and showing it one more time to a gate agent during boarding.

I didn’t have any issues exiting the country on that passport either, although having two passports on the reservation meant I had go through a second doc check for my U.S. passport before getting a boarding pass for my flight back to the States.

This was the second time this year that my Irish citizenship has saved me little money instead of merely letting me use shorter passport lines in Europe as an EU national (and not getting a passport stamp in the process).

Since Jan. 8, American citizens traveling to the United Kingdom have had to pay £16 for a two-year ETA (electronic travel authorisation) and do that at least three business days before flying to the U.K. It could have been worse; the British government originally planned to require an ETA just for connecting through Heathrow before relenting.

But Irish nationals are exempt from this, in keeping with the U.K. and Ireland’s Common Travel Area arrangements. So I didn’t have to worry about getting an ETA for my two-day stopover in London between Web Summit Qatar and MWC Barcelona.

Starting in the last quarter of 2026, I’ll get one more way to save a little money when the EU implements its ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorisation System), which will cost €7 and be valid for three years or, if sooner, the expiration of the passport used to apply for it. EU nationals will, of course, be exempt from that.

I feel a little guilty ducking all of these minor administrative obstacles since all of these countries are only responding to longstanding U.S. travel-permissions requirements for their own citizens. Brazilian citizens need a visa to travel to the U.S., with fees starting at $185 for a 10-year non-immigrant tourist visa. And U.K. and EU nationals need to pay $21 for an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization), good for two years or passport expiration.

No American can blame any foreign government for deciding to return a little of these favors. And every American should hope that foreign governments following news of the incarcerations of international tourists and students in the U.S. (in some cases only for their speech) under the xenophobic Trump administration have the grace not to reciprocate.

#BrazilEVisa #dualCitizenship #ESTA #EUETIAS #internationalTravel #IrishCitizenship #IrishPassport #passportStamps #passports #UKETA #USPassport #USVisa #WebSummitRio