Weekly output: FCC frees Verizon from phone-unlocking rule, Donut Lab’s solid-state battery, Wikipedia turns 25, Google traffic trends
This week brought a lot of unpleasant headlines, but none made me feel uneasy like the news that Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson was subjected to an unexpected visit by the FBI at her house Wednesday that concluded with investigators confiscating her work and personal laptops, her phone and her smartwatch–all seized, it now seems, on a fraudulent pretext. Since then, the man who spent his equivalent of pocket change to buy the Post in 2013 has said nothing about that in public, yet another way in which Jeff Bezos has shown himself an unworthy successor to Katharine Graham and her son Don Graham.
In addition to what you see below, I wrote a post for Patreon readers sharing bonus bits about what I learned at CES two weeks ago.
1/12/2026, FCC Unties Verizon From 60-Day Phone-Unlocking Rule, PCMag
Two days after the Federal Communications Commission granted Verizon’s wish, Verizon suffered an hours-long outage that people could work around relatively easily if their phones were unlocked to allow them to add a third-party eSIM.
1/15/2026: Wikipedia Is Now 25 Years Old [Citation Not Needed], PCMag
I had made a mental note to myself to write an essay about the free online encyclopedia hitting the quarter-century mark, but then the actual date snuck up on me. Fortunately, the lede and the headline basically wrote themselves.
1/17/2026: Donut Labs’ Solid-State Battery-Powered Motorcycle Turned Heads at CES, But Big Questions Remain, PCMag
Writing this left me feeling over my skis more than usual–I don’t cover battery technology in any great depth, this startup has disclosed almost nothing about the design of its solid-state batteries, and two outside analysts weren’t willing to assess their pitch. But reading up at length on this company and on others working on better EV batteries did make me realize one thing: There’s enough innovation happening here that we don’t need Donut’s invention to work.
1/17/2026: AI Is Still Hammering News Sites, Google Search and Social Referrals Plunge, PCMag
The brutal declines in Google search traffic reported in a study published Monday by the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism caught my eyes and those of my editors, but I also found some news value in this report’s stats about which online platforms and technologies newsroom leaders plan to emphasize or back away from.
#AI #AIOverview #BrendanCarr #ces #DonutLab #EVBattery #FCC #phoneUnlocking #SIMLock #smartphoneUnlock #solidStateBattery #verizon #Wikipedia
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