Weekly output: social-media cleanup, Verizon’s phone-unlock waiting period, NASA’s Starliner report

This will be a travel-abbreviated workweek: Friday afternoon, I head to Dulles to start my journey to Spain for MWC Barcelona, still one of my favorite reasons to get on a plane for business. I’ll be there until March 5, so the next few days would be an excellent time to hit me up with any questions you have about the future of the wireless industry.

Meanwhile, Patreon readers got a bonus post from me this week about my continued struggles with my home WiFi, in which trying to pick out a good mesh-network option has required wrestling with unexpected national-security concerns.

2/17/2026: Social-media cleanses, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me in studio to offer some perspective about people implicated in the Epstein files trying to cleanse their social-media history. I said that if you’re sufficiently prominent, the Internet doesn’t forget things.

2/18/2026: Paid Off Your Phone Early? Verizon to Ease 35-Day Hold to Unlock It, PCMag

Four days after Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin reported that Verizon had begun requiring a 35-day waiting period to complete unlocking a phone paid off early (unless you made that payment in one of Verizon’s own stores with cash or a credit card’s chip or tap-to-pay options), I asked Verizon for comment. Hours later, I got a statement that the company was working to allow online payments to qualify for an immediate unlock–and then Verizon didn’t give Brodkin the same statement.

2/20/2026: Unpacking Starliner Failures, NASA Chief Delivers Scathing Assessment, PCMag

While I was at a space-industry conference in Tysons Thursday, NASA announced the findings of an investigation into everything that went wrong with Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule after its first and still only launch with astronauts aboard. So instead of writing up one of the panels at this event, I started reading the agency’s 311-page report, hit up Boeing PR for a comment and got in a call with a longtime observer and critic of NASA. Then I spent more of Friday than I’d planned on writing this post.

Mike Lindell’s lawyers used #AI to write brief—judge finds nearly 30 #mistakes
Lindell brief has many defects including "cases that do not exist," judge says.
In their brief that apparently relies on incorrect and fictional citations, Lindell's lawyers argued that much of the evidence Coomer wants to exclude is relevant to his #credibility, character, and #reputation.

#JonBrodkin
#tech
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/mypillow-ceos-lawyers-used-ai-in-brief-citing-fictional-cases-judge-says/