Rob PegoraroThis workweek felt longer than usual because Thursday had me going to Dallas and back for an upcoming story. As booked, this itinerary would have put about 17 hours between my stepping off my front porch in the morning and returning to my house late at night, but as flown it returned me home three hours later than planned, almost 21 hours after I’d woken up. Patreon readers, I hope you will enjoy my upcoming recap of that prolonged day.
7/22/2024: Why the Tech Industry Refuses to Learn From Disastrous Outages, The New Republic
A friend filling in at TNR–the same one who helped me get my first byline at that publication last July–asked if I could turn around a post about lessons from the CrowdStrike calamity. I said I could, received an editorial green light for my pitch at 11:37 a.m., got useful quotes from three of six subject-matter experts I’d hit up for comment, and filed the piece at 5 p.m. sharp.
7/23/2024: TikTok, YouTube Battle for Satisfaction Supremacy, Facebook Hate Calms a Bit, PCMag
In my latest coverage of the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s ratings of social-media and search-engine firms, I called out the contradiction between search operators having such closely-spaced satisfaction rankings and Google’s overwhelming dominance of the market.
7/23/2024: Sydney Sweeney’s X Account Reportedly Hijacked Via (Yet Another) SIM Swap, PCMag
The celebrity angle didn’t make me want to cover the account takeover that 404 Media’s Joseph Cox reported, but seeing a telecom carrier once again apparently fall prey to a SIM-swap attack made me want to remind readers that this risk is not going away. And that they should not depend on text-message-based two-factor authentication for the most important accounts in their lives.
7/24/2024: Buttigieg Plays the Long Game on EVs, But He’s Not Sold on the Cybertruck, PCMag
I didn’t have Tuesday night’s Axios event featuring Secretary Pete on my calendar until Monday, when an e-mail from that publication listed it among other upcoming events. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it hadn’t hit capacity by the time I signed up.
7/26/2024: Senators: Your Driving Data May Have Been Sold For as Little as 26 Cents, PCMag
Two days later, I returned to the topic of cars to cover how Sens. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.) documented how readily and how cheaply some car manufacturers will sell off driving-behavior data to data brokers.
#ACSI #connectedCarPrivacy #connectedCars #CrowdStrike #electricCars #EVs #ITMonoculture #PeteButtigieg #searchEngines #SIMSwap #socialMediaSatisfaction #SydneySweeney #TNR #XAccountTakeover
