Weekly output: Zoox, FCC on broadband, Trump 2.0 cybersecurity, NextGen Acela WiFi, Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, Myriam Joire podcast

This was a big week for wrapping up stories that I had begun reporting out in a previous month–not September, but August. I’m now mostly caught up on those projects and behind on a post I owe from the cable-industry group SCTE’s conference in D.C. last week.

I also barely managed to avoid falling behind in my commitment to Patreon readers to write two exclusive posts a month: I published September’s second, a look at how some freelance tech journalists cover travel costs to events like IFA and MWC by arranging sponsorships from individual exhibitors, with less than seven hours left in the month.

9/30/2025: Amazon’s Zoox Launches First Stage of Robotaxi-Service Testing in DC, PCMag

Spending all of Monday at SCTE’s event meant that I had to finish writing this during the cocktail hour at a press dinner at All-Purpose across the street from the convention center.

10/1/2025: FCC Tries to Speed Up Broadband Buildouts But Cuts School Wi-Fi Support, PCMag

I spent much more time talking to Public Knowledge’s telecom-law expert Harold Feld than the brief quotes in this story might suggest–which happens every time I ask Harold if I can borrow some of his extensive insight for a story.

10/1/2025: U.S. cybersecurity was bad during the first Trump administration. Somehow, it’s getting worse, Fast Company

I started working on this before Black Hat, got some useful quotes for it during that security conference in Las Vegas, then quizzed a couple of experts in the weeks after, then got seriously sidetracked from being out of town for the first two weeks of September.

10/2/2025: I Tested the Wi-Fi on Amtrak’s NextGen Acela. Bad News: You No Longer Have an Excuse to Skip Work, PCMag

Amtrak took much longer than I expected to get back to me on some of the more technical questions I had after my introduction to NextGen Acela at the end of August, and then I realized that I could refresh my reporting and get some comparative data points about WiFi on Amtrak’s older Northeast Regional trains by making a quick trip to Baltimore and back on Monday afternoon.

10/4/2025: Want to Buy Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Smart Glasses? You May Have to Work For It, PCMag

My tech-analyst friend Avi Greengart’s LinkedIn post about his unsuccessful attempt to buy a pair of these augmented-reality glasses struck me as newsworthy to reshare on that platform. I also shared it on PCMag’s Slack, and one of my colleagues then suggested there was a post to be written about Meta’s weird retail-distribution strategy.

10/6/2025: MediaTek Dimensity 9500 in depth, Meta Ray-Ban Display, Xiaomi 17 Pro and Pro Max, Xiaomi 15T series, OnePlus 15 teaser, Realme GT 8 Pro leaks, CMF Headphone Pro, and more with Siegfried Chang and Rob Pegoraro – Mobile Tech Podcast 447, Myriam Joire

After years of showing up at the same tech events with my friend and fellow avgeek Myriam, I finally showed up on her podcast. Among many other topics we discussed, I particularly appreciated our exchange about the possibile utility of smart glasses; she’s more optimistic about their odds of becoming a consumer-scale gadget than I am, but we agree that Meta is not the ideal company to champion this category.

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Snap is Working on AR Glasses, Selfie Drone: Report

Snap is working on its next-generation glasses that will be able to layer Snapchat lenses (which are augmented reality effects) onto the environment without needing to use a smartphone camera, according to a new report. It has also reportedly revived its plans to introduce a selfie-drone.

According to a report from The Information, and noted by Engadget, the next generation camera glasses aren't actually being developed with the intention of deployment to the average consumer. Instead, the company is focusing efforts on developers and creators, those who currently are responsible for making the app's more popular SnapChat AR filters.

Snapchat is reportedly gearing up to officially announce these new Spectacles in May during its developer conference. Theoretically, if the glasses are successful, Snap could aim to launch more widely.

While Snap is most well-known for its social media app, the company has successfully brought hardware to market. Snap launched the Snap Spectacles 3 in 2019 and still offers them for sale today. The original Snap spectacles were a viral hit in 2016 when they launched in special pop-up vending machines in select cities. Eventually, the Spectacles became avaialble to order on Amazon. In 2018, Snap launched its second-generation Spectacles that allowed you to capture photos using the glasses.

That's not the only hardware Snap is investigating. The report goes on to say that the company is once again looking into producing a selfie drone. In 2017, Snap reportedly acquired the LA-based drone company Ctrl Me Robotics before looking at another China-based acquisition, Zero Zero Robotics. Back then, The Information reported that Zero Zero reached out to Snap for funding help, which was later denied by the robotics company's CEO.

Since then, news about Snap and drones has been largely pretty quiet, but that is apparently set to change. Snap supposedly did eventually invest in Zero Zero to the amount of $20 million, but it did not outright acquire the company. Since then, the new report indicates that Snap's own engineers have been working on developing an in-house product. It's not clear when such a drone would come to market and how it would differentiate itself in what has become a very crowded space.

#news #products #ar #augmentedreality #augmentedrealityglasses #selfiedrone #smartglasses #snap #snapchat #snapspectacles #snapspectacles3