This week treated me to the very Washington experience of going to two different tech-policy events in the same room in the same large facility–the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, one of my more frequent conference settings in the District.

Patreon subscribers got an extra post on Friday: more than a thousand words’ worth of outtakes from my early-August conversation with Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl at Mojave Air & Space Port.

9/24/2024: Internet Providers, Wi-Fi Router Vendors Can Now Ship Cloudflare’s DNS for Free, PCMag

I have been writing about broadband outages caused by failures at an Internet provider’s domain-name-system servers for a very long time, so the relevance of Cloudflare’s pitch was immediately relevant to me.

9/25/2024: White House 6G priorities: Openness and security, and the 6G part isn’t a prerequisite, Light Reading

The first of two stories that I wrote for my telecom trade-pub client from the 6G Symposium in Washington covered a panel in which experts spoke at length about the risks of China steering the development of 6G while saying the word “China” much less often than I would have expected.

9/26/2024: Could open RAN in orbit jumpstart the market for D2D services?, Light Reading

I needed a little more time to write up this longer and more in-the-weeds panel about the state of satellite-hosted connectivity for phones and other devices.

9/26/2024: NYC Mayor Adams’ Indictment Offers a Few Lessons in Smartphone Security, PCMag

Before I could finish laughing at the fanboy-esque devotion to Turkish Airlines recounted in the indictment of Eric Adams, I also had to laugh at its depiction of the mayor’s fortuitous forgetfulness of of the smartphone passcode he had just changed from four to six digits.

9/27/2024: X Blocks Links to Story on Leaked JD Vance Dossier, Suspends Author, PCMag

One angle to this story that I should have noted: This purported research report on the Republican Party’s vice-presidential candidate that journalist Ken Klippenstein shared on his newsletter in unredacted form Thursday (before posting a redacted version on Friday in what he later described as a test of X’s rules) does not even mention Vance’s house in Alexandria, much less include its street address. That does not speak well of the effort put into this document, if it really was a product of the Trump campaign and not something forged by Iranian hackers.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/09/29/weekly-output-cloudflare-dns-white-house-6g-policy-satellite-to-phone-service-eric-adams-opsec-x-vs-jd-vance-dossier/

#5G #6G #8888 #Cloudflare #DNS #ElonMuskTwitter #EricAdams #JDVanceDossier #KenKlippenstein #satelliteToPhone #TurkishAirlines

Weekly output: Symbotic, Most Innovative Companies in robotics, Redwood Materials, Most Innovative Companies in manufacturing, Matter security label, SpaceX and Starship, AT&T and AST SpaceMobile, Android 15, Waymo, This Week in Tech

If you’ve been wondering why it’s been so long since I last had a byline with Fast Company, here’s your answer: I’ve spent a non-trivial part of the last three months helping to put together the robotics and manufacturing parts of the publication’s Most Innovative Companies list.

(In my nonexistent spare time, I also wrote a post for Patreon readers about my roadmap to getting our house off the methane gas grid–starting with the appliance that represents the smallest part of that fossil-fuel problem.)

3/19/2024: How Symbotic is speeding up warehouse robots, even in the dark, Fast Company

This piece profiles one of the finalists in the MIC robotics category–a warehouse-robot developer whose customers include Target and Walmart, and which the editors ranked number 34 among the 50 most innovative firms in the world.

3/19/2024: The most innovative companies in robotics for 2024, Fast Company

In addition to Symbotic, Doodle Labs, Agility Robotics, Locus Robotics, Dusty Robotics, Gecko Robotics, Nearthlab, Opentrons, Stratom, and Teleo earned MIC nods and brief writeups from me.

3/19/2024: Here’s how Redwood Materials is creating a circular economy for lithium-ion batteries, Fast Company

Here, I took a closer look at the company that ranked 19th among the top 50, a startup moving to scale up EV battery recycling with some help from the government.

3/19/2024: The most innovative companies in manufacturing for 2024, Fast Company

Our other MIC nominees in this category: Group14 Technologies, Holcim (written by another Fast Co. contributor, Ted C. Fishman), Mighty Buildings, Formlabs, Nucor, Cellares, Doosan Bobcat, Pyrowave, and Timken.

3/19/2024: Watch Out for This Blue Badge on the Next Smart Home Device You Buy, PCMag

The organization behind the Matter connected-gadget standard are now moving to sync up their security efforts with government labeling programs.

3/19/2024: SpaceX Expects Next Starship Launch in About 6 Weeks, PCMag

SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell shared some news about the progress of the company’s Starship project and Starlink efforts during a panel at the Satellite 2024 show in D.C.

3/22/2024: AT&T, AST SpaceMobile Promise ‘True Broadband’ From Satellite Phone Service, PCMag

I filed a second piece from Satellite about AT&T’s plans to fill in dead zones using an upcoming constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites operated by its partner AST SpaceMobile.

3/22/2024: Android 15’s Second Developer Preview Augments Satellite Roaming, PCMag

Space-based broadband showed up in my coverage a third time when Google announced a new set of features coming to the next version of Android that include software to report when your phone has switched to a satellite connection.

3/22/2024: Waymo Wants You to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Robotaxi, PCMag

Thursday, I had to rush from Satellite to a Waymo event–a good use case not for a driverless car but for a bikeshare ride–to catch a panel about road safety that I found unintentionally revealing.

3/24/2024: This Week in Tech 972: Judicial Whimsy, TWiT.tv

I showed up at this podcast for the first time since August and joined host Leo Laporte and two people whose expertise I’ve leaned on before in my stories–game developer and activist Brianna Wu and lawyer Cathy Gellis–to talk about the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple, whether the government should ban business transactions with TikTok, Supreme Court cases involving social-media content moderation, and other recent tech-policy topics.

#Android15 #ASTSpaceMobile #Matter #MIC #MostInnovativeCompanies #RedwoodMaterials #satelliteToPhone #smartHomeSecurity #SpaceXStarship #Starlink #Symbotic #ThisWeekInTech #TWiT #Waymo

I have only two days this upcoming workweek that aren’t blocked off completely, Monday and Thursday. Tuesday I’ll be working the Virginia primary election (hard to believe it’s been almost four years since my first long day as a poll worker), Wednesday I’m covering the  ACA Connects telecom-industry conference, and Friday I fly to Austin for SXSW.

In addition to the stories below, I wrote a bonus post for Patreon readers recapping some of the more interesting things I saw at MWC.

2/26/2024: Google Brings Gemini to Messages App in AI-Flavored Android Feature Drop, PCMag

The first story I filed from Barcelona is one that I could have written from home–Google PR gave me an embargoed copy of the announcement of these new features. But I did appreciate being able to try them out in person at Google’s MWC exhibit during a press breakfast Monday morning.

2/25/2024: 2 Wheels, 3 Cameras, One 5G Radio: Orbic Debuts Connected E-Bike at MWC, PCMag

Writing about a 5G-connected e-bike was not in any of my MWC plans, but the nice thing about large tech events like this is that they can serve up surprises that justify making your way to an exhibitor’s corner of the show floor.

2/28/2024: Cyber diplomacy for the next era of connectivity, Compiler Pop-Up Series: The Barcelona Edition

I moderated this panel discussion between a trio of diplomats–Steve Lang, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international and communications policy, Vassiliki Gogou, a cybersecurity expert with the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, and Maite Arcos, director general of the ESYS Foundation–at an event hosted by Compiler. That’s a new non-profit tech-policy publication supported by the Hewlett Foundation and founded by Mike Farrell, a longtime information-security journalist.

2/28/2024: NTT Docomo ‘Feel Tech Animal’ Exhibit Had Me Walking a Virtual Dog, PCMag

This virtual-reality demo was another thing not in my MWC plans until another attendee suggested I check it out.

2/29/2024: Bluesky Adds Hashtag Support, Better Account Portability Than Mastodon, PCMag

I saw the news about this on my way to the airport in Barcelona early Thursday morning, pitched a post about it in PCMag’s Slack workspace, and got a go-ahead from my editor before I’d cleared security in BCN. Then I wrote the post during my layover in Zurich.

2/29/2024: At MWC, AT&T and AST execs talk up space-based possibilities, Light Reading

The interviews for this piece happened Monday, but I didn’t finish writing it until Tuesday and then my overworked editor, also at MWC, needed a little more time to get this published. And then we had to correct it because I didn’t look close enough at the transcription of the interview provided by Google’s Live Transcribe app to notice that I’d jotted down a different number for the capacity of AST’s NextGen satellites in the notes I took on my laptop.

3/1/2024: Facebook Finds New Way to Unfriend Publishers by Nixing News Tab, PCMag

Writing this post became a little more fun when I realized that Facebook had not only gotten rid of the option to put the News tab among the basic shortcuts in its iPhone and iPad app, it had also left up old documentation that directs users to a nonexistent part of the settings interfaces on those apps.

3/1/2024: Ep 96 SmartTechCheck Podcast MWC, Qualcomm FastConnect 7900, Apple kills car project, SCOTUS, Mark Vena

I shared my impressions of MWC at my industry-analyst friend’s podcast in which we also discussed such recent tech plot twists as Apple closing down its car project and the Supreme Court taking up what strike me as flagrantly unconstitutional Florida and Texas laws that would compel social platforms to publish speech that they might find repulsive.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/03/03/weekly-output-android-feature-drop-5g-connected-e-bike-infosec-diplomacy-feel-tech-animal-demo-bluesky-supports-hashtags-att-and-ast-spacemobile-facebook-to-nix-news-tab-mark-vena-pod/

#AndroidFeatureDrop #ASTSpaceMobile #ATT #Barcelona #BCN #Bluesky #cybersecurity #eBikes #FacebookNews #hashtags #infosec #MarkVena #MobileWorldCongress #MWC #NTN #satelliteToPhone #virtualReality #wireless