The last more-or-less full work week of the year is about to start, and I know I’ll be working the week after that to meet the last deadlines I have in 2023.

12/11/2023: Teens Are Online ‘Almost Constantly,’ Usually on These Apps, PCMag

I got an advance look at this Pew Research Center study on teenage social-media use and found it enlightening–including the part where the teenagers in the study group said they were spending slightly less time on almost every social-media app compared to last year.

12/12/2023: Google Maps Location Data to Be Stored on Your Device, Not the Cloud, PCMag

Google surprised me with this announcement, in a good way. I needed other people–for example, Electronic Frontier Foundation general counsel Jennifer Lynch–to point out how this move could spell the end of “geofence warrants” asking for Google Maps records of everybody in a particular place at a particular time.

12/13/2023: 8th Grade Career Day, Thomas Jefferson Middle School

My last speaking gig of the year had me explaining the business I have chosen to three classes’ worth of eighth graders, with compensation in the form of free coffee and breakfast pastries.

(Patreon readers got a detailed recap of this event, including some of the smarter questions the students asked.)

12/15/2023: AT&T: Spam Texts Are Down By a Third, PCMag

After talking to one of AT&T’s executives about the drop in spam-text reports they’d seen, I wanted to see if the other two nationwide carriers or its regulators at the Federal Communications Commission had seen similar trends. Sadly, they had not.

12/16/2023: End of an Era: Google Groups to Drop Usenet Support, PCMag

The second bit of unexpected Google news this week took me all the way back to almost 30 years ago, when my online experience began with exploring Usenet on my dial-up AOL account.

https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/17/weekly-output-teen-social-media-use-google-maps-timeline-privacy-journalism-as-a-career-spam-texts-google-groups-to-dump-usenet/

#careerDay #GoogleGroups #GoogleLocationHistory #GoogleMapsTimeline #PewResearchCenter #robotexts #spamTexts #teenSocialMediaUse #teenageSocialMediaUse #Usenet

Anybody else notice a spike in #SpamTexts this morning…? I’ve had over a dozen so far and I NEVER give out my phone number, so I don’t know how I got on “the list”…? Could the news of the FCC directing the phone companies to block this shit have anything to do with it, a “last gasp,” as it were…?

#JoinIn
#ScrewSpammers

Oh please let this work: “The Federal Communication Commission announced today its first set of rules designed to reduce the number of scam texts Americans get. The move will require carriers to block texts from three types of numbers plus one more measure which will be a start to tackling the rapidly growing problem.”

#SpamTexts #FCC #Security #Technology

https://9to5mac.com/2023/03/17/fcc-requires-carriers-to-block-texts/