Weekly output: Mark Vena podcast, Verizon customer service, AI fair use, Comcast ditches data caps, Aurora’s autonomous trucks, age verification for porn sites, Universal Service Fund, Trump tariffs

The first half of this year is almost in the books, which means I’m thinking of a few longer pieces that I’d meant to have seen published and paid for by now but instead have yet to start writing.

Patreon readers got an extra post from me this week: a recap of how Uber rides in Mexico City helped me realize how much trouble cheap Chinese EVs are going to cause for Tesla.

6/23/2025: Ep 112 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple WWDC 25, Apple Intelligence, OpenAI device, Trump phone, Mark Vena

I suggested that this podcast cover the exercise in commercialized cult worship that is Trump Mobile. Two days after we recorded the show, that site’s description of the T1 phone that it plans to sell changed from “proudly made right here in the USA” to “brought to life right here in the USA.”

6/24/2025: Verizon Touts Upgraded Customer Service Push: Will It Make a Difference?, PCMag

Put me down as a skeptic of the difference that customer service can make in broadband: I can’t remember when I last called either my wireless carrier or my Internet provider for help.

6/24/2025: Judge: It’s Fair Use to Train AI on Books You Bought, But Not Ones You Pirated, PCMag

I found this case interesting for two reasons: It did not involve any claims of AI plagiarism and it allowed for a distinction between training AI models on purchased content and training it on pirated material. That last point should have Silicon Valley nervious, since so many large firms–hi, Meta–could not resist taking that copyright-infringing shortcut.

6/26/2025: Comcast’s New Plans Dump the Data Caps, PCMag

This is a post I have wanted to be able to write for years. I guess seeing enough subscribers flee for unlimited-data offerings of fiber and fixed-wireless services had a persuasive effect on Comcast’s management that my own posts denouncing this exercise in abuse of market power did not.

6/27/2025: Aurora hits a self-driving trucking milestone, Fast Company

One of my editors suggested that Aurora launching commercial deliveries via its self-driving trucks meant it was time to revisit the company I’d profiled for Fast Co. last summer. Conveniently enough, Aurora’s president Ossa Fisher was one of the speakers at Web Summit Vancouver, allowing me to interview her IRL during that conference.

6/27/2025: Sorry, Pornhub Fans: Supreme Court Upholds Texas Age-Verification Law, PCMag

I had this case on my list of opinions to look for on the Supreme Court’s site Friday morning, with an idea that my lede would have to reference Avenue Q’s “The Internet Is For Porn” regardless of the outcome. I’m surprised nobody else seems to have gone with that. After publication, my editor added statements about the decision from a few interested parties.

6/27/2025: That ‘Universal Service Charge’ on Your Phone Bill Isn’t Going Away, PCMag

As I was working on a post about the Texas case, I saw this opinion pop up and realized that I should write about that as well. In the hours that passed, my inbox accumulated comments from a variety of groups–including telecom trade associations that in other scenarios want the government to butt out–applauding this decision.

6/28/2025: For Electronics Makers in Latin America, the Roller-Coaster Ride Is Worse Than Just Paying a High Tariff, PCMag

I started writing this piece from my hotel in Mexico City hours before my departure and then needed another week to check with NielsenIQ to see if they had any stats about the effects of tariffs on the country and then find time to finish and file the thing.

#ageVerification #AITraining #Anthropic #Aurora #autonomousTrucks #autonomousVehicles #Comcast #ComcastDataCaps #copyright #dataCaps #ElectronicsHomeMexico #FirstAmendment #LLMs #MarkVena #podcast #SupremeCourt #tariffs #UniversalServiceFund #USF #VerizonCustomerService #VerizonSupport #Vz #Xfinity

Weekly output: Trump Mobile, Facebook passkeys, SpaceX Starship explosion, Reebok earbud-carrying smartwatch

I spent this week in a different federal district–Mexico City, where I traveled to cover the Electronics Home Mexico tech trade show as a guest of the show’s organizers. (As in, they’re covering my travel expenses.) I now have no business travel planned until early August, and I’m fine with that.

6/17/2025: 5 Things to Know About the New Trump Smartphone, Washingtonian

Washingtonian’s Kate Corliss texted me while I was on my way to MEX, and then we talked during what was supposed to be a short layover at IAH that then dragged on for hours. I’m glad she used this line: “So if you sign up for that, you’re paying a Trump tax for wireless service with your favorite guy’s name on it.”

6/19/2025: Facebook Finally Lets You Sign in With a Passkey, But Not Everywhere, PCMag

Once again, Facebook is excluding users of its Web site from a new feature, which strikes me as seriously unhelpful in the context of a security upgrade like this.

6/19/2025: Another SpaceX Starship Explodes, This Time on the Test Stand, Not in Space, PCMag

As I was getting ready to go to bed Wednesday night, I saw that a static fire of Starship’s upper stage had gone disastrously awry and put in a pitch to cover that in PCMag’s Slack. When I woke up, my editor had green-lit the idea, and I had it written before breakfast.

6/21/2025: Tired of Losing Your Earbuds? This Smartwatch Lets You Stash Them Inside a Hidden Compartment, PCMag

The first of two pieces from this trade show featured an unlikely find on the show floor that one of the other journalists on the trip had suggested as worth a look.

#CDMX #earbuds #ElectronicsHomeMexico #FacebookPasskeys #MexicoCity #passkeys #Reebok #smartwatch #SpaceX #Starship #T1Phone #TrumpCult #TrumpMobile

Weekly output: Virginia tax filing, Android 16, Disney and Universal v. Midjourney

After three weeks in a row of traveling for work, my only business travel this week was across the Potomac to a series of events and conferences in the District. But Monday morning will have me once again boarding a flight–I’m off to Mexico City to cover Electronics Home Mexico, a tech trade show in its first year that decided to cover the travel costs of a small group of invited U.S. journalists and analysts. I’ll disclose that subsidy in any copy I file from there.

6/9/2025: Fifteen years after shuttering its tax-prep app, Va. may be ready to compete with TurboTax again, Virginia Mercury

I’ve come to rely on this nonprofit newsroom’s coverage of my state, and now I’ve contributed to it with a piece covering a case of crony capitalism that I decried in the Washington Post in 2010 and then revisited there in 2020. I’m glad to have some good news to report, but even in a best-case scenario I’m looking at a few more years of filing state income taxes on paper.

6/10/2025: Android 16 Arrives With Stronger Security, Neater Notifications, Smaller Tweaks, PCMag

Six-plus months after I wrote about the first developer preview of Android 16, this operating-system update is out and available for download to my Pixel 9 Pro. I may hold off until next weekend to install it, because none of this release’s new features seem like must-have-now material.

6/11/2025: Disney, Universal Sue Midjourney for Creating ‘Bottomless Pit of Plagiarism’, PCMag

Writing about this copyright-infringement lawsuit was more amusing than I expected, in part because of how Disney and Universal’s complaint teems with dry descriptions of the characters allegedly copied by Midjourney. Here, for example, is its overview of Homer Simpson: “is a loveable goof with a penchant for donuts, wears blue pants with a white top, and has two signature strands of hair.”

#AIImageGeneration #android #Android16 #copyright #Disney_ #ElectronicsHomeMexico #generativeAI #HomerSimpson #Intuit #MexicoCity #Midjourney #Pixel #VirginiaForm760 #VirginiaIFile #VirginiaTaxes