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.
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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