Weekly output: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, Comcast low latency, painstaking passkey progress
This has been a strange, sad and shocking week in the nation’s capital–first the mid-air collision outside National Airport Wednesday that left 67 people dead and ended a nearly 16-year streak without fatal crashes by U.S. airlines, then Elon Musk’s attempts to stage what I have to call a digital coup at the Treasury Department and the Agency for International Development.
Patreon readers got an extra post this week: my annual breakdown of last year’s income according to the business models of my freelance clients.
1/28/2025: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 Testbed Plane Breaks the Sound Barrier, PCMag
Having Boom bump this test flight from Monday to Tuesday gave me a little extra time to check two descriptions of the XB-1: “independently developed” (Boom did this without government dollars or direction, unlike the Northrop F-20 fighter that was built with private money but was based on the earlier, taxpayer-funded F-5, and which that company developed at the request of the Pentagon) and “exceed Mach 1” (XB-1 sustained that achievement in level flight, unlike the Bombardier business-jet prototype that cracked the sound barrier in shallow dives in 2021).
1/29/2025: Comcast Upgrade Promises Ultra-Low Lag Xfinity Internet for Video Calls, VR, Games, PCMag
Comcast’s announcement of this new feature was shockingly short on details, but a company publicist was willing to answer e-mail after e-mail as I realized the data points I needed to write this post.
2/1/2025: The Passkey Future Is Here, But Some Companies Still Make It Too Complicated, PCMag
A year after I interviewed FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar at a conference in D.C. about identity and authentication, I sat down with him at the 2025 version of this conference to discuss what the industry had and had not accomplished since January.
#AndrewShikiar #authentication #BoomSupersonic #Comcast #FIDOAlliance #infosec #lowLag #lowLatency #Mach1 #passkeys #passwordless #supersonic #XB1