"Vernor Vinge, who three times won the Hugo for best novel, has died," writes Slashdot reader Felix Baum. Ars Technica reports: On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for science and writing. "A titan in the literary genre that explores a limitless range of potential destinies, Vernor enthralled millions with tales of plausible tomorrows, made all the more vivid by his polymath masteries of language, drama, characters, and the implications of science," wrote Brin in his post.

As a sci-fi author, Vinge won Hugo Awards for his novels A Fire Upon the Deep (1993), A Deepness in the Sky (2000), and Rainbows End (2007). He also won Hugos for novellas Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002) and The Cookie Monster (2004). As Mike Glyer's File 770 blog notes, Vinge's novella True Names (1981) is frequency cited as the first presentation of an in-depth look at the concept of "cyberspace." Vinge first coined the term "singularity" as related to technology in 1983, borrowed from the concept of a singularity in spacetime in physics.

When discussing the creation of intelligences far greater than our own in an 1983 op-ed in OMNI magazine, Vinge wrote, "When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding." In 1993, he expanded on the idea in an essay titled The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.

Microsoft today announced a preview release of Windows Notepad, with built-in spellchecking and an autocorrect feature. BleepingComputer reports: Microsoft says they are rolling out this preview to Insiders in the Windows 11 Canary and Dev channels, but it may take some time before it's available for everyone. "With this update, Notepad will now highlight misspelled words and provide suggestions so that you can easily identify and correct mistakes," reads Microsoft's announcement. "We are also introducing autocorrect which seamlessly fixes common typing mistakes as you type."

Once installed, Notepad will now show a red squiggly line under misspelled words that, when clicked, shows suggestions on the correct spelling. It's also possible to ignore words in a single text document or add them to the global dictionary so they are not shown in the future.

Microsoft says that this feature will be turned off for log and source code files. This is because it's common for non-standard words to be used in these files, triggering multiple spellcheck errors. Users can control this setting globally or for specific file types in the Notepad app's settings. The autocorrect feature is a bit more seamless, automatically making small changes to grammar and punctuation as you type.

In a Threads post today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. With the feature enabled, Threads users will be able to cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon. The Verge reports: Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum. As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to "search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server."

There are still a few limitations, though. The beta currently doesn't let users view replies and follows from the fediverse, for example. Meta also can't promise that when you delete a federated post on Threads, it will also get deleted on the other platforms it was shared on.

couchslug shares a report from ITPro: A European cloud trade body has called for an investigation into Broadcom amid concerns over changes it has made to VMware licensing structures. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium called on regulatory and legislative bodies across Europe to investigate the changes Broadcom has made to the VMware operating model, which it says will "decimate" the region's cloud infrastructure. "CISPE calls upon regulators, legislators and courts across Europe to swiftly scrutinize the actions of Broadcom in unilaterally canceling license terms for essential virtualization software," the trade body said in a statement. Since acquiring VMware in November 2023, Broadcom has embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of software licensing at the firm, which has drawn widespread criticism from customers. Broadcom stated it would continue to support customers under a perpetual licensing agreement for the period defined in the contract, but following this customers would need to exchange any remaining licenses for subscription-based products. This has left both cloud service vendors and customers in limbo, according to CISPE, without any solid information on how, when, or if they will be able to license VMware products essential for their operations from April 2024. Moreover, even if they are able to relicense the VMware software, a number of customers reported dramatic price hikes of as much as 12 times.

CISPE's characterisation of the move was far less charitable, arguing Broadcom is using VMware's market dominance, controlling almost 45% of the virtualization market, to charge exorbitant rents from cloud providers. Several CISPE members admitted that without the ability to license VMware products they will be unable to operate and will go bankrupt, with some stating that over 75% of their revenue depends on VMware virtualization tech. Members added that they often received termination notices late, if at all, with short notice periods that spanned just a few weeks. In addition, CISPE also complained about the decision to remove hundreds of products without any notice, and re-bundle the outstanding products under new prohibitive contract terms, despite there being no changes to the products themselves. Francisco Mingorance, secretary general of CISPE, said the changes will hurt both European customers and cloud service providers by increasing costs and reducing choice. At a time when our members are moving to support the requirements for switching and portability between cloud services outlined in the Data Act, Broadcom is holding the sector to ransom by leveraging VMware's dominance of the virtualization sector to enforce unfair license terms and extract unfair rents from European cloud customers," Mingorance said.

CISPE noted that for some cloud sector applications that require certifications by software or service providers, VMware products are the only viable option. As such, the association called for Broadcom to be recognized as a designated gatekeeper under the terms of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) that came into force on March 7, 2024. Mingorance argued Broadcom's moves will only further restrict an already limited set of options for cloud providers in Europe, warning that Broadcom has a dangerous degree of control over the region's digital ecosystems. "As well as inflicting financial damage on the European digital economy, these actions will decimate Europe's independent cloud infrastructure sector and further reduce the diversity of choice for customers," he explained. "Dominant software providers, in any sector from productivity software to virtualization, must not be allowed to wield life or death power over Europe's digital ecosystems."

India reversed a laptop licensing policy after behind-the-scenes lobbying by U.S. officials, who however remain concerned about New Delhi's compliance with WTO obligations and new rules it may issue, according to U.S. trade officials and government emails seen by Reuters. From the report: In August, India imposed rules requiring firms like Apple, Dell and HP to obtain licences for all shipments of imported laptops, tablets, personal computers and servers, raising fears that the process could slow down sales. But New Delhi rolled back the policy within weeks, saying it will only monitor the imports and decide on next steps a year later.

The U.S. government emails -- obtained under a U.S. open records request -- underline the level of alarm the Indian curbs caused in Washington, and how the U.S. scored a rare lobbying win by persuading Prime Minister Narendra Modi's usually inflexible government to reverse policy. U.S. officials have often been concerned about India's sudden policy changes which they say create an uncertain business environment. India maintains it announces policies in the interest of all stakeholders and encourages foreign investments, even though it often promotes local players over foreign ones.

Some of the language in the documents was blunt, despite the bonhomie often displayed by both sides in public. U.S. officials were upset India's changes to laptop imports came "out of the blue", without notice or consultation, and were "incredibly problematic" for the business climate and $500 million worth of annual U.S. exports, the documents and emails showed. U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai met Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal in New Delhi on Aug. 26, soon after the policy was announced. Although the USTR's public readout said Tai "raised concerns" about the policy and "noted" that stakeholders needed to be consulted, she privately told Goyal during the meeting that the U.S. wanted India to "rescind the requirement", a USTR briefing paper showed.

Google's second developer preview for Android 15 has arrived, bringing long-awaited support for satellite connectivity alongside several improvements to contactless payments, multi-language recognition, volume consistency, and interaction with PDFs via apps. From a report: These developer-focused betas are a proving ground for features that will likely make it into the final public release scheduled for later this year. According to Google, public beta releases should be available to test between April and July. The latest developer preview addresses some nuisances and security concerns experienced by Android users, such as making apps more aware of why some services might be unavailable when devices are using a satellite connection. This is also the first official confirmation that Android 15 will come with satellite messaging, with Google's press release saying that the new preview includes support for "preloaded RCS applications to use satellite connectivity for sending and receiving messages."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Even if you decide to stop offering free editions, you don't get to stop providing the source code to FOSS, users of JasperReports Server are complaining. Cloud Software Group -- the post-merger offspring of Citrix and Tibco -- has decided to withdraw the community edition of its JasperReports Server. Now all you can get is the commercial edition, with a 30-day free trial. Effectively, this seems like a similar tactic to Red Hat's unpopular changes to the way that the RHEL source code is distributed. Some of the JasperReports source code is still on Github, but not everything. The JasperSoft community website has the grumbling of unhappy users -- as does Reddit.

One user on the community website commented: "Are you aware Jasper Server CE was under the Affero GPL, and you can't delete everything? "You cannot just change the license of the previous versions and call it a day. I mean, we the users, have the right to fork it using the same license or a compatible one," the user protested. JasperSoft has been developing its reporting tools in the open for well over a decade -- the Reg was reporting on it nearly twenty years ago. Tibco acquired the company for some $185 million in 2014. We're not certain that things are going very well for the new outfit. Early last year, the merger was followed by a round of job losses, and the company has also more recently doubled its prices on some offerings.

Motorola's 2024 Moto G Power impresses with its soft-touch back and contoured edges at a $300 price point, despite an underwhelming camera and LCD panel. Except one thing: the bloatware. The Verge: Scroll through the app drawer and you'll see a handful of automatically downloaded "folders." They are not folders; they are apps. I first encountered them on last year's Moto G Stylus 5G, and I hate them very much. There are three main offenders -- Shopping, Entertainment, and GamesHub -- and each of these apps acts as a little hub. Icons for apps that you have legitimately downloaded will appear in the corresponding "folder." You'll also find tons of other suggested apps to download -- pages and pages of them! Apps as far as the eye can see!

Dismissing the suggested apps section replaces it with a "Discover" section. In the shopping app, it invites you to "Unlock the power of shopping" with links to buy stuff like kitschy Easter decor from TJ Maxx. Mercifully, there's a toggle to hide this section. These apps are all made by a company called Swish, and you can't opt out of downloading any of them during the setup process. You can (and should!) opt out of downloading a third-party lock screen from a different service called Glance. The more I dig into the software on this phone, the more I hate it. The preinstalled weather app is festooned with ads and even more suggested apps, plus pithy insights like "Gotta love air conditioning at these high levels of humidity." If you tap the option to remove ads, a pop-up asks you to pay $4 for 1Weather Pro.

Microsoft has announced two new Surface devices, the Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business, both featuring Intel's latest Core Ultra processors, a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), and a new Copilot key for AI-powered features in Windows 11.

The devices, which will start shipping to commercial customers on April 9th, have been designed exclusively for businesses and will not be sold directly to consumers. The Surface Pro 10 for Business, starting at $1,199, offers a choice between Core Ultra 5 135U and Core Ultra 7 165U options, with up to 64GB of RAM and a 256GB Gen4 SSD. It also features an improved 13-inch display with an antireflective coating and a 1440p front-facing camera with a 114-degree field of view.

The Surface Laptop 6 for Business, also starting at $1,199, is powered by Intel's Core Ultra H-series chips and is available with up to 64GB of RAM and a 1TB Gen4 SSD. The 15-inch model includes two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, while the 13.5-inch model features a single USB-C Thunderbolt 4 port. Both devices have an optional smart card reader and are Microsoft's most easily serviceable Surface devices to date.

Further reading: Microsoft's official blog.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Dubbed "Kathmandu" after the host city of the GNOME.Asia 2023 conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, the GNOME 46 desktop environment is here to introduce major new features like headless remote desktop support that lets you connect to your GNOME system remotely without there being an existing session. While experimental, Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support is another major new feature in GNOME 46, which will allow you to change the variable refresh rate of your monitor from the GNOME Settings app in the Displays section. Talking about GNOME Settings, the GNOME 46 release brings a new System panel that incorporates the Region, Language, Date, Time, Users, Remote Desktop, and About panels, as well as new Secure Shell settings. Check out the release notes and the official release video here.

GNOME 46 will be available shortly in many distributions, such as Fedora 40 and Ubuntu 24.04. You can try it today by looking for a beta release here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Starting in early 2023, Williams team principal James Vowles and chief technical officer Pat Fry started reworking the F1 team's systems for designing and building its car. It would be painful, but the pain would keep the team from falling even further behind. As they started figuring out new processes and systems, they encountered what they considered a core issue: Microsoft Excel. The Williams car build workbook, with roughly 20,000 individual parts, was "a joke," Vowles recently told The Race. "Impossible to navigate and impossible to update." This colossal Excel file lacked information on how much each of those parts cost and the time it took to produce them, along with whether the parts were already on order. Prioritizing one car section over another, from manufacture through inspection, was impossible, Vowles suggested.

"When you start tracking now hundreds of thousands of components through your organization moving around, an Excel spreadsheet is useless," Vowles told The Race. Because of the multiple states each part could be in -- ordered, backordered, inspected, returned -- humans are often left to work out the details. "And once you start putting that level of complexity in, which is where modern Formula 1 is, the Excel spreadsheet falls over, and humans fall over. And that's exactly where we are." The consequences of this row/column chaos, and the resulting hiccups, were many. Williams missed early pre-season testing in 2019. Workers sometimes had to physically search the team's factory for parts. The wrong parts got priority, other parts came late, and some piled up. And yet transitioning to a modern tracking system was "viciously expensive," Fry told The Race, and making up for the painful process required "humans pushing themselves to the absolute limits and breaking."

The idea that a modern Formula 1 team, building some of the most fantastically advanced and efficient machines on Earth, would be using Excel to build those machines might strike you as odd. F1 cars cost an estimated $12-$16 million each, with resource cap of about $145 million. But none of this really matters, and it actually makes sense, if you've ever worked IT at nearly any decent-sized organization. Then again, it's not even uncommon in Formula 1. When Sebastian Anthony embedded with the Renault team, he reported back for Ars in 2017 that Renault Sport Formula One's Excel design and build spreadsheet was 77,000 lines long -- more than three times as large as the Williams setup that spurred an internal revolution in 2023.

Every F1 team has its own software setup, Anthony wrote, but they have to integrate with a lot of other systems: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel results, rapid prototyping and manufacturing, and inventory. This leaves F1 teams "susceptible to the plague of legacy software," Anthony wrote, though he noted that Renault had moved on to a more dynamic cloud-based system that year. (Renault was also "a big Microsoft shop" in other areas, like email and file sharing, at the time.) One year prior to Anthony's excavation, Adam Banks wrote for Ars about the benefits of adopting cloud-based tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP). You adopt a cloud-based business management software to go "Beyond Excel." "If PowerPoint is the universal language businesses use to talk to one another, their internal monologue is Excel," Banks wrote. The issue is that all the systems and processes a business touches are complex and generate all kinds of data, but Excel is totally cool with taking in all of it. Or at least 1,048,576 rows of it. Banks cited Tim Worstall's 2013 contention that Excel could be "the most dangerous software on the planet." Back then, international investment bankers were found manually copying and pasting Excel between Excel sheets to do their work, and it raised alarm.

sinij shares a report from the New York Post: The Biden administration finalized its crackdown on gas cars Wednesday, with the Environmental Protection Agency announcing drastic climate regulations meant to ensure more than two-thirds of passenger cars and light trucks sold by 2032 are electric or hybrid vehicles. The EPA rule imposes strict limits on tailpipe pollution, limits the agency says can be met if 56% of new vehicles sold in the US are electric by eight years from now, along with 13% that are plug-in hybrids or other partially electric cars. That would be a huge increase over current EV sales, which rose to 7.6% of new vehicle sales last year, up from 5.8% in 2022. [...] The new rule slows implementation of stricter pollution standards from 2027 through 2029, before ramping up to near the level the EPA preferred by 2032. "Personal car ownership is about to get A LOT more expensive as it will have to carry the costs of deep discounts to entice EV sales," adds Slashdot reader sinij.

The macOS Sonoma 14.4 update introduces a bug affecting iCloud Drive's versioning system, where users with "Optimize Mac Storage" enabled can lose all previous versions of a file removed from local storage. MacRumors reports: Versions are normally created automatically when users save files using apps that work with the version system in macOS. According to The Eclectic Light Company's Howard Oakley, users running macOS 14.4 that have "Optimize Mac Storage" enabled should be aware that they are at risk of losing all previously saved versions of a file if they opt to remove it from iCloud Drive local storage: "In previous versions of macOS, when a file is evicted from local storage in iCloud Drive [using the Remove Download option in the right-click contextual menu], all its saved versions have been preserved. Download that file again from iCloud Drive, and versions saved on that Mac (but not other Macs or devices) have remained fully accessible. Do that in 14.4, and all previous versions are now removed, and lost forever."

Oakley said his own tests confirmed that this behavior does not happen in macOS Sonoma 14.3 or macOS Ventura, so it is exclusive to macOS 14.4. For users who have already updated, he suggests either not saving files to iCloud Drive at all, or turning off Optimize Mac Storage. To perform the latter in System Settings, click your Apple ID, select iCloud, and then toggle off the switch next to "Optimize Mac Storage." You may need to perform this action twice -- reports suggest it can turn back on by itself. For a more exhaustive account of the problem, see Oakley's subsequent post.

After securing billions in federal grants and loans, Reuters reports that the company is "planning a $100-billion spending spree across four U.S. states" to build and expand its chip manufacturing factories. From the report: The centerpiece of Intel's five-year spending plan is turning empty fields near Columbus, Ohio, into what CEO Pat Gelsinger described to reporters on Tuesday as "the largest AI chip manufacturing site in the world," starting as soon as 2027. Intel's plan will also involve revamping sites in New Mexico and Oregon and expanding operations in Arizona, where longtime rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co is also building a massive factory that it hopes will receive funding from President Joe Biden's push to bring advanced semiconductor manufacturing back to the United States. [...]

Gelsinger said about 30% of the $100-billion plan will be spent on construction costs such as labor, piping and concrete. The remaining will go towards buying chipmaking tools from firms such as ASML, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials and KLA, among others. Those tools will help bring the Ohio site online by 2027 or 2028, though Gelsinger warned the timeline could slip if the chip market takes a dive. Beyond grants and loans, Intel plans to make most of the purchases from its existing cash flows.

"It will still take three to five years for Intel to become a serious player in the foundry market" for cutting-edge chips, said Kinngai Chan, an analyst at Summit Insights. However, he warned more investment would be needed before Intel could overtake TSMC, adding that the Taiwanese firm could remain the leader for "some time to come." Gelsinger has previously said a second round of U.S. funding for chip factories would likely be needed to re-establish the U.S. as a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, which he reiterated on Tuesday. "It took us three-plus decades to lose this industry. It's not going to come back in three to five years of CHIPS Act" funding, said Gelsinger, who referred to the low-interest-rate funding as "smart capital."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google closed its Fitbit acquisition in 2021. Since then, the tech behemoth has pushed numerous changes to the wearable brand, including upcoming updates announced this week. While Google reshapes its fitness tracker business, though, some long-time users are regretting their Fitbit purchases and questioning if Google's practices will force them to purchase their next fitness tracker elsewhere.

As is becoming common practice with consumer tech announcements of late, Google's latest announcements about Fitbit seemed to be trying to convince users of the wonders of generative AI and how that will change their gadgets for the better. In a blog post yesterday, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google's chief health officer, announced that Fitbit Premium subscribers would be able to test experimental AI features later this year (Google hasn't specified when). "You will be able to ask questions in a natural way and create charts just for you to help you understand your own data better. For example, you could dig deeper into how many active zone minutes... you get and the correlation with how restorative your sleep is," she wrote. DeSalvo's post included an example of a user asking a chatbot if there was a connection between their sleep and activity and said that the experimental AI features will only be available to "a limited number of Android users who are enrolled in the Fitbit Labs program in the Fitbit mobile app."

Fitbit is also working with the Google Research team and "health and wellness experts, doctors, and certified coaches" to develop a large language model (LLM) for upcoming Fitbit mobile app features that pull data from Fitbit and Pixel devices, DeSalvo said. In a blog post yesterday, Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research at Google, said Google wants to use the LLM to add personalized coaching features, such as the ability to look for sleep irregularities and suggest actions "on how you might change the intensity of your workout." Google's Fitbit is building the LLM on Gemini models that are tweaked on de-identified data from unspecified "research case studies," Matias said, adding: "For example, we're testing performance using sleep medicine certification exam-like practice tests." Other recent changes to Fitbit include a name tweak from Fitbit by Google, to Google Fitbit, as spotted by 9to5Google this week. Charge 5 users are especially concerned after users noticed their devices suddenly stopped holding a charge after a December firmware update was pushed. The problem has persisted with Google offering no solution other than offer discounts or, if the device was within its warranty period, a replacement.

"This is called planned obsolescence. I'll be upgrading to a watch style tracker from a different company. I wish Fitbit hadn't sold out to Google," a forum user going by Sean77024 wrote on Fitbit's support forum yesterday. "Others, like 2MeFamilyFlyer, have also accused Fitbit of planning Charge 5 obsolescence," notes Ars. "2MeFamilyFlyer said they're seeking a Fitbit alternative."

samleecole writes: Last month, the surveillance company Flock Safety published a study and press release claiming that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) are "instrumental in solving 10 percent of reported crime in the U.S." The study was done by Flock employees, and given legitimacy with the "oversight" of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper. Now, one of those researchers has told 404 Media that "I personally would have done things much differently" than the Flock researchers did.

The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found "the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them." Flock is one of the largest vendors of ALPR cameras and other surveillance technologies, and is partially responsible for the widespread proliferation of this technology. It markets its cameras to law enforcement, homeowners associations, property managers, schools, and businesses. It regularly publishes in-house case studies and white papers that it says shows Flock is instrumental in solving and reducing crime, then uses those studies to market its products.

EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager on Tuesday warned Apple and Meta on their new fees for their services, saying that this may hinder users from enjoying the benefits of the Digital Markets Act which aims to give them more choices. From a report: Apple announced a slew of changes in January in a bid to comply with the landmark EU tech legislation which requires it to open up its closed eco-system to rivals.

A new fee structure includes a core technology fee of 50 euro cents per user account per year that major app developers will have to pay even if they do not use any of Apple's payment services, which has triggered criticism from rivals such as Fortnite creator Epic Games. Vestager said the new fees have attracted her attention. "There are things that we take a keen interest in, for instance, if the new Apple fee structure will de facto not make it in any way attractive to use the benefits of the DMA. That kind of thing is what we will be investigating," she told Reuters in an interview. Further reading: Apple Working on Solution for App Store Fee That Could Bankrupt Viral Apps.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Since the start of the year, more than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. It's a continuation of the predominant theme of 2023, when more than 260,000 workers across nearly 1,200 tech companies lost their jobs. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all taken part in the downsizing this year, along with eBay, Unity Software, SAP and Cisco. Wall Street has largely cheered on the cost-cutting, sending many tech stocks to record highs on optimism that spending discipline coupled with efficiency gains from artificial intelligence will lead to rising profits. PayPal announced in January that it was eliminating 9% of its workforce, or about 2,500 jobs.

For the tens of thousands of people in Croisant's [anecdote in the linked story] position, the path toward reemployment is daunting. All told, 2023 was the second-biggest year of cuts on record in the technology sector, behind only the dot-com crash in 2001, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Not since the spectacular flameouts of Pets.com, eToys and Webvan have so many tech workers lost their jobs in such a short period of time. Last month's job cut count was the highest of any February since 2009, when the financial crisis forced companies into cash preservation mode.

Major U.S. broadband internet providers must start displaying information similar to nutrition labels on food products to help consumers shop for services starting on April 10, under new rules from the Federal Communications Commission. From a report: Verizon Communications said it will begin providing the labels on Wednesday. The FCC first moved to mandate the labels in 2022. Smaller providers will be required to provide labels starting in October. The rules require broadband providers to display, at the point of sale, labels that show prices, speeds, fees and data allowances for both wireless and wired products. Verizon Chief Customer Experience Officer Brian Higgins said in an interview the labels will help consumers make "an equal comparison" between product offerings, speeds and fees.

Higgins said standardized labels across the industry "make it easier for customers to do a comparison of which provider is going to be the best fit for their needs." He said customers will still need to research various bundling offers across carriers. The labels were first unveiled as a voluntary program in 2016. Congress ordered the FCC to mandate them under the 2021 infrastructure law. "Consumers will finally get information they can use to comparison shop, avoid junk fees, and make informed choices about which high-speed internet service is the best fit for their needs and budget," FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said.

CoinDesk: The Ethereum Foundation -- the Swiss non-profit organization at the heart of the Ethereum ecosystem -- is under investigation by an unnamed "state authority," according to the group's website's GitHub repository. The scope of the investigation and its focus was unknown at press time. According to the GitHub commit dated Feb. 26, 2024, "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality."

The investigation comes during a time of change for Ethereum's technology. Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain by market cap after Bitcoin, launching in 2015 following an initial coin offering for the chain's native ETH token. Earlier this month, the chain underwent a major technical upgrade, dubbed Dencun, designed to bring down transaction costs for users of Ethereum-based layer-2 platforms.