Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

"Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said.

Longtime Slashdot reader devnulljapan writes: In 2012, Canada passed anti-circumvention law Bill C-11, cut-and-pasted from the U.S. DMCA, in return for access to U.S. markets without tariffs. Trump has tariffed Canada anyway, so Cory Doctorow suggests it sounds like like a good idea to ditch Bill C-11 and turn Canada into a "Disenshittification Nation" and go into the business of "disenshittify[ing] America's defective tech exports." Some of the specific ways Canada could respond include legalize jailbreaking, allow alternative app stores/clients, force companies to offer repair tools, and open firmware that break monopoly lock-ins. Cory's pitch is equal parts economic strategy (capture the rents Big Tech extracts) and national security (reduce dependence on U.S. tech stacks that can be switched off or weaponized).

A group of Linux gaming-focused distros and developers have formed the Open Gaming Collective to pool work on shared components like kernels, input systems, and Valve tooling. The Verge reports: Universal Blue, developer of the gaming-focused Linux distribution Bazzite, announced on Wednesday that its helping to form the OGC with several other groups, which will collaborate on improvements to the Linux gaming ecosystem and âoecentralize efforts around critical components like kernel patches, input tooling, and essential gaming packages such as gamescope." The other founding members of the OGC include Nobara, ChimeraOS, Playtron, Fyra Labs, PikaOS, ShadowBlip, and Asus Linux.

[...] It's worth noting that this will mean some changes to Bazzite, which is switching to the OGC kernel, replacing HHD with InputPlumber as its input framework, and integrating features like RGB and fan control into the Steam UI. Bazzite also added that, "We'll be sharing patches we've made to various Valve packages with the OGC and attempting to upstream everything we can."

Google is letting outsiders experiment with DeepMind's Genie 3 "world model" via Project Genie, a tool for generating short, interactive AI worlds. The caveat: it requires a $250/month AI Ultra subscription, is U.S.-only, and has tight limits that make it more of a tech demo than a game engine. Engadget reports: At launch, Project Genie offers three different modes of interaction: World Sketching, exploration and remixing. The first sees Google's Nano Banana Pro model generating the source image Genie 3 will use to create the world you will later explore. At this stage, you can describe your character, define the camera perspective -- be it first-person, third-person or isometric -- and how you want to explore the world Genie 3 is about to generate. Before you can jump into the model's creation, Nano Banana Pro will "sketch" what you're about to see so you can make tweaks. It's also possible to write your own prompts for worlds others have used Genie to generate.

One thing to keep in mind is that Genie 3 is not a game engine. While its outputs can look game-like, and it can simulate physical interactions, there aren't traditional game mechanics here. Generations are also limited to 60 seconds, as is the presentation, which is capped at 24 frames per second and 720p.

Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system's performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls "swarming."

"The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people," Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience.

January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an "improper state" after December's monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft's push to require Microsoft accounts.

The core members of the company's Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community," Davuluri said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: Gatik, a Silicon Valley startup developing self-driving delivery trucks, says its commercial operations are about to scale up dramatically, from fewer than a dozen driverless units running in multiple U.S. states now to hundreds of box trucks by the end of the year. CEO Gautam Narang said it's also booked contracts with retailers worth at least $600 million for its automated fleet. "We have 10 fully driverless, revenue-generating trucks on public roads. Very soon, in the coming weeks, we expect that increase to 60 trucks," he told Forbes. "We expect to end the year with hundreds of driverless trucks -- revenue-generating -- deployed across multiple markets in the U.S."

Though the Mountain View, California-based company hasn't raised as much funding as rivals, including Aurora, Kodiak and Canada's Waabi, Gatik said it's actually scaling up faster than any other robot truck developer. Unlike those companies, it focuses on smaller freight delivery vehicles, rather than full-size semis, supplied by truckmaker Isuzu that operate mainly between warehouses and supermarkets and other large stores. The company's focus has been on so-called middle-mile trucking, which, like long-haul routes, has a severe shortage of human drivers, according to Narang. Currently, its trucks are on the road in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, Nebraska and Ontario, Canada.

The company has been generating revenue since shortly after its founding in 2017, hauling loads for customers like Walmart in trucks with human safety drivers at the wheel. Beginning late last year, it began shifting to fully driverless units and is getting more trucks from Isuzu built specifically to incorporate its tech, Narang said. "The hardware that we are using, this is our latest generation, has been designed to enable driver-out across thousands of trucks."