It's clearly the week for 5G home internet launches, with Verizon lighting up two new markets on the heels of T-Mobile launching its own 4G/5G-router. Verizon 5G Home Internet is now offered in 30 markets, the carrier has announced today, with the potential to be more affordable than T-Mobile 5G Home Internet depending on who you get your phone service from.
Clubhouse seems to be the new darling of the social networking world, which means everyone and anyone is trying to copy it if they can't buy it. Facebook, or at least its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has already been reported to have expressed intent to develop something to rival Clubhouse and has set its New Product Experimentation (NPE) team to work on a few options. One of those to come out of the woodworks is Hotline and, curiously enough, it may actually be able to stand on its own and not be labeled as a direct Clubhouse clone.
T-Mobile is launching its 5G Home Internet service, promising cellular data coverage for 30+ million US households and the potential for cable- and DSL-beating speeds. Priced from $60 per month - with a few provisos - the carrier says that it expects average speeds of around 100 Mbps for most new customers.
A new study from McGill University has found that misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine originating from the United States may be fueling conspiracy theories and other issues in Canada. Social media appears to be a driving factor in this cross-border information exchange, with Canadians who report frequent Twitter use experiencing high exposure to American news sources.
Google's generous unlimited storage offers were admittedly too good to last. Whether or not some people took advantage of that, it was only a matter of time before it became unsustainable, at least as a business. Late last year, Google announced a couple of changes to its formerly unlimited options for Workspace and Google Photos users. It is now announcing an extension of that deadline as a way to give administrators, businesses, and users more time to prepare for the inevitable.
Yahoo has quietly announced that it will shutter its Yahoo Answers platform this summer, redirecting users to the Yahoo homepage and scrubbing its vast user-submitted archives from the Internet. Users who participated on the platform have the option of saving their data before the service goes dark, but you only have a few weeks to get it.
It's safe to say that social networks these days are copying each other more blatantly than before. That sometimes goes not only for features but even the names for those features. We've seen that happen in Stories, Clubhouses, and short-form videos just to name a few. Now it seems that TikTok is once again the progenitor of a new fad, one that remixes one short video with another. TikTok called it its Duets and, after some time baking in limited testing, Instagram is now launching its own Remix on Reels.
The US aims to deliver 100-percent high-speed broadband coverage within the next decade, part of a far-reaching new Infrastructure Plan revealed by President Biden today. The strategy document includes tackling American road, rail, and other transit shortcomings, replacing and repairing crumbling infrastructure, building out more access to digital services like internet connections, and making sure essential services like electricity aren't knocked out by natural disasters like that which took huge swathes of Texas offline earlier in the year.
Google recently made the almost-shocking announcement that not only would it be phasing out support for third-party cookies in Chrome, it would also not build something to replace those cookies. That's a rather big promise considering how these cookies are used for advertising purposes, Google's biggest business. Naturally, Google does have a solution to that predicament that it is calling Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, now available for a few Chrome users to test and verify if it really works as advertised.
Network operators have a tendency to redefine common words and give them new meanings. "Unlimited" is not unlimited when it comes to data and "indefinitely" definitely has an end. To be fair, Verizon did leave the door wide open for when it will shut down its 3G network and now it is officially giving notice to the old technology's remaining users. Big Red is finally shutting down its 3G CDMA network at the end of 2022, three years after its initial plan.
A new whistleblower report claims that the Ubiquiti data breach announced back in January was much bigger and potentially more damaging than the company reported. The insider claims that Ubiquiti deliberately downplayed the data breach out of concerns about its stock price and that the incident was ultimately 'catastrophically worse than reported.'
Popular anonymous social media platform Reddit is experiencing a partial outage this weekend, meaning you may run into issues with loading posts or comments using a desktop browser or mobile app. The issues aren't substantial enough to prevent users from accessing the service but have resulted in 'an elevated error rate,' the Reddit Status website shows.