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Comcast wanted $210,000 for Internet—so this man helped expand a co-op fiber ISP

Enlarge / Fiber conduits being installed for Los Altos Hills Community Fiber. (credit: Los Altos Hills Community Fiber) Sasha Zbrozek lives in Los Altos Hills, California, which he describes as "a wealthy Silicon…

Rent going up? One company’s algorithm could be why

Enlarge (credit: Busa Photography) ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. On a summer day last year,…

New, transparent AI tool may help detect blood poisoning

Enlarge (credit: Sean Justice/Getty) Ten years ago, 12-year-old Rory Staunton dove for a ball in gym class and scraped his arm. He woke up the next day with a 104° F fever, so…

How a Microsoft blunder opened millions of PCs to potent malware attacks

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) For almost two years, Microsoft officials botched a key Windows defense, an unexplained lapse that left customers open to a malware infection technique that has been especially effective in…

Netflix with ads launches Nov. 3, will be missing up to 10% of Netflix catalog

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto) Netflix is launching a $6.99-per-month version that includes four or five minutes of ads per hour and video quality that tops out at 720p. The new "Basic…

32 years in, Microsoft has decided to rebrand “Microsoft Office”

Enlarge / Microsoft 365 will encompass Teams, OneDrive, and the suite of productivity apps formerly known as Office. (credit: Microsoft) Microsoft Office was first released in 1990, and aside from Windows, it's probably…

DeepMind breaks 50-year math record using AI; new record falls a week later

Enlarge / A colorful 3x3 matrix. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images) Matrix multiplication is at the heart of many machine learning breakthroughs, and it just got faster—twice. Last week, DeepMind announced it…

After fight vs. FAA, Verizon’s and AT&T’s new spectrum is boosting 5G speeds

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images /) With AT&T's and Verizon's 5G battle against the aviation industry mostly behind them, the carriers have significantly boosted wireless speeds with their newly deployed spectrum.…

Microsoft takes AI image generation mainstream, strolling into ethics minefield

Enlarge / A preview of Microsoft Designer's AI text-to-image feature, which can generate images from written prompts. (credit: Microsoft) During a Surface press event today, Microsoft announced integrations of AI-powered image-generation technology into…

Report: “Thousands” of Intel layoffs planned as PC demand slows and revenues fall

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Intel is planning its first major layoffs in almost six years, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says that layoffs will "likely" affect thousands of its…