Long before he was building broadband across rural Pennsylvania, Dave Gibbons was disrupting monopolies in a college dorm room.

As a freshman at Gettysburg College in the early 2000s, he and a fellow student launched an online marketplace for students to sell their old textbooks directly, bypassing the campus bookstore, which bought low and sold high. When the store tried to block them from advertising, he pushed back and won.

“Sticking it to the man is definitely part of the ethos,” he laughs.

Two decades later, that same instinct to tackle practical problems and challenge incumbents has delivered a significant broadband win in rural central Pennsylvania.

Black Bear Fiber founder Dave Gibbons on how the Appalachia Digital Accelerator helped secure nearly $30M in USDA and BEAD funding for rural fiber.

The trillion dollar Anthropic IPO will enrich Google and Amazon, who are ostensibly competitors. How does that make sense? It doesn’t, unless Anthropic is four flailing monopolies in a trench coat.

The past month has seen some signs in the financial markets that the AI bubble is beginning to deflate. First it was the neoclouds, which are off-balance sheet entities for large tech and chip companies, getting crushed. Then on Monday, AI giant Anthropic made public its initial draft S-1 filing, the form it has to submit before it sells shares on the stock market.

Then, a few days later, Google and Amazon released their earnings, disappointing investors with misses in revenue targets and higher than expected negative free cash flow. Google stock alone fell by 12% on Thursday, a half a trillion dollar collapse. The next day, the whole tech sector got crushed, and it now down 10% from its high.

Wall Street, it seems, is worried.

Two cryptocurrency tracking firms uncover evidence that a North Korean state-sponsored group, TraderTraitor, is behind the $6.3 billion hack of Binance, a crypto exchange.

Two blockchain-tracking firms, Chainalysis and TRM Labs, point the finger at the North Korean state-sponsored group TraderTraitor, also known as Lazarus, which has targeted cryptocurrencies. TraderTraitor was blamed for last year’s $1.5 billion hack on the Bybit exchange, then the record holder for the largest crypto heist. Last month, the group was also blamed for another $387 million heist on the Bitget exchange.

The League of Minnesota Cities has a FAQ for communities thinking about data center issues...

The demand for new data centers is sweeping the nation. At first, data centers may seem like a typical land use application. However, as city leaders consider proposals for their communities, they may soon find themselves faced with complex questions related to environmental regulations, water usage, and onsite or off-site electric generation.

Get answers to FAQs regarding data centers

RICHLAND COUNTY — A multiyear effort to bring high-speed fiber internet to underserved rural residents in northern Richland County has officially crossed the finish line, delivering connections to hundreds more addresses than originally anticipated.

Ashley Karlen, director of government affairs for Charter Communications, told the Richland County Board of Commissioners Thursday the buildout was completed Oct. 6.

The initiative brought high-speed fiber broadband to 1,167 serviceable locations — surpassing the 748 locations initially contracted under the agreement.

Charter’s overall service footprint for the project encompasses 1,211 passed addresses, according to follow-up data provided by Karlen.

A $6.3 billion heist exposes crypto's dependence on financial gatekeepers, the limits of Binance's safety net, and a potential payday for North Korea.

Thirty Minutes

Shortly after four Thursday afternoon, Eastern time, five wallets controlled by Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, began hemorrhaging digital assets. The first transfers totaled roughly $300 million. Then the attackers struck again and again across ten blockchains. Within half an hour, nearly all of $6.3 billion was gone. A smaller wave followed hours later.

To put that in perspective, the previous record for a crypto theft was the $1.5 billion North Korean hackers took from the exchange Bybit in February 2025. This one is more than four times larger. Elliptic, a blockchain analytics firm, calls it almost certainly the largest theft of any kind in history, surpassing even the roughly $1 billion Saddam Hussein’s regime hauled out of Iraq’s central bank in 2003. Saddam needed trucks. These thieves needed access to Binance’s transaction systems and half an hour.

Binance quickly froze withdrawals and assured its 335 million registered users that their money was safe. That reassurance is the real story here. Cryptocurrency was sold as a way to escape banks and financial gatekeepers. Binance became one of the largest gatekeepers of all. So when that money vanished, who actually stood behind the promise to get it back?

The answer says a great deal about what crypto has become.

Do we really want to outsource our First Amendment–protected journalism to Big Tech billionaires who may not share the ethical standards or commitment to public accountability?

Since leaving the daily news business eight years ago, I’ve remained deeply committed to improving California’s media landscape and supporting journalists as they navigate an increasingly difficult time for our profession. Journalism has given so much to our communities, and I want to do what I can to support the people who keep it alive.

That commitment has led me down a couple of paths. I teach journalism at Fresno State, where I have the opportunity to work with the next generation of journalists. I also founded the Institute for Media and Public Trust to help support the news industry and explore ways to strengthen public trust in journalism.

Lawmakers Argue DOJ Is Encouraging the Court to Ignore Federal Statutes and Grant AI Companies a Blanket Exemption to Copyright Laws

Washington, D.C. (October XX, 2026)— Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust, and Rep. Hank Johnson, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet, submitted an amicus brief opposing the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) bizarre argument that there is some sort of national security exception to current copyright law that allows AI companies to train their models on copyrighted work, including New York Times journalism, without compensation. 

The brief, filed in the Southern District of New York in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, reminds the court that the arguments in DOJ’s brief violate the plain text of the Copyright Act, which does not contain any national security exception to allow private companies free and unfettered use of copyrighted materials.

A company like Microsoft, one of America’s great technological innovators, is unaccustomed to harsh public reprimands from the White House. So it reacted with indignation when Vice President JD Vance took to a Washington stage to announce a crackdown on H-1B visa abuse, saying of Microsoft that there had been “no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more” and warning it could no longer “lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

Microsoft pushed back hard, with company president Brad Smith calling Mr. Vance’s remarks “completely off base.” Someone “had failed to inform the vice president accurately about our numbers,” he said. Most of Microsoft’s applications were for workers already employed, he said, not for new hires.

After decades of deregulation, governments are back in control of their energy sectors. Energy is no longer just a commodity. It's become an instrument of economic power and geopolitical influence.

This 47-page perspectives report from Shift Lab gives you a data-rich view of how the US, China and Europe are reshaping global energy.

Get the report and access to the webinar recording

Musk has the rockets, the satellites and the money. But without massive amount of spectrum, he has little chance of challenging the Big Three on the ground.

Elon Musk is spending billions buying American radio spectrum. How much more could he acquire, what would it take to challenge the Big Three, and could the economics of building a fourth mobile network become his biggest problem?

The prototype satellite for Project Suncatcher was able to beam back a short haiku about being in space, generated by Google’s Gemma 4 open-source AI model.

Google just hit a major milestone in its “moonshot” project to deploy functional, solar-powered data centers in space. The tech giant has now received its first AI response from one of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips launched into low Earth orbit.

During a ground-station pass, Google researchers prompted the company’s Gemma 4 open-source AI model to generate a haiku about being in space. As the satellite passed by Svalbard, Norway's Arctic archipelago, it was able to beam back a short poem:

“Blue marble below
Data streams in silent grace
Starlight feeds my core.”

OpenAI's CEO isn't a fan of the growing trend of running AI models locally on PC hardware, calling it a waste of precious DRAM. 'You want maximum utilization,' he says.

It’s not exactly a surprise, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman isn’t a fan of people running AI models locally because it can pull precious memory supplies away from data centers. 

“You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow, many people’s intuition is the opposite of that,” Altman said in a new interview on the Cheeky Pint podcast. 

In contrast, OpenAI partners, including Nvidia and Microsoft, have been touting the benefits of running AI models on new PC hardware with high memory capacity. Local AI offers better privacy, but it also means consumers and enterprises can ditch cloud-based AI without paying, making the business model a direct threat to OpenAI and other top providers.

Google just lost approximately $500 billion in market value in a single day. Its shares collapsed 12.6% on October 29, one of the largest shareholder-value destructions in history. What makes this more shocking is that Google’s business is growing. Third-quarter revenue increased 25% to $127.6 billion, while Google Cloud revenue jumped 103% to $30.7 billion. Apparently, even doubling your cloud business is no longer enough to please Wall Street.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is circulating a proposal to preempt California "carrier of last resort" regulations that AT&T says are slowing its copper retirement plans in the state. The proposal arrives amid an ongoing clash between federal deregulation goals and state consumer-protection authority.

The proposal follows recent FCC rules designed to speed up the retirement of power-hungry copper networks and to free up dollars for network upgrades and the deployment of IP-based wireless or fiber alternatives. It also tied into AT&T's FCC-approved plan to turn down copper services in certain parts of California that's been getting pushback from state regulators.

The proposal aims to ensure that "state obligations cannot be used in a manner that prevents a provider from effectuating a discontinuance that the Commission has approved," the FCC said.

Carr believes that the proposed order, if eventually adopted, would preempt state regulations related to copper retirements. However, there would be a comment and reply period that would take place before an FCC vote.

The FCC made two decisions relevant to direct-to-device (D2D) services on Thursday, kicking off a proceeding to modernize D2D spectrum sharing rules, and proposing to auction 25 MHz of mid-band spectrum. 

The Thursday vote begins the process to auction 1675-1695 MHz and 2020-2025 MHz bands up for auction to be used for D2D operations and flexible-use, terrestrial networks like 5G.

“The FCC intends to open this auction to a broad range of connectivity providers — from 5G and 6G to D2D, or some hybrid network.  We expect big interest in this seemingly modest amount of spectrum — indeed, similar D2D bands are selling for tens of billions of dollars on the secondary market today,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a statement. 

The disaster will happen first, then the action to prevent it. The entire thing is backwards.

Talk to any cybersecurity professional these days and you’ll be met with exasperation, weariness, and an absence of their typical whimsy. These people are tired. They’re calling the past month “Black October” after AI-detected vulnerabilities emerged with unprecedented rapidity, faster than many could patch. They’ve been driven to discouragement.

This is sort of what happens when you create technology far more powerful than what came before it, and let it loose on a society whose defenses were built for a prior era. Safeguards that seemed solid before AI are now seemingly at risk. To many in the field, a major AI-driven catastrophe seems like a matter of when, not if.

There is currently a lot of news circulating about the financial troubles of two of the largest cable companies. Both Optimum (formerly Altice USA) and Cable One are in distress.

Optimum is in financial distress because of its $26 billion in total debt, which includes payments coming due in 2027 of $6 billion. While the company is profitable , it’s not nearly profitable enough to meet the debt payments. Altice’s debt comes from the money the company spent to buy two other cable companies; Altice bought Cablevision in 2016 for $17.7 billion. The company bought Suddenlink in 2022 for $9.1 billion.

These transactions were highly leveraged with debt. The company has been hemorrhaging broadband customers and has lost over 580,000 customers since the end of 2022. The company’s stock has  plummeted over time. Five years ago, the stock traded at more than $28 per share. As I’m writing this blog, the share price was $0.65.

The Guy With the Dish on the Roof: Starlink in Rural America

The camp’s founder is a former Nashville touring musician who started a website and YouTube channel years ago to teach banjo, guitar, mandolin, and just about everything you can think of (sadly, the jaw harp lessons aren’t yet available).

He has built an impressive business with a full brand and following, a retail store, and an event business.

One afternoon, he walked us through his production workflow. He records in his studio, creates separate audio and video files, and shuttles everything back and forth with his editing team, who are located in different parts of the country.

Being the telecom geek in the room, I asked the obvious question: Who’s your provider?

Starlink.

There’s no fiber to his place. Given the volume of files he moves, his monthly bill runs to an amount that would make most of us check the invoice twice. I frankly had never heard of a residential bill at that level. Even most business locations don’t pay that much.

Every ten years, the telecommunications equipment lobby invents a new miracle to convince mobile operators to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on radio hardware they cannot afford. For 5G, the miracle was remote robotic surgery and self-driving cars—applications that either stayed in conference demos or bypassed the public cellular billing system entirely. As the 6G standardization machine rolls through 3GPP Release 20 and toward Release 21, the industry has settled on its new salvation story: Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC).

The pitch from vendor keynotes is sexy. Mobile operators already own millions of cellular towers covering the planet. By upgrading those towers to 6G, every base station will supposedly double as a high-resolution radar. Operators will stop just selling cheap data plans; they will sell a live “digital twin” of the physical world, charging cities to monitor street intersections, aviation authorities to track low-altitude drones, and defense ministries to guard the skies.

Let’s call this narrative what it is: commercial bullcrap.

Schoharie County is one step closer to having 100% broadband coverage.

The county has applied for the ConnectALL state grant to help bridge the gap and bring digital equity to rural communities.

The county could receive up to $30 million for infrastructure upgrades.

Currently 92% of the county has access to high-speed internet.