Month: October 2023

Enlarge / FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at US District Court on March 30, 2023, in New York City after being hit with a criminal charge for allegedly authorizing a bribe of at least $40 million to one or more Chinese government officials. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Santiago )

Sam Bankman-Fried took the stand in his criminal trial today in an attempt to avoid decades in prison for alleged fraud at cryptocurrency exchange FTX and its affiliate Alameda Research.

Providing testimony has been called a risky move for Bankman-Fried by many legal observers. After answering questions posted by his own lawyers, Bankman-Fried will have to face cross-examination from federal prosecutors. But after three weeks in which US government attorneys laid out their case, including testimony from former FTX and Alameda executives, Bankman-Fried's legal team announced yesterday that he would take the stand.

Today's testimony was unusual because US District Judge Lewis Kaplan sent the jury home for the day to conduct a hearing on whether certain parts of his testimony are admissible. "That means Bankman-Fried will give some of his testimony to the judge without the jury present. The judge will then decide whether Bankman-Fried is allowed to say the same testimony in front of a jury," The Wall Street Journal wrote in its live coverage. The trial is not being streamed via audio or video.

Enlarge / A sign directing people to a toilet facility during the Children's Day Parade, part of the Notting Hill Carnival celebration in west London on Sunday August 27, 2023. (credit: Getty | Yui Mok)

The United Kingdom is experiencing a dramatic outbreak—unprecedented in scale and magnitude—of diarrheal illnesses from the intestinal parasite, Cryptosporidium, aka Crypto.

According to a rapid communication published Thursday in the journal Eurosurveillance, UK health officials report that Crypto cases have exceeded the upper bounds of expected cases since mid-September, and an October peak saw cases roughly threefold above what is usual for this time of year. The outbreak is still ongoing.

Laboratory notifications of Cryptosporidium species in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, by week of specimen, 2023. (credit: Eurosurveillance | Peake et al.)

So far, it's unclear what's driving the extraordinary burst in cases. The outbreak has splattered into almost every region of all four UK nations. "Given the scale and geographical spread of the [case] exceedance across regions and nations of the UK, a single local exposure is an unlikely cause," the authors, led by officials at the United Kingdom Health Security Agency in London, wrote in the rapid report.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Slowly but surely, the public will start gaining more access to evidence shared in the Department of Justice's antitrust trial probing Google's search business, following an intervention by press outlets. In a motion to intervene, outlets earlier this month told the court that they were struggling to cover the trial because much of the evidence and proceedings has been withheld, redacted, or closed off entirely to protect industry trade secrets.

Yesterday, Judge Amit Mehta granted some of the demands of outlets—including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, MLex, and Law360—which, among other requests, had asked the court to mandate the sharing of dozens of exhibits that the public has so far been denied access to despite pending press requests.

Mehta said that the supplemental order and other recent orders would allow the court to "continue facilitating public access to the trial and minimizing the need to close the courtroom while providing for the protection of confidential information."

Enlarge / A T-Mobile store on August 24, 2023 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Anna Moneymaker)

T-Mobile has scrapped a plan to automatically switch users to newer, more expensive packages after hearing loads of criticism from customers.

The plan became public knowledge two weeks ago with the leak of internal documents that said customers would be switched to pricier tiers starting with the November bill cycle unless they contacted T-Mobile to opt out. Documents showed that T-Mobile customer service reps were trained to tell users who complained, "We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost."

But in an earnings call yesterday (see transcript), T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said it's no longer happening because feedback from angry subscribers showed it "isn't something that our customers are going to love."

Enlarge / Google Fiber Labs brings quick internet to early adopters. (credit: Google)

Google Fiber is still operating in a handful of cities, and now the bandwidth-rich are getting richer: Fiber plans to upgrade some users to outrageously fast 20Gbps service by the end of the year. Google's Wednesday blog post calls this part of a "GFiber Labs" experiment and says the service "will initially be available as an early access offering to a small group of GFiber customers in select areas."

The 20Gbps service is made possible by new networking gear: Nokia's 25G PON (passive optical network) technology, which lets Internet service providers push more bandwidth over existing fiber lines. Google says it's "one of the first" ISPs to adopt the technology for consumers, though at least one other US ISP, the Tennessee provider "EPB," has rolled out the technology. Customers will need new networking gear, too, and Google says you'll get a new fiber modem with built-in Wi-Fi 7.

Fierce Telecom spoke with Google's Nick Saporito, head of product at Google Fiber, who said, “We definitely see a need" for 20Gbps service. For now, Saporito says the service is "a very early adopter product," but it will eventually roll out "in most, if not all, of our markets."

Enlarge / Could the 12-inch MacBook make a return as some kind of "lower-cost MacBook"? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you want a Mac laptop, you usually need to be ready to spend at least $1,000. Whether we're talking about the white plastic MacBook from 2006, the 11-inch MacBook Air from a decade ago, or the modern M1 MacBook Air, the list price for Apple's cheapest MacBook is usually within $100 or so of that four-digit price barrier (not counting refurbished Macs or ones that go on sale).

Apple has a stated aversion to releasing less-expensive hardware just to hit an attractive price—"cheap is for other people because we try to build a better product," Apple marketing SVP Greg Joswiak told us a few years ago. But rumors of a low-cost MacBook pop up every few years, undeterred, usually conflating "entry-level" with "low-cost." Here's a prediction about an $800 MacBook from October 2008 (actual entry-level prices: $999 and $1,299). Here's analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and Bloomberg's Mark Gurman in 2018 predicting a MacBook Air "with a lower price tag" that would "reignite sales" (actual price: $1,199, $200 more than the previous MacBook Air).

This week, Kuo came back with an updated version of that same report, claiming that Apple "may also consider (but hasn't decided yet) introducing a more affordable MacBook model to boost shipments." Mac revenue and unit shipments have indeed been down year over year for a few quarters, though that has more to do with a pandemic- and Apple Silicon-fueled sales spike in 2021 and 2022 than anything (the revenue numbers are still on the high side of normal compared to 2019 and most of 2020).

Enlarge / Tory Bruno, ULA's chief executive, inside the company's rocket factory in Decatur, Alabama. (credit: Cameron Carnes for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

It sure sounds like United Launch Alliance is up for sale. Tory Bruno, the rocket builder's CEO, said this week that anyone who purchased ULA would reap the rewards of the company's "transformation" over the last few years, a course change primarily driven by geopolitics and the competitive threat of SpaceX.

While Bruno did not disclose details of any negotiations about a potential sale of ULA, he told Bloomberg News this week that the launch operator is primed for a buyer. Boeing and Lockheed Martin each have a 50 percent stake in the Colorado-based rocket company.

“If I were buying a space business, I’d go look at ULA,” Bruno said. “It’s already had all the hard work done through the transformation. You’re not buying a Victorian with bad plumbing. It’s all been done. You’re coming in at the end of the remodel, so you can focus on your future."