November 27, 2023 – Broadcom, a semiconductor and infrastructure solution company, announced Wednesday that it has finalized its $69-billion acquisition of VMware, a cloud computing company.

Broadcom will offer modernized VMware cloud services to enterprise customers, which will assist in helping applications deploy more efficiently and improve advanced security services, explained a press release.

“We are excited to welcome VMware to Broadcom and bring together our engineering-first, innovation-centric teams as we take another important step forward in building the world’s leading infrastructure technology company,” said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan.

Broadcom initially announced its intention to acquire VMware in May 2022, and underwent the process of receiving regulatory approvals from countries including  Australia, Brazil and Canada.

Wilkes gets $191M to complete rural broadband rollout

Internet service provider Wilkes Communications and its subsidiary RiverStreet Networks announced November 20 that they have secured a $191.1-million private loan to complete its rural broadband expansion in North Carolina and Virginia.

The financing comes from CoBank, which has a specific stream for rural broadband projects.

The fiber expansion project is expected to reach and service 100,000 locations by the time it is completed with a goal being to replace the remaining Wilkes infrastructure that relies on copper with fiber, read a press release.

“With this substantial financial backing, we are ready to break down barriers and bring the digital future within reach for even the most remote regions of North Carolina and Virginia,” said Wilkes Communications CEO Eric Cramer.

Wilkes has already received $270 million in funding from federal, state and local grants, which will go toward supplementing the loan from CoBank.

Kinetic lays out plan for Georgia buildout

Internet service provider Kinetic announced Tuesday its plan to rollout fiber to more than 70 percent of Colquitt County, Georgia in 2024.

The buildout will include nearly 440 miles of fiber – of which 180 has already been installed – meaning nearly 17,000 homes and 7,400 more customers will get fiber, the company said.

Kinetic said it is working with Colquitt Electric Membership Corp. to complete the $32.5-million fiber network, which includes $21.4 million in state money from the Local Fiscal Recovery Funds Program, which was backed by American Rescue Plan funds, and the remaining $11.1 million will come from Kinetic itself.

“We believe this transformation will open up new opportunities, including enhancing people’s qualities of life and driving economic growth,” said Michael Foor, president of Kinetic Georgia Operations, in the press release.

The company said currently 40 percent of the county is currently eligible to receive their fiber services.

November 22, 2023 – OpenAI announced in an X post early Wednesday morning that Sam Altman will be re-joining the company that built ChatGPT as CEO after he was fired on Friday. 

Altman confirmed his intention to rejoin OpenAI in an X post Wednesday morning, saying that he was looking forward to returning to OpenAI with support from the new board.

Former company president Greg Brockman also said Wednesday he will return to the AI company.

Altman and Brockman will join with a newly formed board, which includes former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as the chair, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who previously held a position on the OpenAI board.

Satya Nadella, the CEO of OpenAI backer Microsoft, echoed support for both Brockman and Altman rejoining OpenAI, adding that he is looking forward to continuing building a relationship with the OpenAI team in order to best deliver AI services to customers. 

OpenAI received backlash from several hundred employees who threatened to leave and join Microsoft under Altman and Brockman unless the current board of directors agreed to resign.  

Tech CEOs subpoenaed to attend hearing

Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, and Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, announced Monday that tech giants Snap, Discord and X have been issued subpoenas for their appearance at the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6 in relation to concerns over child sexual exploitation online. 

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Discord CEO Jason Citron have been asked to address how or if they’ve worked to confront that issue. 

Durbin said in a press release that the committee “promised Big Tech that they’d have their chance to explain their failures to protect kids. Now’s that chance. Hearing from the CEOs of some of the world’s largest social media companies will help inform the Committee’s efforts to address the crisis of online child sexual exploitation.” 

Durbin noted in a press release that both X and Discord refused to initially accept subpoenas, which required the US Marshal Service to personally deliver those respective documents. 

The committee is looking to have Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testify as well but have not received confirmation regarding their attendance.  

Several bipartisan bills have been brought forth to address that kind of exploitation, including the Earn It Act, proposed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut, and Graham, which holds them liable under child sexual abuse material laws. 

EFF urging FTC to sanction sellers of malware-containing devices

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group, have asked the Federal Trade Commission in a letter on November 14 to sanction resellers like Amazon and AliExpress following allegations mobile devices and Android TV boxes purchased from their stores contain malware.

The letter explained that once the devices were turned on and connected to the internet,  they would begin “communicating with botnet command and control (C2) servers. From there, these devices connect to a vast click-fraud network which a report by HUMAN Security recently dubbed BADBOX.”

The EFF added that this malware is often operating unbeknownst to the consumer, and without advanced technical knowledge, there is nothing they can do to remedy it themselves.

“These devices put buyers at risk not only by the click-fraud they routinely take part in, but also the fact that they facilitate using the buyers’ internet connections as proxies for the malware manufacturers or those they sell access to,” explained the letter. 

EFF said that the devices containing malware included ones manufactured by Chinese companies AllWinner and RockChip, who have been reported on for sending out products with malware before by EFF.

November 20, 2023 – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced in an X post Monday that former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will be joining Microsoft after being fired from the machine learning company. 

Over the course of the last four days, OpenAI has undergone several shifts in leadership, which includes OpenAI investor Microsoft acquiring OpenAI president and chairman Greg Brockman to lead an AI research team alongside Altman. 

Brockman, who had been concurrently relieved from his role as chairman of the OpenAI board, announced his resignation Friday via X, upon learning that the board had decided to fire Altman. 

OpenAI said in a blog post Friday that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

OpenAI then notified The Information Saturday that Emmett Shear, co-founder of streaming site Twitch, would serve as CEO after having CTO Mira Murati serve that role in the interim.  

Following Nadella’s announcement Monday morning, nearly 500 of the 700 OpenAI employees were signatories to a letter threatening to leave their roles to work under Altman and Brockman at Microsoft unless all of the current board members resign. 

As of Monday, OpenAI board member Ilya Sutskever posted a message of regret on X regarding the board decision to remove Altman and Brockman. The phrase “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” is now emerging from employee’s X accounts.  

FCC announces new national broadband map

The head of the Federal Communication Commission announced Friday the third iteration of its national broadband map, showing just over 7.2 million locations lack access to high-speed internet. 

That is less than the 8.3 million identified in May.   

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel noted that map data continue to fluctuate less between iterations, showing improvements in map accuracy. 

Previous iterations of the national broadband map had been criticized for not accurately depicting areas with and without service, with widespread concern that that would impact the allocation of Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment funding. 

The map outlines where adequate broadband service is and is not available throughout the nation and provides viewers with information on the providers who service those areas and the technology used to do so. 

Providers form spectrum advocacy coalition 

A group of telecom industry players including Verizon and T-Mobile announced Thursday the formation of the Coalition for Emergency Response and Critical Infrastructure to advocate for select use of the 4.9 GigaHertz (GHz) spectrum band. 

The coalition is in support of prioritizing state and local public safety agencies as main users of the 4.9 GHz band, while ensuring that non-public safety licensees operate on the band to avoid interference. 

“Public Safety agencies have vastly different needs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and they should decide what compatible non-public-safety use means within their jurisdictions,” read the coalition’s letter.  

In January of this year, the FCC adopted a report to manage the use of the 4.9 GHz band, while seeking comment on the role a band manager would play in facilitating license allocation between public safety and non-public safety entities. 

It had proposed two methods of operation for the band manager in which it would either lease access rights from public-safety entities and then sublease that to non-public safety entities, or to facilitate direct subleasing between public safety operators and external parties. 

In its letter to the FCC, the coalition announced support for the second of those methods stressing the fact that it will allow public safety license holders retain authority over who they sublease their spectrum to.