Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed raising the minimum definition of broadband to 100Mbps for downloads and 20Mbps for uploads. Engadget reports: The previous 25/3 benchmark is both outdated and hides just how many low-income and rural internet users are being "left behind and left offline," Rosenworcel said. The chair said multiple pieces of evidence supported the hike, including requirements for new network construction stemming from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The FCC had already proposed upgrades to rural speeds through a special program, but this would affect the definition of broadband regardless of where users live in the country.

Rosenworcel also wanted the minimum speed to evolve over time. She proposed setting a much higher standard of 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up for some point in the future. The leader further suggested more criteria for determining the "reasonable and timely" rollout of broadband, including adoption rates, affordability, availability and equitable access.

MIT's Technology Review shares data from a Facebook-run tool called CrowdTangle. It shows that by 2018 in the nation of Myanmar (population: 53 million), " All the engagement had instead gone to fake news and clickbait websites.

"In a country where Facebook is synonymous with the internet, the low-grade content overwhelmed other information sources." [T]he sheer volume of fake news and clickbait acted like fuel on the flames of already dangerously high ethnic and religious tensions. It shifted public opinion and escalated the conflict, which ultimately led to the death of 10,000 Rohingya, by conservative estimates, and the displacement of 700,000 more. In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted a genocide and that Facebook had played a "determining role" in the atrocities. Months later, Facebook admitted it hadn't done enough "to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence." Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a collection of internal documents provided to Congress and a consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have reaffirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: Facebook's algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, combined with its failure to prioritize content moderation outside the US and Europe, has fueled the spread of hate speech and misinformation, dangerously destabilizing countries around the world.

But there's a crucial piece missing from the story. Facebook isn't just amplifying misinformation.

The company is also funding it.

An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
Facebook pays them for permission to open their content within Facebook's app (where Facebook controls the advertising) rather than having users clickthrough to the publisher's own web site, reports Technology Review: Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform's design also didn't sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages — in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue. Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy — one they still use today... Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of U.S. dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary — paid to them directly by Facebook. An internal company document, first reported by MIT Technology Review in October, shows that Facebook was aware of the problem as early as 2019... At one point, as many as 60% of the domains enrolled in Instant Articles were using the spammy writing tactics employed by clickbait farms, the report said...

75% of users who were exposed to clickbait content from farms run in Macedonia and Kosovo had never followed any of the pages. Facebook's content-recommendation system had instead pushed it into their news feeds.
Technology Review notes that Facebook now pays billions of dollars to the publishers in their program. It's a long and detailed article, which ultimately concludes that the problem "is now happening on a global scale." Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook's payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale...

Google is also culpable. Its AdSense program fueled the Macedonia- and Kosovo-based farms that targeted American audiences in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. And it's AdSense that is incentivizing new clickbait actors on YouTube to post outrageous content and viral misinformation.
Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Technology Review that they'd misunderstood the issue. And the spokesperson also said "we've invested in building new expert-driven and scalable solutions to these complex issues for many years, and will continue doing so."

Google's spokesperson confirmed examples in the article violated their own policies and removed the content, adding "We work hard to protect viewers from clickbait or misleading content across our platforms and have invested heavily in systems that are designed to elevate authoritative information."

It's estimated there are 10.9 million digital nomads just in the U.S. — and two digital nomads writing for The Next Web point out they're just part of a larger trend. "As of 2021, there are over 35 million digital nomads

Are they also about to start changing the world? Digital nomads' growing numbers and financial clout have caused dozens of tourist-starved countries to update their travel policies for borderless workers. In Summer 2020, a handful of nations launched visa programs to attract digital nomads, starting with Estonia in June, then Barbados, Bermuda, Costa Rica, Anguilla, Antigua, and later, most of Eastern Europe. Now, 30+ nations offer some form of incentive for traveling remote workers. Sweetheart deals like income tax breaks, subsidized housing, and free multiple entry have become as popular as employee work benefits. The opportunities are so numerous, solutions exist just to help you "amenity shop" the perfect country Airbnb style...

Some ambitious nomads, like activist and author Lauren Razavi, have also started to advocate for their rights as global citizens and the future of borderless work... Remote workers like Lauren (and us) want to completely redefine the role governments play in digital nomads' movement and regulation. How? By laying the foundation for the next generation of travel and work, an internet country called Plumia... Plumia wants to build the alternative using decentralized technologies, while also working with countries and institutions on policies that achieve common goals... Begun in 2020 as an independent project by remote-first travel insurance company, SafetyWing, Plumia's plan is to combine the infrastructure for living anywhere with the functions of a geographic country...

Blockchain enthusiasts are also testing an approach that begs the question: are traditional countries still necessary? Bitnation advocates for decentralizing authority by empowering voluntary participation and peer-to-peer agreements. They've âhosted the world's first blockchain marriage, birth certificate, refugee emergency ID, and more as proof of concept... Currently in development, Plumia is focusing on developing member-focused services and content... Verifying a digital identity, maintaining a 'permanent address' whilst on the move, switching service providers and jurisdictions on the fly, complying with complicated tax and labor laws — these are all thorny issues to solve. Initiatives like Plumia are jumping into quite an active ring, however.

In addition to countries competing to serve and attract digital nomads, a number of well-financed startups such as Jobbatical, Remote, and Oyster are creating private-sector solutions to issues posed by people and companies going remote.

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation: As people around the world escape poverty, you might expect their energy use to increase. But my research in Nepal, Vietnam, and Zambia found the opposite: lower levels of deprivation were linked to lower levels of energy demand. What is behind this counterintuitive finding? [...] We found that households that do have access to clean fuels, safe water, basic education and adequate food -- that is, those not in extreme poverty -- can use as little as half the energy of the national average in their country. This is important, as it goes directly against the argument that more resources and energy will be needed for people in the global south to escape extreme poverty. The biggest factor is the switch from traditional cooking fuels, like firewood or charcoal, to more efficient (and less polluting) electricity and gas.

In Zambia, Nepal, and Vietnam, modern energy resources are extremely unfairly distributed -- more so than income, general spending, or even spending on leisure. As a consequence, poorer households use more dirty energy than richer households, with ensuing health and gender impacts. Cooking with inefficient fuels consumes a lot of energy, and even more when water needs to be boiled before drinking. But do households with higher incomes and more devices have a better chance of escaping poverty? Some do, but having higher incomes and mobile phones are not either prerequisites or guarantees of having basic needs satisfied. Richer households without access to electricity or sanitation are not spared from having malnourished children or health problems from using charcoal. Ironically, for most households, it is easier to obtain a mobile phone than a clean, nonpolluting fuel for cooking. Therefore, measuring progress via household income leads to an incomplete understanding of poverty and its deprivations.

So what? Are we arguing against the global south using more energy for development? No: instead of focusing on how much energy is used, we are pointing to the importance of collective services (like electricity, indoor sanitation and public transport) for alleviating the multiple deprivations of poverty. In addressing these issues we cannot shy away from asking why so many countries in the global south have such a low capacity to invest in those services. It has to do with the fact that poverty does not just happen: it is created via interlinked systems of wealth extraction such as structural adjustment, or high costs of servicing national debts. Given that climate change is caused by the energy use of a rich minority in the global north but the consequences are borne by the majority in the poorer global south, human development is not only a matter of economic justice but also climate justice. Investing in vital collective services underpins both.

Broadband use surged 30% to 40% during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, and even reached 60% in some areas, an industry group has concluded. CNET reports: The Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group released data this week that it gathered from internet service providers, broadband analytics firms, and networking companies that help deliver data. We all consumed more downstream data -- the flow from the internet to the home -- but upstream use grew faster. That's an important consideration given that most cable and DSL services offer much higher downstream capacity. All those videoconferences for work meetings and online schooling likely were involved in the upstream data traffic. "Some networks saw more than 300% increase in the amount of video conferencing traffic from February to October 2020," the report said.

Though the internet itself held up well overall, there are problems. "Rural and low-income households have struggled" with broadband access to online services, the report said, and some households suffered with older equipment that couldn't handle heavy traffic or the increase in networked devices in the home. If you're having problems at home, you should consider an Ethernet cable connection to your network router, upgrading to a mesh network with multiple network access points, upgrading your PC or phone, or paying for a faster internet connection if it's available.

Tim Wu coined the phrase "net neutrality". He's the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age , and Bloomberg calls him an "outspoken advocate for aggressive antitrust enforcement against U.S. technology giants."

They add that now the Columbia University media law professor "is joining the White House an adviser, signaling that the Biden administration is preparing to square off against the industry's biggest companies." Wu will join the National Economic Council as a special assistant on technology and competition policy, the White House said Friday. Wu's appointment elevates to a senior position in the administration a leading antitrust expert, favored by progressives, who has assailed the power of dominant tech companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Facebook Inc. Both companies were sued by U.S. antitrust enforcers last year for allegedly abusing their monopoly power...

After the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general sued Facebook in December, Wu wrote a column in the New York Times comparing Facebook's strategy of buying competitors to Standard Oil's tactics in the 19th century. "What the federal government and states are doing is reasserting a fundamental rule for all American business: You cannot simply buy your way out of competition," Wu wrote. "Facebook, led by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has taken that strategy to a smirking and egregious extreme, acquiring multiple companies to stifle the competitive threat they pose."

Wu joins the Biden administration as tech giants are grappling with a reckoning in Washington that could transform the industry. The Facebook lawsuit could lead to the breakup of the company, while the Justice Department's complaint against Google targets the heart of its business — Internet search. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations of Apple Inc. and Amazon... Wu argued in his book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, that rising concentration across the economy has led to concentrated wealth and power as well as radicalized politics that threatens American democracy.
A White House press briefing Friday included this response to a question about Biden's plans for big tech companies: The President has been clear — on the campaign, and, probably, more recently — that he stands up to the abuse of power, and that includes the abuse of power from big technology companies and their executives. And Tim will help advance the President's agenda, which includes addressing the economic and social challenges posed by the growing power of tech platforms; promoting competition and addressing monopoly and market power issues; expanding access to broadband for low-income and rural communities across the country...

We don't have new policy to announce here... Just that the President believes, as he's talked about before, that it's important to promote competition and address monopoly and market power issues.
Interestingly, last August Wu also wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "A TikTok Ban is Overdue," arguing that China's "extensive blocking, censorship and surveillance violate just about every principle of internet openness and decency. China keeps a closed and censorial internet economy at home while its products enjoy full access to open markets abroad..." The asymmetry is unfair and ought no longer be tolerated. The privilege of full internet access — the open internet — should be extended only to companies from countries that respect that openness themselves...

[China] bans not only most foreign competitors to its tech businesses but also foreign sources of news, religious instruction and other information, while using the internet to promote state propaganda and engage in foreign electoral interference... Few foreign companies are allowed to reach Chinese citizens with ideas or services, but the world is fully open to China's online companies...

The idealists who thought the internet would automatically create democracy in China were wrong. Some think that it is a tragic mistake for the United States to violate the principles of internet openness that were pioneered in this country. But there is also such a thing as being a sucker. If China refuses to follow the rules of the open internet, why continue to give it access to internet markets around the world...?

We need to wake up to the game we are playing when it comes to the future of the global internet. The idealists of the 1990s and early '00s believed that building a universal network, a kind of digital cosmopolitanism, would lead to world peace and harmony. No one buys that fantasy any longer. But if we want decency and openness to survive on the internet — surely a more attainable goal — the nations that hold such values need to begin fighting to protect them.

The share of Americans working more than one job to make ends meet has been growing over the past two decades, and the pay from second jobs make up a substantial share of workers' earnings, according to a paper published by the U.S. Commerce Department on Wednesday. From a report: An estimated 7.8% of U.S. workers had more than one job as of the first quarter of 2018, up from 6.8% in 1996, according to new data unveiled by the Census bureau, which provides a more detailed analysis of multiple job holders than was previously available. The findings were based on data from 18 states.

The earnings from the workers' second jobs make up an average 28% of their total earnings, showing that workers are likely relying on that pay, researchers said. In general, women were more likely to have multiple jobs than men, with 9.1% of women holding multiple jobs as of 2018, compared with 6.6% of men. They also noted that multiple-job holding occurred at all levels of income, but was more common for low-wage workers. Those juggling more than one occupation earned less, on average, than people who had only one job.

In March Andrew Yang's nonprofit gave $1,000 one-time grants to a thousand residents in the Bronx. This week a new article in the New Yorker asks one of those grant recipients how they feel about Yang's newest proposal as he runs to be New York's mayor: to give the city's public-housing residents billions of dollars in a "Borough Bucks" currency that would hopefully recirculate in the community: "I was like, you know, am I the only person here that would love to live in a society where we can actually barter our talents and skills, instead of depending on this economy that's not working for us?"

Yang made a similar point when I asked him about the origins of the Borough Bucks proposal. "If you're going to invest resources in a community, your preference is that the resources circulate within the community, particularly if you can serve multiple goals," he said. "They're just imaginative ways for communities to unlock resources."
The article also notes that in an earlier run for the U.S. presidency, "his pitch was that the economy needed to be modernized to account for automation and other technological advances. In his mayoral run, his pitch is that New York City should become the 'anti-poverty' city." But they explored the larger question of whether Yang sees a growing acceptance for universal basic incomes: I asked Yang about the debate, now happening in Congress, about whether Biden should push for fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks in the next bailout package, or two-thousand-dollar checks, or two thousand dollars a month until the economy rebounds. Yang said that he favored the last proposal.

I asked him how he felt about the fact that even as other candidates in the race were attacking him, several — Eric Adams, the former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and the City Council member Carlos Menchaca — had expressed interest in the U.B.I. policies he had championed. "I would love to check out their plans," Yang said. "It's an idea whose time has come. I'm certainly very proud to have contributed to the idea's popularity, but anyone who wants to adapt a version of it, like, fantastic."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The railroad tracks cut through Weyling White's boyhood backyard like an invisible fence. He would play there on sweltering afternoons, stacking rocks along the rails under the watch of his grandfather, who established a firm rule: Weyling wasn't to cross the right of way into the white part of town. The other side had nicer homes and parks, all the medical offices, and the town's only hospital. As a consequence, White said, his family mostly got by without regular care, relying on home remedies and the healing hands of the Baptist church. "There were no health care resources whatsoever," said White, 34. "You would see tons of worse health outcomes for people on those streets." The hard lines of segregation have faded in Ahoskie, a town of 5,000 people in the northeastern corner of the state. But in health care, a new force is redrawing those barriers: algorithms that blindly soak up and perpetuate historical imbalances in access to medical resources. A STAT investigation found that a common method of using analytics software to target medical services to patients who need them most is infusing racial bias into decision-making about who should receive stepped-up care. While a study published last year documented bias in the use of an algorithm in one health system, STAT found the problems arise from multiple algorithms used in hospitals across the country.

The bias is not intentional, but it reinforces deeply rooted inequities in the American health care system, effectively walling off low-income Black and Hispanic patients from services that less sick white patients routinely receive. These algorithms are running in the background of most Americans' interaction with the health care system. They sift data on patients' medical problems, prior health costs, medication use, lab results, and other information to predict how much their care will cost in the future and inform decisions such as whether they should get extra doctor visits or other support to manage their illnesses at home. The trouble is, these data reflect long-standing racial disparities in access to care, insurance coverage, and use of services, leading the algorithms to systematically overlook the needs of people of color in ways that insurers and providers may fail to recognize.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Facebook plans to donate 720,000 masks — a combination of the coveted N95 respirators and more basic surgical masks — and 1.5 million pairs of gloves to health care workers around the world. Facebook officials said they bought the masks for their offices' emergency disaster kits following wildfires in California. Facebook has already donated 375,000 masks and 867,000 pairs of gloves to county officials in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, who are expected to distribute them to hospitals...

Facebook also said it has donated $650,000 worth of food to more than a dozen Bay Area senior centers, schools and other organizations, including Food Runners SF, Peninsula Volunteers Meals on Wheels and the East Palo Alto Senior Center. Meanwhile, the company sent $250,000 to the Sequoia Union High School District in San Mateo County to pay for 2,000 Wi-Fi hotspots and a year of Wi-Fi for low-income students who need to complete their work online during shelter in place but don't have a reliable connection.

The company, which is the dominant employer in its headquarters city but also has large offices in San Francisco, Mountain View and other Bay Area cities, also pledged to give $500,000 to multiple homelessness prevention organizations in the Bay Area — and promised more local support.
The article notes America's scarcity of masks and other gear "became so dire in Washington state that medical workers made 500 masks out of vinyl, tape, foam and elastic purchased at Home Depot."

And it also has an update on how other companies are pitching in around America. "[F]actories that crank out cars and trucks were looking into making much-needed ventilators. Distilleries intended for beer, whiskey and rum transformed to instead turn out hand sanitizers and disinfectants. And an electronics maker that builds display screens was repurposed for surgical masks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Enterprise information management (EIM) company OpenText is acquiring cloud data backup and protection service Carbonite in a deal worth $1.42 billion. Carbonite, which offers a number of data backup and protection services for consumers and businesses, had become the subject of significant takeover rumors over the past few months after its revenue dropped. CEO Mohamad Ali stepped down in July and was replaced on an interim basis by board chair Steve Munford.

Carbonite's announcement was timed to coincide with its Q3 2019 financials, which revealed a net loss of $14 million, compared to a small net income of $600,000 during the same period last year. Founded in 1991, OpenText is among Canada's biggest software companies, specializing in helping enterprises manage all their content and unstructured data in the cloud or on-premises. The company has made a number of other notable acquisitions in the recent past, including Dell EMC's enterprise content division, which it bought for $1.6 billion in 2017, and file-sharing service Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, which it bought for an undisclosed amount last year. OpenText hasn't offered any specifics around how it will leverage Carbonite's technology post-acquisition. But the latter's focus on backing up and protecting data stored in the cloud makes it easy to imagine the two platforms complementing each other as a growing number of businesses migrate to the cloud. "Following expressions of interest from multiple parties, the Carbonite board conducted a thorough and comprehensive process, which included contact with a number of strategic and financial parties, to identify the best way to maximize shareholder value," Munford said in a press release. "The board strongly believes that a transaction with OpenText delivers compelling, immediate, and substantial cash value to shareholders."

New submitter Bruce Henry shares a story: Today's aging workforce faces an uncertain future. The announcement this week that General Motors will lay off 15 percent of its salaried workforce and shutter multiple plants in North America was a sobering reminder of how far the American worker has fallen. Unlike most large private sector corporations today, thousands of employees at GM still enjoy some union benefits. The company has reportedly set aside $2 billion for layoffs and buyouts. It's not much, but it's something -- many workers, if they are laid off en masse, will be far less lucky. Some older Americans are lucky enough to have been grandfathered into generous pension plans and others hope social security and personal savings will be enough to sustain themselves. But for millions of younger people, the outlook is bleaker -- an ever-diminishing social safety net, with retirement dependent almost entirely on how well they manage savings. Two-thirds of millennials have nothing saved for retirement.

The private sector pension as we once knew it is all but dead. Public sector pensions, meanwhile, are under attack at the state level. "Companies don't offer pensions anymore. Social security, when it was established, was meant to be one leg of a stool," says Gerald Friedman, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "One leg would be the private pension through employment, a second leg personal savings, and a third leg social security. Social security is now the only source of income of a lot elderly have." What, if anything, are our politicians doing about this? Progressives rail against President Donald Trump, but real retirement security has not been a big enough part of the conversation on either side of the political spectrum. Millions of Americans are in danger of entering their final decades unable to afford ballooning medical bills and cost-of-living expenses. This is a huge problem, and one that liberals in particular should have capitalized on this election cycle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Best known for its Viking history, snow sports and jaw-dropping fjords, Norway is making a new name for itself as the only major economy in Europe where young people are getting markedly richer. People in their early thirties in Norway have an average annual disposable household income of around 460,000 kroner (around $56,200). Young Norwegians have enjoyed a 13% rise in disposable household income in real terms compared to Generation X (those born between 1966 and 1980) when they were the same age. These startling figures come from the largest comparative wealth data set in the world, the Luxembourg Income Database, and were analyzed in a recent report on generational incomes for the UK Think Tank The Resolution Foundation.

Compare this with young people in other strong economies: U.S. millennials have experienced a 5% dip, in Germany it's a 9% drop. For those living in southern Europe (the southern Eurozone suffered the brunt of the global economic crisis in 2008), disposable incomes have plunged by as much as 30%. Norway's youth unemployment rate (among 15- to 29-year-olds) is also relatively low at 9.4% compared to an OECD average of 13.9%. According to the BBC, this can be attributed to the country's rapid economic growth, thanks largely to their huge oil and gas sectors. "After seeing the biggest increase in average earnings of any large high-income economy between 1980 and 2013, it now leads multiple global rankings for wealth and wellbeing."

Long-time Slashdot reader speedplane writes: Yes, we've all heard that net neutrality is on its way out, and it seems NPR was able to snag one of the few (the only?) interview's of Ajit Pai on its effect. Sadly, NPR's Rachel Martin stuck to very broad and basic questions, and failed to press Pai on the change of policy. That said, it's worth a listen.
Pai insists that "We saw companies like Facebook, and Amazon and Google become global powerhouses precisely because we had light-touch rules that applied to this Internet. The Internet wasn't broken in 2015 when these heavy-handed regulations were adopted, and once we remove them, I think we'll continue to see the infrastructure investment that will benefit digital consumers and entrepreneurs alike... I've talked to a lot of companies that say, look, we want to be able to invest in these networks, especially in rural and low-income urban areas, but the more heavy-handed the regulations are, the less likely we can build a business case for doing it."

But New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says he's spent six months investigating "a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC's notice and comment process" for net neutrality, adding that "the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence." (Nine requests over five months were ignored.) And now over 65,000 people have signed a new online petition at WhiteHouse.gov calling for the immediate removal of Ajit Pai as the FCC's chairman, calling him "a threat to our freedoms."

Meanwhile, The Verge has compiled "a list of the lawmakers who voted to betray you," with each listing also including "how much money they received from the telecom industry in their most recent election cycle."

You asked, he answered!

Lithium-ion battery inventor John B. Goodenough has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced today that the FCC will be "dropping its legal defense of a new system for expanding broadband subsidies for poor people, and will not approve applications from companies that want to offer the low-income broadband service," reports Ars Technica. The Lifeline program, which has been around for 32 years and "gives poor people $9.25 a month toward communications services," was voted to be expanded last year under FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. That expansion will now be halted. Ars Technica reports: Pai's decision won't prevent Lifeline subsidies from being used toward broadband, but it will make it harder for ISPs to gain approval to sell the subsidized plans. Last year's decision enabled the FCC to approve new Lifeline Broadband Providers nationwide so that ISPs would not have to seek approval from each state's government. Nine providers were approved under the new system late in former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's term, but Pai rescinded those approvals in February. There are 36 pending applications from ISPs before the commission's Wireline Competition Bureau. However, Pai wrote today, "I do not believe that the Bureau should approve these applications." He argues that only state governments have authority from Congress to approve such applications. When defending his decision to revoke Lifeline approvals for the nine companies, Pai said last month that more than 900 Lifeline providers were not affected. But most of those were apparently offering subsidized telephone service only and not subsidized broadband. Currently, more than 3.5 million Americans are receiving subsidized broadband through Lifeline from 259 eligible providers, Pai said in today's statement. About 99.6 percent of Americans who get subsidized broadband through Lifeline buy it from one of the companies that received certification "through a lawful process," Pai wrote. The remaining 0.4 percent apparently need to switch providers or lose service because of Pai's February decision. Only one ISP had already started providing the subsidized service under the new approval, and it was ordered to notify its customers that they can no longer receive Lifeline discounts. Pai's latest action would prevent new providers from gaining certification in multiple states at once, forcing them to go through each state's approval process separately. Existing providers that want to expand to multiple states would have to complete the same state-by-state process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Daily Dot: The more social media you use, the higher the likelihood that you'll be anxious or depressed. At least according to the University of Pittsburgh Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health. In a study published online this month with more than 1,700 millennial adults, it found people who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression or anxiety than millennials who use zero to two platforms. The participants were asked about the most popular social media platforms in 2014, the year the study was conducted, which included Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine, and LinkedIn. Those who used more than seven platforms showed higher levels of depressive symptoms, even when researchers controlled for factors like race, gender, relationship status, household income, education, and total time spent on social media. Brian A. Primack, lead author of the study, notes that the correlation is not certain. He told PsyPost: "It may be that people who suffer from symptoms of depression or anxiety, or both, tend to subsequently use a broader range of social media outlets. For example, they may be searching out multiple avenues for a setting that feels comfortable and accepting. However, it could also be that trying to maintain a presence on multiple platforms may actually lead to depression and anxiety. More research will be needed to tease that apart."

HughPickens.com writes: Ann Carrns reports at the NYT that despite a push by financial institutions to switch customers to digital statements from paper, the traditional hard-copy version may work better for some people, in particuar particular, older, less educated and lower-income consumers who may lack fast Internet connections at home. According to a new report from the National Consumer Law Center, even consumers who know the Internet may simply prefer paper, because statement notifications can easily be overlooked in a deluge of email. Also unlike paper statements, which can be neatly collected and filed away, going paperless on multiple accounts will mean having that information scattered under different user names and passwords. You may also be surprised to learn you have to pay for copies of some older statements. "If you have a system for organizing your paper statements, you should think about how that's going to translate online," says Jim Bruene. Finally you may not be able to go back as far with paperless statements. At Verizon, cellphone customers get up to 12 months of past statements. Customers can also request older statements dating back seven years for $5 per copy.

Under federal law, banks must obtain consent from consumers to deliver statements electronically. But banks are sometimes aggressive in encouraging customers to opt out of receiving paper statements. Last summer, holders of some Chase credit cards received pop-up ads when they logged into their accounts online, asking them to switch to electronic statements. The notice said "Action Required," even though no action was necessary if cardholders simply wanted to continue receiving paper statements. The screen showed buttons for "accept" and "manage my preferences," but not for "decline."

Last week you had the chance to ask electrical engineer and L5 society co-founder Keith Henson about space colonization, his solar power satellite project, and his run-ins with Scientology. Below you'll find his answers to your questions.

A while ago you had the chance to ask programmer and open source advocate Bruce Perens about the future of open source, its role in government, and a number of other questions. Below you'll find his answers and an update on what he's doing now.