Simon Sharwood reports via The Register: Amazon Web Services has announced the WorkSpaces Thin Client -- a device dedicated to connecting to its WorkSpaces desktop-as-a service offering and based on Amazon's own "Fire Cube" smart TV box. The $195 machine has the same hardware as the Fire Cube: the eight-core Arm-powered Amlogic POP1-G SoC, plus 2GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 10/100 ethernet, and a single USB-A 2.0 port. Bluetooth is included to connect other peripherals. A second HDMI output can be added by acquiring an $85 hub that also offers four more USB ports. Like the Fire TV Cube, the Thin Client also runs a modified cut of Android.

But there the similarities end. AWS created custom firmware and ripped out anything remotely related to running a consumer device, replacing it with software designed solely to create a secure connection between the device and desktops running in the Amazonian cloud. Amazon Business -- the B2B version of Jeff Bezos's digital souk -- will ship the device to your door, and charge it to your AWS bill. At least if you are in the USA. Europe will get the Thin Client in early 2024, and it'll eventually migrate elsewhere.

AWS decided to base the box on the Fire Cube because, according to a corporate blog post, AWS customers expressed a desire for cheaper and easier-to-maintain client devices. As AWS execs searched for a well-priced box, they considered the Fire TV Cube, found it fit the bill and noted it was already being made at scale. Keeping things in-house made sense, too. And so we find ourselves with AWS taking on established thin client providers. The cloudy concern is also keen to have a crack at the thick wedge of the enterprise PC market: call centers, payment processing centers, and other environments with lots of users and high staff turnover due to factors like seasonal demand for workers.

Amazon has grabbed the crown of biggest delivery business in the U.S., surpassing both UPS and FedEx in parcel volumes. From a report: The Seattle e-commerce giant delivered more packages to U.S. homes in 2022 than UPS, after eclipsing FedEx in 2020, and it is on track to widen the gap this year, according to internal Amazon data and people familiar with the matter. The U.S. Postal Service is still the biggest parcel service by volume; it handles hundreds of millions of packages for all three companies. A decade ago Amazon was a major customer for UPS and FedEx, and some executives from the incumbents and analysts mocked the notion that it could someday supplant them. Amazon's outsize growth combined with strategy shifts at FedEx and UPS have changed the balance.

Before Thanksgiving this year, Amazon had already delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S., and its internal projections predict that it will deliver around 5.9 billion by the end of the year, according to documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Last year Amazon shipped 5.2 billion packages. Amazon's figures include only packages that Amazon shipped from beginning to end. UPS and FedEx include packages they hand off to the postal service for final delivery in their tallies. UPS has said that its domestic volume this year is unlikely to exceed last year's 5.3 billion, which includes packages delivered to customers through the postal service. In the first nine months this year, UPS handled around 3.4 billion parcels domestically.

The United States, Britain and more than a dozen other countries on Sunday unveiled what a senior U.S. official described as the first detailed international agreement on how to keep AI safe from rogue actors, pushing for companies to create AI systems that are "secure by design." From a report: In a 20-page document unveiled Sunday, the 18 countries agreed that companies designing and using AI need to develop and deploy it in a way that keeps customers and the wider public safe from misuse. The agreement is non-binding and carries mostly general recommendations such as monitoring AI systems for abuse, protecting data from tampering and vetting software suppliers.

Still, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, said it was important that so many countries put their names to the idea that AI systems needed to put safety first. "This is the first time that we have seen an affirmation that these capabilities should not just be about cool features and how quickly we can get them to market or how we can compete to drive down costs," Easterly told Reuters, saying the guidelines represent "an agreement that the most important thing that needs to be done at the design phase is security."

America's census bureau looked at how many people relocated into each state from another state, compared to the total number of people making a move in that state. The state with the lowest "inmigration" ratio? California.

From 2021 through 2022, "California's inmigration rate was 11.1% last year..." reports SFGate. "For comparison, nearby Oregon had a inmigration rate of 21%."

But the census bureau cautions that California — America's most populous state — "also had a relatively large base of movers overall" — over 4 million — which could help explain its low ratio in several statistics. SFGate reports: California's outmigration rate — defined as the "number of people moving out of a state as a share of that state's total number of movers" — was also below the national migration average. Texas had the country's lowest outmigration rate, at 11.7%, according to the Census Bureau's analysis.
California and Texas are America's two most populous states. (The total population of California is 39 million — roughly 11.7% of America's population — while Texas has another 30 million. Oregon's population is just 4,240,137.) Interestingly, most people moving to California arrived from... Texas. (44,279). At the same time, 102,422 people moved from California to Texas, with another 74,157 moving from California to Arizona.

New York state also lost 91,201 people to Florida, and another 75,103 people to New Jersey. The second-highest number of people (31,225) who moved from a different state to California came from New York...

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, California saw a net loss of 340,000 residents between 2021 and 2022, with most of the people who left heading to Florida or Arizona.

AI employed by the U.S. military "has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces' missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia," reports the Associated Press.

But that's the beginning. AI also "tracks soldiers' fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space." Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to "galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August. While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy — including on weaponized systems.'

There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles. That's especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.

America's long-standing Advanced Research Projects Agency (or ARPA) developed the foundational technologies for the internet.

This week its energy division announced $42 million for projects enabling a "more secure and reliable" energy grid, "allowing it to utilize more solar, wind, and other clean energy." But specifically, they funded 15 projects across 11 states to improve the reliability, resiliency, and flexibility of the grid "through the next-generation semiconductor technologies." Streamlining the coordinated operation of electricity supply and demand will improve operational efficiency, prevent unforeseen outages, allow faster recovery, minimize the impacts of natural disasters and climate-change fueled extreme weather events, and redcude grid operating costs and carbon intensity.
Some highlights:

• The Georgia Institute of Technology will develop a novel semiconductor switching device to improve grid control, resilience, and reliability.
• Michigan's Great Lakes Crystal Technologies (will develop a diamond semiconductor transistor to support the control infrastructure needed for an energy grid with more distributed generation sources and more variable loads
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will develop an optically-controlled semiconductor transistor to enable future grid control systems to accommodate higher voltage and current than state-of-the-art devices.
• California's Opcondys will develop a light-controlled grid protection device to suppress destructive, sudden transient surges on the grid caused by lightning or electromagnetic pulses.
• Albuquerque's Sandia National Laboratories will develop novel a solid-state surge arrester protecting the grid from very fast electromagnetic pulses that threaten grid reliability and performance.

America's Secretary of Energy said the new investment "will support project teams across the country as they develop the innovative technologies we need to strengthen our grid security and bring reliable clean electricity to more families and businesses — all while combatting the climate crisis."

The office sector's credit crunch is intensifying. By one measure, it's now worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. From a report: Only one out of every three securitized office mortgages that expired during the first nine months of 2023 was paid off by the end of September, according to Moody's Analytics. That is the smallest share for the first nine months of any year since at least 2008 and well below the nadir reached in 2009, when 47% of these loans got paid off. That share is also well below the rate before the pandemic, when more than eight out of every 10 maturing securitized office mortgages were paid back in some years.

While the numbers cover only office mortgages packaged into bonds -- so-called commercial mortgage-backed securities -- they reflect a broader freeze in the lending market for office buildings. Many office owners can't pay back their old loans because they can't get new mortgages. Remote work and rising vacancies have hit building profits, making it harder to pay interest. Higher interest rates have pushed debt costs up and building values down. That combination is fueling a rise in defaults. The share of office CMBS loans that are delinquent has tripled over the past year to 5.75%, according to Trepp. It doesn't help that many banks no longer issue new office loans and that many insurance companies and debt funds have become more cautious.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A group of Russian-state hackers known for almost exclusively targeting Ukranian entities has branched out in recent months either accidentally or purposely by allowing USB-based espionage malware to infect a variety of organizations in other countries. The group -- known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm -- has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia's Federal Security Service by the Security Service of Ukraine. Most Kremlin-backed groups take pains to fly under the radar; Gamaredon doesn't care to. Its espionage-motivated campaigns targeting large numbers of Ukrainian organizations are easy to detect and tie back to the Russian government. The campaigns typically revolve around malware that aims to obtain as much information from targets as possible.

One of those tools is a computer worm designed to spread from computer to computer through USB drives. Tracked by researchers from Check Point Research as LitterDrifter, the malware is written in the Visual Basic Scripting language. LitterDrifter serves two purposes: to promiscuously spread from USB drive to USB drive and to permanently infect the devices that connect to such drives with malware that permanently communicates with Gamaredon-operated command and control servers. "Gamaredon continues to focus on [a] wide variety [of] Ukrainian targets, but due to the nature of the USB worm, we see indications of possible infection in various countries like USA, Vietnam, Chile, Poland and Germany," Check Point researchers reported recently. "In addition, we've observed evidence of infections in Hong Kong. All this might indicate that much like other USB worms, LitterDrifter [has] spread beyond its intended targets."

The image [here], tracking submissions of LitterDrifter to the Alphabet-owned VirusTotal service, indicates that the Gamaredon malware may be infecting targets well outside the borders of Ukraine. VirusTotal submissions usually come from people or organizations that encounter unfamiliar or suspicious-looking software on their networks and want to know if it's malicious. The data suggests that the number of infections in the US, Vietnam, Chile, Poland, and Germany combined may be roughly half of those hitting organizations inside Ukraine.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In recent years, lots of American companies have gotten behind a potential climate solution called carbon capture and storage, and the Biden administration has backed it with billions of dollars in tax incentives and direct investments. The idea is to trap planet-heating carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of factories and power plants and transport it to sites where it is injected underground and stored. But the idea is controversial, in large part because the captured carbon dioxide would be shipped to storage sites via thousands of miles of new pipelines. Communities nationwide are pushing back against these pipeline projects and underground sites, arguing they don't want the pollution running through their land.

Now the U.S. Forest Service is proposing to change a rule to allow storing this carbon dioxide pollution under the country's national forests and grasslands. "Authorizing carbon capture and storage on NFS lands would support the Administration's goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent below the 2005 levels by 2030," the proposed rule change says. But environmental groups and researchers have concerns. Carbon dioxide pollution will still need to be transported to the forests via industrial pipeline for storage, says June Sekera, a research fellow with Boston University. "To get the CO2 to the injection site in the midst of our national forest, they've got to build huge pipelines," Sekera says. "All this huge industrial infrastructure that's going to go right through." Sekera says building those CO2 pipelines may require clearing a lot of trees.

The chief executive of Binance, the largest global cryptocurrency exchange, plans to step down and plead guilty to violating criminal U.S. anti-money laundering requirements, in a deal that may preserve the company's ability to continue operating, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Changpeng Zhao is scheduled to appear in Seattle federal court Tuesday afternoon and enter his plea, the people said. Binance, which Zhao owns, will also plead guilty to a criminal charge and agree to pay fines totaling $4.3 billion, which includes amounts to settle civil allegations made by regulators, the people said. The deal would end long-running investigations of Binance. [...] The deal would allow Zhao to retain his majority ownership of Binance, although he won't be able to have an executive role at the company. He would face sentencing at a later date.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reviewing a cutting-edge therapy called exa-cel that could potentially cure people of sickle cell disease, a painful and deadly disease with no universally successful treatment. "If approved, exa-cel, made by Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals and the Swiss company CRISPR Therapeutics, would be the first FDA-approved treatment that uses genetic modification called CRISPR," reports CNN. From the report: CRISPR, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a technology researchers use to selectively modify DNA, the carrier of genetic information that the body uses to function and develop. [...] The new exa-cel treatment under FDA consideration can use the patient's own stem cells. Doctors would alter them with CRISPR to fix the genetic problems that cause sickle cell, and then the altered stem cells are given back to the patient in a one-time infusion.

In company studies, the treatment was considered safe, and it had a "highly positive benefit-risk for patients with severe sickle cell disease," Dr. Stephanie Krogmeier, vice president for global regulatory affairs with Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated, told the panel. Thirty-nine of the 40 people tested with the treatment did not have a single vaso-occlusive crisis, which means the misshapen red blood cells block normal circulation and can cause moderate to severe pain. It's the top reason patients with sickle cell go to the emergency room or are hospitalized. Before the treatment, patients experienced about four of these painful crises a year, resulting in about two weeks in the hospital.

The FDA sought the independent panel's advice, in part, because this would be the first time the FDA would approve a treatment that uses CRISPR technology, but Dr. Fyodor Urnov, a professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, reminded the committee CRISPR has been around for 30 years and, in that time, scientists have learned a lot about how to use it safely. "The technology is, in fact, ready for primetime," Urnov said. With this kind of genetic editing, scientists could inadvertently make a change to a patient's DNA that is off-target, and the therapy could harm the patient. [...] The FDA is expected to make an approval decision by December 8.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program's legality. According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans' calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.

The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs' departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T's infrastructure -- a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had "serious concerns about the legality" of the DAS program, adding that "troubling information" he'd received "would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress." That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered "sensitive but unclassified" by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator's letter. AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson said only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena. However, "there is no law requiring AT&T to store decades' worth of Americans' call records for law enforcement purposes," notes Wired. "Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T's voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance."

"The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient's names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time." It's unclear exactly how far back the call records accessible under DAS go, although a slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that they can be queried for up to 10 years.

The US Justice Department is seeking more than $4 billion from Binance as part of a proposed resolution of a years-long investigation into the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. From a report: Negotiations between the Justice Department and Binance include the possibility that its founder Changpeng Zhao would face criminal charges in the US under an agreement to resolve the probe into alleged money laundering, bank fraud and sanctions violations, according to people familiar with the discussions. Zhao, also known as "CZ," is residing in the United Arab Emirates, which doesn't have an extradition treaty with the US, but that doesn't prevent him from coming voluntarily. An announcement could come as soon as the end of the month, though the situation remains fluid, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

There's been predictions that a transition to electric vehicles would hurt autoworkers. But this week U.S. autoworkers ended their strike after winning "significant gains in pay and benefits," reports the Associated Press: The United Auto Workers union overwhelmingly ratified new contracts with Ford and Stellantis, that along with a similar deal with General Motors will raise pay across the industry, force automakers to absorb higher costs and help reshape the auto business as it shifts away from gasoline-fueled vehicles...

The companies agreed to dramatically raise pay for top-scale assembly plant workers, with increases and cost-of-living adjustments that would translate into 33% wage gains. Top assembly plant workers are to receive immediate 11% raises and will earn roughly $42 an hour when the contracts expire in April of 2028. Under the agreements, the automakers also ended many of the multiple tiers of wages they had used to pay different workers.

They also agreed in principle to bring new electric-vehicle battery plants into the national union contract. This provision will give the UAW an opportunity to unionize the EV battery plants plants, which will represent a rising share of industry jobs in the years ahead.
In October the union's president criticized what had been the original trajectory of the auto industry. "The plan was to draw down engine and transmission plants, and permanently replace them with low-wage battery jobs. We had a different plan. And our plan is winning."

And this week the union's president said they had not only "raised wages dramatically for over a hundred thousand workers" — and improved their retirement security. "We took a major step towards ensuring a just transition to electric vehicles."

In Belvidere, Illinois, the union "won a commitment from Stellantis to reopen a shuttered factory and even add an EV battery plant," the Associated Press notes.

"The new contract agreements were widely seen as a victory for the UAW," their article adds — and perhaps even for other autoworkers. After the UAW's president announced plans to try unionizing other plants, three foreign automakers in the U.S. — Honda, Toyota and Hyundai — "quickly responded to the UAW contract by raising wages for their factory workers."

"At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth," reports the New York Times magazine, "including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris."

The article notes a threat assessment from U.S. Space Force Chief Master Sergeant Ron Lerch: What's most concerning isn't the swarm of satellites but the types. "We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles," Lerch said — for example, a Russian "nesting doll" satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia's, is launching unmanned "space planes" into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding A.I. capabilities to satellites.

An intelligence report, Lerch said, predicted the advent, within the next decade, of satellites with radio-frequency jammers, chemical sprayers and lasers that blind and disable the competition. All this would be in addition to the cyberwarfare tools, electromagnetic instruments and "ASAT" antisatellite missiles that already exist on the ground. In Lerch's assessment, space looked less like a grand "new ocean" for exploration — phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration — and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward.
One interesting detail from the article. "[I]f a requirement to 'blind and deafen' an enemy's satellites were to arise from U.S. Space Command, the Space Force could help fulfill the order. The means would most likely not be "kinetic" — some form of physical or explosive contact — but electronic, a weapon of code-related stealth, or perhaps a kind of debilitating high-energy burst."

And Space Force's highest-ranking officer, General Chance Saltzman, describes the kind of new military calculations made, for example, when Ukraine moved its communications to Starlink satellites: "The Russians are trying to interrupt it," he said, "and they're not having very good success." And the takeaway is that proliferated systems of many small machines in low orbit can be more technologically resilient to hacking and disruption than a few big machines in higher orbits... [W]hile small satellites in a large configuration could potentially be a more expensive investment than two or three megasatellites, the shift could be worthwhile. If an adversary believes that it cannot achieve a military objective, Saltzman remarked, it will hesitate to cross "a threshold of violence." No conflicts. No debris. No crisis.

According to a new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, women in the U.S. are now projected to live about six years longer than U.S. men. TIME reports: [T]he 2021 data represent the largest gender-based life expectancy gap in the U.S. since 1996. The gulf began to widen before the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors note, but the trend accelerated from 2019 to 2021. Deaths from COVID-19 and unintentional injuries, a category that includes accidental drug overdoses, were the largest contributors to the widening of the gap, but differential rates of homicide, heart disease, and suicide deaths also played a role, according to the report. It's well-established that men die of these causes more frequently than women, and in recent years, they have been some of the most common causes of death overall. Heart disease, COVID-19, and unintentional injuries accounted for three of the top five in 2021.

The gender gap would have been even wider, the authors note, but for factors including increases in maternal mortality and decreases in cancer deaths among men. Overall, the data underscore the continued importance of limiting COVID-19's spread, and of finding better ways to improve national mental health and prevent drug overdoses and suicides -- fatalities sometimes labeled by experts as "deaths of despair."

The newly updated U.S. Department of Agriculture's "plant hardiness zone map" has gardeners across the nation researching what new plants they can grow in their warming regions, as the 2023 map is about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 2012 map. NPR reports: This week the map got its first update in more than a decade, and the outlook for many gardens looks warmer. The 2023 map is about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 2012 map across the contiguous U.S., says Chris Daly, director of the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University that jointly developed the map with the USDA. Daly says the new map means about half the country has shifted into a new half zone and half hasn't. In some locations, people may find they can grow new types of flowers, fruits, vegetables and plants.

Daly says he is hesitant to explicitly attribute the specific changes from the 2012 map to the 2023 map to climate change because of the volatility of the key statistic they used to create this map. They were mapping "the coldest night of the year, each year, over the past 30 years", Daly says, and it's a highly variable figure. In an email, a press officer for the USDA says, "Changes to plant hardiness zones are not necessarily reflective of global climate change because of the highly variable nature of the extreme minimum temperature of the year." But Daly says, in the big picture, climate change is playing a role in changing what grows where in the US: "Over the long run, we will expect to see a slow shifting northward of zones as climate change takes hold."

The way we buy and sell homes in the U.S. isn't normal -- at least not compared with the rest of the world. From a report: The commission on a home sale here is typically around 5% to 6%, usually split between the seller's and buyer's agents. In most countries, the commissions are substantially smaller. The U.S. is home to as many as three million agents. By most estimates, no other country is even a close second.

Though it is unclear how much a court decision on commissions last month will upend American real estate, if at all, the ruling opens up the possibility of forever changing how agents are paid for their work. And looking at home sales around the world offers a window into what could be in store. One reason commissions here remain high is the use of buyer agents, said Ryan Tomasello, managing director at investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Home sellers pay the commission -- typically between 5% and 6% of a home's selling price -- which is usually split between the seller's and buyer's agent. Buyer agents aren't nearly as common in other parts of the world, said Tomasello.

[...] In the pre-internet days, a buyer agent's main job was to screen and filter listings for hopeful home buyers. Today, much of that early house hunting can be done online. So the role of the buyer agent has shifted more to providing advice and support, as well as recommendations for home inspectors, lenders and lawyers. A good buyer agent will know how to make a strong offer and may push to lower the home price. In most countries, buyer agents are much less of a factor.

Sara Fischer reports via Axios: The decline of local newspapers accelerated so rapidly in 2023 that analysts now believe the U.S. will have lost one-third of the newspapers it had as of 2005 by the end of next year -- rather than in 2025, as originally predicted. There are roughly 6,000 newspapers left in America, down from 8,891 in 2005, according to a new report from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. "We're almost at a one-third loss now and we'll certainly hit that pace next year," said the report's co-authors -- Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Medill, and Sarah Stonbely, director of Medill's State of Local News Project. Of the papers that still survive, a majority (4,790) publish weekly, not daily.

Over the past two years, newspapers continued to vanish at an average rate of more than two per week, leaving 204 U.S. counties, or 6.4%, without any local news outlet. Roughly half of all U.S. counties (1,562) are now only served with one remaining local news source -- typically a weekly newspaper. Abernathy and Stonbely estimate that 228 of those 1,562 counties, or roughly 7% of all U.S. counties, are at high risk of losing their last remaining local news outlet.

There isn't enough investment in digital news replacements to stop the spread of news deserts in America. The footprint for alternative local news outlets is tiny and they are mostly clustered around metro areas that already have some local coverage. The report estimates that -- for outlets focused on state and local news -- there are roughly 550 digital-only news sites, 720 ethnic media organizations and 215 public broadcasting stations in America, compared to 6,000 newspapers. The authors argue that the dynamic between those with access to quality local news and those who don't "poses a far-reaching crisis for our democracy as it simultaneously struggles with political polarization, a lack of civic engagement and the proliferation of misinformation and information online."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission has approved (PDF) a new set of rules aiming to prevent "digital discrimination." It means the agency can hold telecom companies accountable for digitally discriminating against customers -- or giving certain communities poorer service (or none at all) based on income level, race, or religion. The new rules come as part of the Biden Administration's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which requires the FCC to develop and adopt anti-digital discrimination rules. "Many of the communities that lack adequate access to broadband today are the same areas that suffer from longstanding patterns of residential segregation and economic disadvantage," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said following today's vote. "It shows that minority status and income correlate with broadband access."

Under the new rules, the FCC can fine telecom companies for not providing equal connectivity to different communities "without adequate justification," such as financial or technical challenges of building out service in a particular area. The rules are specifically designed to address correlations between household income, race, and internet speed. Last year, a joint report from The Markup and the Associated Press found that AT&T, Verizon, and other internet service providers offer different speeds depending on the neighborhood in cities throughout the US. The report revealed neighborhoods with lower incomes and fewer white people get stuck with slower internet while still having to pay the same price as those with faster speeds. At the time, USTelecom, an organization that represents major telecom providers, blamed the higher price on having to maintain older equipment in certain communities.

The FCC was nearly divided on the new set of rules, as it passed with a 3-2 vote. Critics of the new policy argue the rules are an overextension of the FCC's power. Jonathan Spalter, the CEO of USTelecom, says the FCC is "taking overly intrusive, unworkably vague, and ultimately harmful steps in the wrong direction." Spalter adds the framework "is counter" to Congress' goal of giving customers equal access to the internet. Still, supporters of the new rules believe they can go a long way toward improving fractured broadband coverage throughout the US. The FCC will also establish an "improved" customer portal, where the agency will field and review complaints about digital discrimination. It will take things like broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance across communities into account when evaluating providers for potential rule violations, giving it the authority to hopefully finally address the disparities in internet access throughout the US.