“Chairman Carr’s moves today are very unfortunate as they further signal that the Commission is no longer prioritizing closing the digital divide,” Schwartzman said. “In the 21st Century, education doesn’t stop when a student leaves school and today’s actions could lead to many students having a tougher time completing homework assignments because their families lack Internet access.”
Biden FCC expanded school and library program
Under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC expanded its E-Rate program in 2024 to let schools and libraries use Universal Service funding to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and services that could be used off-premises. The FCC previously distributed Wi-Fi hotspots and other Internet access technology under pandemic-related spending authorized by Congress in 2021, but that program ended. The new hotspot lending program was supposed to begin this year.
Carr argues that when the Congressionally approved program ended, the FCC lost its authority to fund Wi-Fi hotspots for use outside of schools and libraries. “I dissented from both decisions at the time, and I am now pleased to circulate these two items, which will end the FCC’s illegal funding [of] unsupervised screen time for young kids,” he said.
Under Rosenworcel, the FCC said the Communications Act gives it “broad and flexible authority to establish rules governing the equipment and services that will be supported for eligible schools and libraries, as well as to design the specific mechanisms of support.”
The E-Rate program can continue providing telecom services to schools and libraries despite the hotspot component being axed. E-Rate disbursed about $1.75 billion in 2024, but could spend more based on demand because it has a funding cap of about $5 billion per year. E-Rate and other Universal Service programs are paid for through fees imposed on phone companies, which typically pass the cost on to consumers.
The Trump administration’s plans to improve Americans’ health will include a push to review the safety of electromagnetic radiation, echoing long-held conspiracy theories and falsehoods about Wi-Fi and 5G touted by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
On Friday, Politico obtained a draft version of the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” a highly anticipated report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission intended to steer the administration’s health policy. The report, which has not been adopted by the White House, is being viewed as friendly to industry, and it contains little to no policy recommendations or proposed regulations. For instance, it includes no proposed restrictions on pesticides or ultra-processed foods, which are top priorities of the MAHA movement.
Otherwise, the document mainly rehashes the talking points and priorities of Kennedy’s health crusades. That includes attacking water fluoridation, casting doubt on the safety of childhood vaccines, pushing for more physical activity in children to reduce chronic diseases, getting rid of synthetic food dyes, and claiming that children are being overprescribed medications.
Notably, the report does not mention the leading causes of death for American children, which are firearms and motor vehicle accidents. Cancer, another top killer, is only mentioned in the context of pushing new AI technologies at the National Institutes of Health. Poisonings, another top killer, are also not mentioned explicitly.
While the importance of water quality is raised in the report, it’s only in the context of fluoride and not of any other key contaminants, such as lead or PFAS. And although the draft strategy will prioritize “whole, minimally processed foods,” it offers no strategy for reducing the proportion of ultra-processed food (UPF) in Americans’ diets. The strategy merely aims to come up with a “government-wide definition” for UPF to guide future research and policies.
Linux and its code are made by people, and people are not with us forever. Over the weekend, a brief message on the Linux kernel mailing list reminded people of just how much one person can mean to a seemingly gargantuan project like Linux, and how quickly they can disappear:
Denise Finger, wife of the deceased, wrote to the Linux Wireless list on Friday evening:
This is to notify you that Larry Finger, one of your developers, passed away on June 21st.
LWN.net reckons that Finger, 84, contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or 1,464 commits total, at least since kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes precarious nature of contributing to the kernel, this is on its own an impressive achievement—especially for someone with no formal computer training, and who considered himself a scientist.
The deepest of trenches: Linux Wi-Fi in the 2000s
That kind of effort is worth celebrating, regardless. But it’s the space that Finger devoted himself to that makes him a notably patient, productive contributor.
Getting Wi-Fi to work on a device running Linux back when Finger started contributing was awful. The chances of your hardware being recognized, activated, and working properly right after install was akin to getting a straight flush in poker. If nobody had gotten around to your wireless chipset yet, you used NDISwrapper, a Windows-interfacing kludge tool that simultaneously made your Linux install less open and yet still painful to install and maintain.
Finger started fixing this with work on Broadcom’s BCM43XX drivers. Broadcom provided no code for its gear, so Finger helped reverse-engineer the necessary specs by manually dumping and reading hardware registers. Along with Broadcom drivers, Finger also provided Realtek drivers. Many commenters across blogs and message boards are noting that their systems are still using pieces of Finger’s code today.
Fixing mainframes, science gear, and RV resorts
Larry Finger, and fish, from his Quora profile.
Quora
Finger doesn’t have a large footprint on the web, outside of his hundreds of kernel commits. He has a page for DRAWxtl, for producing crystal-structure drawings, on his personal domain, but not a general personal page. He sometimes answered Quora questions. He had a GitHub profile, showing more than 100 contributions to projects in 2024.
Perhaps the biggest insight into Finger found in one place is a three-part series for Linux Journal, “Linux in a Windows Workstation Environment,” written in 2005, when he was roughly 65. He summarizes his background: Fortran programmer in 1963, PDP-11 interfaces to scientific instruments in the 1970s, VAX-11/780 work in the early 1980s, and then Unix/Linux systems, until retiring from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in 1999. The mineral Fingerite is named for Finger, whose work in crystallography took him on a fellowship to northern Bavaria, as noted in one Quora answer about the Autobahn.
“At that time, I became a full-time RV resident, dedicated to the avoidance of cold weather,” Finger writes. He and his wife Denise arrived that year at a 55-plus RV community in Mesa, Arizona. He joined the computer club, which had a growing number of Windows PCs sharing a DSL connection through one of the systems running WinGate. A new RV resort owner wanted to expand to 22 workstations, but WinGate licenses for that many would have been expensive for the club. Finger, who was “highly distrustful of using Windows 98 in a mission-critical role,” set to work.
Finger goes on across the series to describe the various ways he upgraded the routing and server capacity of the network, which grew to 38 user stations, Samba shares, a membership database, VPN tunnels, several free RJ-45 ports, and “free Wi-Fi access… throughout the park.”
Lots of people have commented on the broad work Finger did to make Linux usable for more people. A few mention that Finger also mentored people, the kind of work that has exponential effects. “MB” wrote on LWN.net that Finger “mentored other people to get the Broadcom Open Source code into kernel. And I think it was a huge success. And that was only a small part of Larry’s success story.”
In a 2023 Quora response to someone asking if someone without “any formal training in computer science” can “contribute something substantial” to Linux, Finger writes, “I think that I have.” Finger links to the stats for the 6.4 kernel, showing 172,346 lines of his code in it, roughly 0.5% of the total.
I have never taken any courses in Computer Science; however, I have considerable experience in coding, much of which happened when computers were a lot less powerful than today, and it was critical to write code that ran efficiently.
Finger suggests in his response small patches, deep reading of the guidelines, and always using git’s send-email to send patches: “Nothing will get shot down more quickly than a patch submitted from a mailer such as Thunderbird.” Finding typos and errors in comments and text strings can help, especially after translation. Finger advises being patient, expecting criticism about following rules and formats, and to keep plugging away at it.
In another Quora response about kernel driver development, Finger says, “This activity can be highly rewarding, and also equally frustrating!” You should learn C, Finger suggested, and maybe start with analyzing USB drivers, and take your time learning about DMA.
“Do not lose hope,” Finger wrote. “It took me about 2 years before I could do anything more than tell the experts where my system was generating a fault.”
The new headphones look just like earlier leaks showed.
Sonos
Here’s a marketing render of the headphones, showing the physical buttons.
Sonos
And here’s the other side.
Sonos
A view inside the cups.
Sonos
A side view.
Sonos
After months of rumors and leaks, audio brand Sonos has announced and revealed its first foray into personal audio with the Sonos Ace, pricey wireless over-ear headphones that compete with the likes of Apple’s AirPods Max and Sony’s popular WH-1000XM5.
The Bluetooth 5.4 headphones were shown to select press outlets in New York this week. It’s too early to judge their sound quality, but they’re priced at the high end, and Sonos has a good reputation on that front.
Each cup has a 40 mm driver, and there are a total of eight microphones for noise control. Notably, the headphones weigh less than Apple’s AirPods Max.
Like competing pairs, they have high-end features like effective active noise cancelling and aware modes, Dolby Atmos spatial audio, and head tracking. The killer feature is for users who are already using Sonos’ other products in their home theaters: you can quickly switch from playing audio on the Sonos Arc soundbar to the headphones and back. That works for any audio from your TV, including set-top boxes or game consoles.
It’s a bit like how Apple’s AirPods Max work with the Apple TV set-top-boxes. Support for other Sonos soundbars like the second-generation beam is coming later this year.
Additionally, the Ace will get a new feature called “TrueCinema” that leverages your Sonos speakers’ ability to create a 3D map of the room in order to simulate the acoustics of your own space when wearing the headphones and using spatial audio, in theory making it sound even more like you’re just listening on a normal in-room surround system. That feature is also coming later in the year, though.
Of course, the timing for this announcement couldn’t be worse for Sonos. The company is currently tangled up in a consumer backlash after it updated its mobile app but left out several features from the previous version, including accessibility options.
The app update was intended primarily to make it easier to get in and out of the app and to do basic tasks like adjust the volume without waiting on screens to load or taking too many steps—and it succeeds at that, which is long overdue. But it doesn’t have all the edge case features its predecessor does, and Sonos is playing damage control with an angry subset of its normally loyal userbase.
For the Ace, the app is needed to do things like adjust EQ and some other special features, but it’s not required for basic listening tasks like adjusting volume or noise cancellation settings. Thankfully, Sonos has opted for physical buttons for those things instead of either touch gestures or an app interface.
The Sonos Ace will release June 5, and it will cost $549.
