Olga Kharif

Dish Network, which is in the process of building a fourth nationwide US wireless network, has enlisted the help of Helium to extend 5G signals through customers’ hotspots. The plan calls for customers to install transmitters in their homes or offices. These devices work on unlicensed 5G airwaves and customers will be paid in cryptocurrency to host the hotspots. Dish is under pressure to build a next-generation 5G network using its arsenal of airwave licenses that carry a use-or-lose requirement.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is “inclined” not to order Apple to immediately reinstate the Fortnite app as the companies faced off in their first courtroom showdown. Judge Gonzalez Rogers said that the dispute over Apple’s App Store isn’t a “slam dunk” for either side.

US wireless carriers have long said they may slow video traffic on their networks to avoid congestion and bottlenecks. But new research shows the throttling happens pretty much everywhere all the time.

The largest US telecommunication companies are slowing internet traffic to and from popular apps like YouTube and Netflix, according to new research from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The researchers used a smartphone app called Wehe, downloaded by about 100,000 consumers, to monitor which mobile services are being throttled when and by whom, in what likely is the single largest running study of its kind. Among US wireless carriers, YouTube is the No. 1 target of throttling, where data speeds are slowed, according to the data.

The Wi-Fi icon -- a dot with radio waves radiating outward -- glows on nearly every internet-connected device, from the iPhone to thermostats to TVs. But it’s starting to fade from the limelight. With every major US wireless carrier now offering unlimited data plans, consumers don’t need to log on to a Wi-Fi network to avoid costly overage charges anymore. That’s a critical change that threatens to render Wi-Fi obsolete. And with new competitive technologies crowding in, the future looks even dimmer.

The bad news for the privacy-conscious is that big Web companies and dozens of startups have begun testing or using cookie alternatives that are often more difficult to spot or disable.

These programs “don’t have consumer controls already there,” says Lou Montulli, who invented the cookie 20 years ago and is now a co-founder of Zetta, a cloud storage startup. “Once they go into effect, consumers have no ability to turn them off.”

Some programs track users by their IP addresses; others look at users’ operating systems and other factors. Startups are promising advertisers that they can deliver, without cookies, data comparable to what the big Web companies collect.

Google and NASA are developing smart robots designed to fly around the International Space Station and eventually take over some menial tasks from astronauts with the aid of custom-built smartphones.

Since 2006, three colorful, volleyball-sized robots have been slowly floating around a 10-foot by 10-foot by 10-foot space inside the ISS. Scientists used them for research projects such as a study on the movement of liquids inside containers in microgravity environments.

NASA now plans to attach smartphones to the flying robots to give them spatial awareness that would enable them to travel throughout the space station. The Android-based phones will track the 3D motion of the robotic spheres while mapping their surroundings.

“Our goal is to advance the state of 3D sensing for mobile devices in an effort to give mobile devices human-scale sense of space and motion,” says Johnny Chung Lee, a technical program lead at Google.