Vox

A Q&A with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

There’s a lot of pieces that need to come together to get 5G networks to work on mobile devices — new standards need to be agreed on, new modems need to be developed, and new networking hardware for towers needs to be rolled out. But Qualcomm might have just cleared one of the major hurdles with the announcement of its new QTM052 mmWave antenna modules, the first that have been announced that will enable the high-speed swath of networking spectrum to work with mobile phones. That’s a big deal, because not all 5G is created equal.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter joined to announce a new standards initiative called the Data Transfer Project, designed as a new way to move data between platforms. Google described the project as letting users “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it.”

BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith was confused as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. So while he’s not exactly Howard Beale, the famously pugnacious editor of BuzzFeed pressed hard recently on global news partnerships head Campbell Brown to explain how Facebook defines journalism and who practices it. The focus of his ire was the presence of six conservative publications at a biannual meeting that Brown ran recently with a group of editors and publishers Facebook works with.