Tag Archive for: Want

Big tech companies want to help get you back in the office

Masked co-workers discuss in an open office.

Enlarge / Office staff respecting social distancing during a meeting. Group of business men and women having a meeting in office during corona virus pandemic. (credit: Getty Images)

Many things about Matt Bruinooge’s senior year at Brown are different from his previous college life. One is that he logs on to a website from tech giant Alphabet twice a week to schedule nasal swabs.

Brown is one of the first customers of a pandemic safety service from Alphabet subsidiary Verily Life Sciences called Healthy at Work, or Healthy at School at colleges. It offers a website and software for surveying workers or students for symptoms, scheduling coronavirus tests, and managing the results.

The site Bruinooge uses to schedule his tests has similar styling to Google’s office suite. When a test comes back negative, he sees a graphic of something like a COVID-era hall pass, with a big check mark in soothing green. “The testing process is streamlined,” Bruinooge says—although he wonders where his data may end up.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Charter tries to convince FCC that broadband customers want data caps

Illustration of a water hose with Internet data trickling out of it, represented by 1s and 0s.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Charter Communications has claimed to the Federal Communications Commission that broadband users enjoy having Internet plans with data caps, in a filing arguing that Charter should be allowed to impose caps on its Spectrum Internet service starting next year.

Charter isn’t currently allowed to impose data caps because of conditions the FCC placed on its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. The data-cap condition is scheduled to expire on May 18, 2023, but Charter in June petitioned the FCC to let the condition expire two years early, in May 2021.

With consumer-advocacy groups and Internet users opposing the petition, Charter filed a response with the FCC last week, saying that plans with data caps are “popular.”

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica