An anonymous reader shares a report: I reviewed a number of laptops in 2022 across consumer, workstation, gaming, business, Chromebook, and everywhere else. I touched all of the major brands. But I had a particular focus on ultraportables this year -- that is, thin and light devices that people buy to use, say, on their couch at home -- because, with Apple's MacBooks in such a dominant position, many eyes have been on their competitors on the Windows side. For many of these models, I found myself writing the same review over and over and over. They were generally good. They performed well. But their battery life was bad.

What these laptops had in common is that they were all powered by the Intel P-series. Without getting too into the weeds here, Intel processors have, in the past, included H-series processors -- powerful chips that you'll find in gaming laptops and workstations -- and U-series processors for thinner, lighter devices. (There was also a G-series, which was this whole other thing, for a couple of years.) But the Intel 12th Generation of mobile chips (that is, the batch of chips that Intel released this year) has a new letter: the P-series. The P-series is supposed to sit between the power-hungry H-series and the power-efficient U-series; the hope was that it would combine H-series power with U-series efficiency.

And then many -- a great many -- of this year's top ultraportable laptops got the P-series: big-screeners like the LG Gram 17; modular devices like the Framework Laptop; business notebooks like the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7; premium ultraportables like the Acer Swift 5, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, and the Dell XPS 13 Plus. The problem was that, in reality, the P-series was just a slightly less powerful H-series chip, which Intel had slapped an "ultraportable" label onto. It was identical to the H-series in core count and architecture, but it was supposed to draw slightly less power.

A Microsoft .NET Community standup has left Windows desktop developers wondering what kind of future, if any, the company has planned for its older desktop application frameworks, Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). From a report: A "what's new" slide for WPF presented by senior program manager Olia Gavrysh last week shows "Community Run Project" as the first bullet point, causing consternation among attendees. "Who's happy that WPF is now a community run project? This is soooo scary," remarked Morten Nielsen, a senior principal engineer at ESRI working on the ArcGIS runtime, for location-based analytics.

The slide was perhaps misinterpreted. It was intended as an update on what is happening with pull requests from the community, rather than meaing that WPF has been handed over to the community. Nevertheless, concerns about the future of the framework are well founded. "It's not dead. we have a team working on WPF and supporting it," said Gavrysh, but added, "we now switch to the model where we accept a lot of PRs [pull requests] from the community because we think of WPF as [a] very mature project so not that much rapid development is happening."

Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist writes: Terminal emulators have barely changed in 30 years. They're still just scrolling windows of unstructured text. Why is there so little innovation in an application we use every day?

There are so many ways they could be modernized to help us be more productive. For example:

- If I type ls to show a directory listing, I should be able to right-click on a filename and get a list of operations to perform on that file, just like a file browser.

- If I start to type a filename and press tab twice, it shouldn't just print a list of possible completions. It should provide a popup to select the one I want.

- Why can't I cat an image file and see the image right in the terminal window?


Are there any modern terminals that update this important tool for the 21st century? And if not, what prevents them?

In June GitHub announced they'd retire their customizable text editor Atom on December 15th — so they could focus their development efforts on the IDEs Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Codespaces. "As new cloud-based tools have emerged and evolved over the years, Atom community involvement has declined significantly," according to a post on GitHub's blog.

So while "GitHub and our community have benefited tremendously from those who have filed issues, created extensions, fixed bugs, and built new features on Atom," this now means that:

- Atom package management will stop working
- No more security updates
- Teletype will no longer work
- Deprecated redirects that supported downloading Electron symbols and headers will no longer work
- Pre-built Atom binaries can continue to be downloaded from the atom repository releases

Fortunately, in 2014 GitHub open sourced the code for Atom. And according to It's FOSS News: A community build for it is already available; however, there seems to be a new version (Pulsar) that aims to bring feature parity with the original Atom and introduce modern features and updated architecture....

The reason why they made a separate fork is because of different goals for the projects. Pulsar wants to modernize everything to present a successor to Atom. Of course, the user interface is much of the same. Considering Pulsar hasn't had a stable release yet, the branding could sometimes seem all over the place. However, the essentials seem to be there with the documentation, packages, and features like the ability to install packages from Git repositories....

As of now, it is too soon to say if Pulsar will become something better than what the Atom community version offers. However, it is something that we can keep an eye on.... You can head to its official download page to get the package required for your system and test it out.
Like Atom, Pulsar is cross-platform support (supporting Linux, macOS, and Windows).

Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds. The Register reports: The Windows and Azure titan slipped the prohibition into an update of its Universal License Terms for Online Services that came into effect on December 1. That document covers any "Microsoft-hosted service to which Customer subscribes under a Microsoft volume licensing agreement," and on The Register's reading, mostly concerns itself with Azure. Microsoft's Summary of Changes to the license states: "Updated Acceptable Use Policy to clarify that mining cryptocurrency is prohibited without prior Microsoft approval." Within the license itself there's hardly any more info.

A section headed "Acceptable Use Policy" states: "Neither Customer, nor those that access an Online Service through Customer, may use an Online Service: to mine cryptocurrency without Microsoft's prior written approval." Microsoft appears not to have publicized this decision beyond the Summary of Changes page and, in recent hours, in an advisory to partners titled: "Important actions partners need to take to secure the partner ecosystem." That document states "the Acceptable Use Policy has been updated to explicitly prohibit mining for cryptocurrencies across all Microsoft Online Services unless written pre-approval is granted by Microsoft," and adds: "We suggest seeking written pre-approval from Microsoft before using Microsoft Online Services for mining cryptocurrencies, regardless of the term of a subscription." Microsoft told The Register it made the change because "crypto currency mining can cause disruption or even impairment to Online Services and its users and can often be linked to cyber fraud and abuse attacks such as unauthorized access to and use of customer resources."

"We made this change to further protect our customers and mitigate the risk of disrupting or impairing services in the Microsoft Cloud." Permission to mine crypto "may be considered for Testing and Research for security detections."

Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds. From a report: The Windows and Azure titan slipped the prohibition into an update of its Universal License Terms for Online Services that came into effect on December 1. That document covers any "Microsoft-hosted service to which Customer subscribes under a Microsoft volume licensing agreement," and on The Register's reading, mostly concerns itself with Azure.

Microsoft's Summary of Changes to the license states: "Updated Acceptable Use Policy to clarify that mining cryptocurrency is prohibited without prior Microsoft approval." Within the license itself there's hardly any more info. A section headed "Acceptable Use Policy" states: "Neither Customer, nor those that access an Online Service through Customer, may use an Online Service: to mine cryptocurrency without Microsoft's prior written approval."

couchslug writes: Mozilla's Firefox once commanded a large chunk of the browser market share, but now it stands under a pitiful 5 percent. Google money removes need to compete from a management POV as they'll get paid either way but they're still leaving money on the table.

What should Mozilla do to help Firefox regain its lost market share? Not so long ago Internet Explorer was only used to download Firefox when geeks reloaded Windows machines for others. Today, Edge, however pathetic, still outranks Firefox. Were FF not arguably the best available browser for Linux, share would be even less.

Were you the king for a day what would you do to make Firefox great again? If you dropped or deprecated Firefox what shooed you off? This is not about Firefox being good or bad but about regaining casually discarded market share.

Microsoft has once again been caught allowing its legitimate digital certificates to sign malware in the wild, a lapse that allows the malicious files to pass strict security checks designed to prevent them from running on the Windows operating system. ArsTechnica: Multiple threat actors were involved in the misuse of Microsoft's digital imprimatur, which they used to give Windows and endpoint security applications the impression malicious system drivers had been certified as safe by Microsoft. That has led to speculation that there may be one or more malicious organizations selling malicious driver-signing as a service. In all, researchers have identified at least nine separate developer entities that abused the certificates in recent months.

The abuse was independently discovered by four third-party security companies, which then privately reported it to Microsoft. On Tuesday, during Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday, the company confirmed the findings and said it has determined the abuse came from several developer accounts and that no network breach has been detected. The software maker has now suspended the developer accounts and implemented blocking detections to prevent Windows from trusting the certificates used to sign the compromised certificates. "Microsoft recommends that all customers install the latest Windows updates and ensure their anti-virus and endpoint detection products are up to date with the latest signatures and are enabled to prevent these attacks," company officials wrote.

Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser was an improvement over the initial version of Edge in many ways, including its support for Windows 7 and Windows 8. But the end of the road is coming: Microsoft has announced that Edge will end support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 in mid-January of 2023, shortly after those operating systems stop getting regular security updates. From a report: Support will also end for Microsoft Edge Webview2, which can use Edge's rendering engine to embed webpages in non-Edge apps. The end-of-support date for Edge coincides with the end of security update support for both Windows 7 and Windows 8 on January 10, and the end of Google Chrome support for Windows 7 and 8 in version 110. Because the underlying Chromium engine in both Chrome and Edge is open source, Microsoft could continue supporting Edge in older Windows versions if it wanted, but the company is using both end-of-support dates to justify a clean break for Edge.

Anyone remember the high-end commercial UNIX workstations from a few decades ago — like from companies like IBM, DEC, SGI, and Sun Microsystems?

Today OSnews looked back — but also explored what happens when you try to buy one today> : As x86 became ever more powerful and versatile, and with the rise of Linux as a capable UNIX replacement and the adoption of the NT-based versions of Windows, the days of the UNIX workstations were numbered. A few years into the new millennium, virtually all traditional UNIX vendors had ended production of their workstations and in some cases even their associated architectures, with a lacklustre collective effort to move over to Intel's Itanium — which didn't exactly go anywhere and is now nothing more than a sour footnote in computing history.

Approaching roughly 2010, all the UNIX workstations had disappeared.... and by now, they're all pretty much dead (save for Solaris). Users and industries moved on to x86 on the hardware side, and Linux, Windows, and in some cases, Mac OS X on the software side.... Over the past few years, I have come to learn that If you want to get into buying, using, and learning from UNIX workstations today, you'll run into various problems which can roughly be filed into three main categories: hardware availability, operating system availability, and third party software availability.
Their article details their own attempts to buy one over the years, ultimately concluding the experience "left me bitter and frustrated that so much knowledge — in the form of documentation, software, tutorials, drivers, and so on — is disappearing before our very eyes." Shortsightedness and disinterest in their own heritage by corporations, big and small, is destroying entire swaths of software, and as more years pass by, it will get ever harder to get any of these things back up and running.... As for all the third-party software — well, I'm afraid it's too late for that already. Chasing down the rightsholders is already an incredibly difficult task, and even if you do find them, they are probably not interested in helping you, and even if by some miracle they are, they most likely no longer even have the ability to generate the required licenses or release versions with the licensing ripped out. Stuff like Pro/ENGINEER and SoftWindows for UNIX are most likely gone forever....

Software is dying off at an alarming rate, and I fear there's no turning the tide of this mass extinction.
The article also wonders why companies like HPE don't just "dump some ISO files" onto an FTP server, along with patch depots and documentation. "This stuff has no commercial value, they're not losing any sales, and it will barely affect their bottom line.

It was 29 years ago today that DOOM was first released — and we're still using it! Here in 2022, the latest mod reportedly converts its demons into the zombies and creepers from Minecraft. This week Hackaday wrote about a simple emulated RISC-V processor that runs DOOM. Last month someone even got DOOM running in Notepad. And recently WebTV enthusiasts not only jerry-rigged a contemporary TV to a WebTV unit, but then actually got it to play a 1990s-era WebTV version of DOOM on their TV screen.

The last 29 years have been a long, strange trip. A hidden Doom level appeared in Microsoft Excel. A Doom video was also used to promote Windows 95. And then there was that weird Doom movie starring The Rock and Karl Urban... By 2015 Doom was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. In 2016 John Romero created a new level. Later that year a new release of Doom even featured a mod with one of the the original Doom II levels from 1994.

In 2016 we'd asked Slashdot readers to share their own favorite stories about Doom — and the best thing about that post is those 351 comments. ("I went to the door, confused why the police were banging on my door.... They said they had reports of shots being fired." )

Is anyone still playing Doom today? Share your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

And what's your own favorite story about Doom?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Following Google's beta rollout of the feature in October, passkeys are now hitting Chrome stable M108. "Passkey" is built on industry standards and backed by all the big platform vendors -- Google, Apple, Microsoft -- along with the FIDO Alliance. Google's latest blog says: "With the latest version of Chrome, we're enabling passkeys on Windows 11, macOS, and Android." The Google Password Manager on Android is ready to sync all your passkeys to the cloud, and if you can meet all the hardware requirements and find a supporting service, you can now sign-in to something with a passkey. [...]

Now that this is actually up and running on Chrome 108 and a supported OS, you should be able to see the passkey screen under the "autofill" section of the Chrome settings (or try pasting chrome://settings/passkeys into the address bar). Next up we'll need more websites and services to actually support using a passkey instead of a password to sign in. Google Account support would be a good first step -- right now you can use a passkey for two-factor authentication with Google, but you can't replace your password yet. Everyone's go-to example of passkeys is the passkeys.io demo site, which we have a walkthrough of here.

Microsoft is finally bringing a built-in screen recorder to Windows. The Verge reports: The Snipping Tool in Windows 11 will soon be updated to include screen recording, meaning Windows users won't have to rely on the Xbox Game Bar or third-party tools just to record their screens. Windows 11 testers will start getting access to the updated Snipping Tool today, and the new record option will allow you to record an entire screen or even a section that gets cropped. The update comes more than four years after Microsoft first introduced a new screenshot experience for Windows. [...] Microsoft has only just started testing this with Windows 11 testers in the Dev Channel, so it's likely some weeks or months before this Snipping Tool is released to everyone using Windows 11.

Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to nudge laggards toward Windows 11 amid a migration pace that company executives would undoubtedly prefer is rather faster. From a report: The software giant is offering an option of upgrading to Windows 11 as an out of box experience to its Windows 10 22H2 installed base, the main aim being to smooth their path forward to the latest operating system. "On November 30, 2022, an out-of-band update was released to improve the Windows 10, version 2004, 20H2, 21H1, 21H2, and 22H2 out-of-box experience (OOBE). It provides eligible devices with the option to upgrade to Windows 11 as part of the OOBE process. This update will be available only when an OOBE update is installed."

The update, KB5020683, applies only to Windows 10 Home and Professional versions 2004, 20H2, 21H1, 22H2. There are some pre-requisites that Microsoft has listed here before users can make the move to Windows 11. The operating system was released on October 5 last year but shifting stubborn consumers onto this software has proved challenging for top brass at Microsoft HQ in Redmond. According to Statcounter, a web analytics service that has tracking code installed on 1.5 million websites and records a page view for each, some 16.12 percent of Windows users had installed Windows 11 in November, higher than the 15.44 percent in the prior month, but likely still not close to the figures that Microsoft was hoping for.

Around 2009 Slashdot was abuzz about how over-the-air broadcasting in North America was switching to a new standard called DTV. (Fun fact: North America and South America have two entirely different broadcast TV standards — both of which are different from the DVB-T standard used in Europe/Africa/Australia.) But 2022 ends with us already talking about DTV's successor in North America: the new broadcast standard NextGen TV.

This time the new standard isn't mandatory for TV stations, CNET points out — and it won't affect cable, satellite or streaming TV. But now even if you're not paying for a streaming TV service, another article points out, in most major American cities "an inexpensive antenna is all you'll need to get get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and PBS stations" — and often with a better picture quality: NextGen TV, formerly known as ATSC 3.0, is continuing to roll out across the U.S. It's already widely available, with stations throughout the country broadcasting in the new standard. There are many new TVs with compatible tuners plus several stand-alone tuners to add NextGen to just about any TV. As the name suggests, NextGen TV is the next generation of over-the-air broadcasts, replacing or supplementing the free HD broadcasts we've had for over two decades. NextGen not only improves on HDTV, but adds the potential for new features like free over-the-air 4K and HDR, though those aren't yet widely available.

Even so, the image quality with NextGen is likely better than what you're used to from streaming or even cable/satellite. If you already have an antenna and watch HD broadcasts, the reception you get with NextGen might be better, too.... Because of how it works, you'll likely get better reception if you're far from the TV tower.

The short version is: NextGen is free over-the-air television with potentially more channels and better image quality than older over-the-air broadcasts.
U.S. broadcast companies have also created a site at WatchNextGenTV.com showing options for purchasing a compatible new TV. That site also features a video touting NextGen TV's "brilliant colors and a sharper picture with a wider range of contrast" and its Dolby audio system (with "immersive, movie theatre-quality sound" with enhancements for voice and dialogue "so you get all of the story.") And in the video there's also examples of upcoming interactive features like on-screen quizzes, voting, and shopping, as well as the ability to select multiple camera angles or different audio tracks.

"One potential downside? ATSC 3.0 will also let broadcasters track your viewing habits," CNet reported earlier this year, calling the data "information that can be used for targeted advertising, just like companies such as Facebook and Google use today...

"Ads specific to your viewing habits, income level and even ethnicity (presumed by your neighborhood, for example) could get slotted in by your local station.... but here's the thing: If your TV is connected to the internet, it's already tracking you. Pretty much every app, streaming service, smart TV and cable or satellite box all track your usage to a greater or lesser extent."

But on the plus side... NextGen TV is IP-based, so in practice it can be moved around your home just like any internet content can right now. For example, you connect an antenna to a tuner box inside your home, but that box is not connected to your TV at all. Instead, it's connected to your router. This means anything with access to your network can have access to over-the-air TV, be it your TV, your phone, your tablet or even a streaming device like Apple TV....

This also means it's possible we'll see mobile devices with built-in tuners, so you can watch live TV while you're out and about, like you can with Netflix and YouTube now. How willing phone companies will be to put tuners in their phones remains to be seen, however. You don't see a lot of phones that can get radio broadcasts now, even though such a thing is easy to implement.
But whatever you think — it's already here. By August NextGen TV was already reaching half of America's population, according to a press release from a U.S. broadcaster's coalition. That press release also bragged that 40% of consumers had actually heard of NextGen TV — "up 25% from last year among those in markets where it is available."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A previously undocumented data wiper named CryWiper is masquerading as ransomware, but in reality, destroys data beyond recovery in attacks against Russian mayor's offices and courts. CryWiper was first discovered by Kaspersky this fall, where they say the malware was used in an attack against a Russian organization. [...] CryWiper is a 64-bit Windows executable named 'browserupdate.exe' written in C++, configured to abuse many WinAPI function calls. Upon execution, it creates scheduled tasks to run every five minutes on the compromised machine.

Next, it contacts a command and control server (C2) with the name of the victim's machine. The C2 responds with either a "run" or "do not run" command, determining whether the wiper will activate or stay dormant. Kaspersky reports seeing execution delays of 4 days (345,600 seconds) in some cases, likely added in the code to help confuse the victim as to what caused the infection. CryWiper will stop critical processes related to MySQL, MS SQL database servers, MS Exchange email servers, and MS Active Directory web services to free locked data for destruction.

Next, the malware deletes shadow copies on the compromised machine to prevent the easy restoration of the wiped files. CryWiper also modifies the Windows Registry to prevent RDP connections, likely to hinder intervention and incident response from remote IT specialists. Finally, the wiper will corrupt all enumerated files except for ".exe", ".dll", "lnk", ".sys", ".msi", and its own ".CRY", while also skipping System, Windows, and Boot directories to prevent rendering the computer completely unusable. After this step, CryWiper will generate ransom notes named 'README.txt,' asking for 0.5 Bitcoin (approximately $8,000) in exchange for a decrypter. Unfortunately, this is a false promise, as the corrupted data cannot be restored.

Google researchers say they have linked a Barcelona, Spain-based IT company to the sale of advanced software frameworks that exploit vulnerabilities in Chrome, Firefox, and Windows Defender. From a report: Variston IT bills itself as a provider of tailor-made Information security solutions, including technology for embedded SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) and Internet of Things integrators, custom security patches for proprietary systems, tools for data discovery, security training, and the development of secure protocols for embedded devices.

According to a report from Google's Threat Analysis Group, Variston sells another product not mentioned on its website: software frameworks that provide everything a customer needs to surreptitiously install malware on devices they want to spy on. Researchers Clement Lecigne and Benoit Sevens said the exploit frameworks were used to exploit n-day vulnerabilities, which are those that have been patched recently enough that some targets haven't yet installed them. Evidence suggests, they added, that the frameworks were also used when the vulnerabilities were zero-days. The researchers are disclosing their findings in an attempt to disrupt the market for spyware, which they said is booming and poses a threat to various groups.

Microsoft is offering Windows 11 users a preview of an update that fixes some gaming performance problems. The software maker originally warned of issues with lower than expected performance in some games earlier this month, after some Windows 11 users that had upgraded to the latest 2022 Update (22H2) noticed problems. From a report: "Some games and apps might experience lower than expected performance or stuttering on Windows 11, version 22H2," said Microsoft at the time. "Affected games and apps are inadvertently enabling GPU performance debugging features not meant to be used by consumers." While Microsoft didn't list the exact apps and games experiencing problems, the company did block the Windows 11 2022 Update for systems with affected games and recommended people not upgrade. That safeguard was removed around a week ago, and now Microsoft has issued a full fix. If you're running the Windows 11 2022 Update, you can check Windows Update and find a KB5020044 update preview that you can install.

Ars Technica reports on what happened when researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, left laptops overnight at 12 computer repair shops — and then recovered logs after receiving their repairs: The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied data onto a personal device....

The amount of snooping may actually have been higher than recorded in the study, which was conducted from October to December 2021. In all, the researchers took the laptops to 16 shops in the greater Ontario region. Logs on devices from two of those visits weren't recoverable. Two of the repairs were performed on the spot and in the customer's presence, so the technician had no opportunity to surreptitiously view personal data. In three cases, Windows Quick Access or Recently Accessed Files had been deleted in what the researchers suspect was an attempt by the snooping technician to cover their tracks....

The vast majority of repair shops provide no privacy policy and those that do have no means of enforcing them. Even worse, repair technicians required a customer to surrender their login password even when it wasn't necessary for the repair needed. These findings came from a separate part of the study, in which the researchers brought an Asus UX330U laptop into 11 shops for a battery replacement. This repair doesn't require a technician to log in to the machine, since the removal of the back of the device and access to the device BIOS (for checking battery health) is all that's needed. Despite this, all but one of the repair service providers asked for the credentials to the device OS anyway.

When the customer asked if they could get the repair without providing the password, three refused to take the device without it, four agreed to take it but warned they wouldn't be able to verify their work or be responsible for it, one asked the customer to remove the password, and one said they would reset the device if it was required.

Somewhere in Silicon Valley is a man "standing up to internet giants Comcast and AT&T," reports the Mercury News. (Alternate URL here.)

"Comcast told him it would cost $17,000 to speed up his internet. He rallied 41 South Bay neighbors to build their own lightning-fast fiber-optic network instead " Tech-rich but internet-poor, residents of the Silicon Valley neighborhood were fed up with sluggish broadband speeds of less than 25 Megabits-per-second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload — the federal definition of a home unserved by adequate internet. Frustrated by the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of internet providers, they created their own solution — and now this tony enclave has one of the fastest residential speeds in the nation.

Scott Vanderlip, a software engineer, said Comcast gave him a $17,000 estimate to connect his home to the faster internet service at a neighbor's home. "You got to be kidding me — I can see it on the pole from my driveway," Vanderlip said, remembering his reaction to Comcast's quote.

So the self-described "town rebel" jumped at the chance to partner with a startup internet service provider called Next Level Networks. If Vanderlip could rally a few neighbors willing to invest a couple thousand dollars, Next Level would get them very fast internet. That was in 2017. Now, Vanderlip is president of the Los Altos Hills Community Fiber Association, which provides super-fast speeds — up to 10 Gigabits-per-second upload and download — to its over 40 association members, letting them transfer huge files and load webpages in the click of a computer mouse, Vanderlip said.

That's 125 times faster than the median download speed in Santa Clara County.
It helped that his home "also happened to sit near a local school with a spare fiber optic internet connection," the article points out.

But a startup internet service provider called Next Level Networks also handled "the infrastructure procurement, contracts, logistics and retail — essentially providing the residents a turnkey fiber optic internet service — while Vanderlip and two of his neighbors, who joined with an investment of $5,000 each, bought the fiber optic infrastructure, crowdsourced new members and mapped out an initial fiber route to their houses."

Thanks to Slashdot reader k6mfw for sharing the story!