Nilay Patel

The Helium network, which gives you tokens for running mesh network hardware, was once the go-to counterexample of things crypto might create. Sadly, it didn’t really make anyone any money, there’s a lot of alleged corruption, and things are so bad that Binance — which is itself mired in investigations and was just hacked today — is delisting Helium tokens. Oh, and the story is in Forbes, which just took $200m in funding from... Binance! Everything in crypto is so messy all the time!

The funniest thing about this is that even more things happened while we were taping this episode of The Vergecast.

The new Prologue EV has a new Honda wordmark on the back, which is fun and cyberpunk-y in the way that monospaced fonts can be fun and cyberpunk-y. Apparently this is the new branding for Honda’s EVs, which will also get a little blue “e” badge so everyone knows you’re running on electrons under the hood.

Truth Social is hurting for cash and user growth and an SEC investigation into its go-public deal with a shell company called Digital World Acquisition Corp. has prompted users of the service to — what else? — call for the entire SEC to be shut down.

You never know with Elon, but his offer to actually buy the company after all this drama is weird because he’s asking for the case to be put on hold before he closes the deal. Why would Twitter — or the court — agree to that, after Elon has already walked away once? I’ll believe this is real when the deal finally closes.

Ian is starting to make landfall in Florida, and AT&T says it’ll waive text, talk, and data overage fees for both postpaid and prepaid wireless customers with billing addresses in 828 zip codes across Florida from September 28, 2022 through October 28, 2022. The company is also prepping its huge Network Disaster Recovery team, which has everything from truck-based mobile cell towers to entire basecamp setups for field work.

Ford’s newest big work trucks are the first pickups in the US with 5G modems (supplied by Qualcomm, of course), and the first vehicles I’ve seen with 5G at all, really. It mostly allows the built-in WiFi hotspot to support 10 devices. Audi and GM have plans to add 5G in 2024, as do other carmakers like Stellantis. Remember when 5G was going to revolutionize cars?

You have to watch this video, and PC Gamer’s writeup is also great.