This four-minute Verizon short (there’s also a thirty second version if you can’t wait that long) starring Storrie and directed by Nia DaCosta (Candyman, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple) pays off their appearance at the Vanity Fair Oscar party by raising awareness about the Heated Rivalry star’s mobile phone struggles.
Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) is hunting for answers about the state of US telecom network security after the Salt Typhoon hack first reported late last year. The attack was so massive that US officials encouraged Americans to use encrypted apps to prevent their conversations from being seen by hackers. Cantwell is asking digital forensics firm Mandiant to hand over assessments behind AT&T and Verizon’s claims that their networks are now secure.
[commerce.senate.gov]
Cameron John Wagenius, aka kiberphant0m, had already pleaded guilty on two charges for hacking T-Mobile and Verizon, and could face 20 years in prison after pleading guilty Tuesday to additional conspiracy, extortion, and identity theft charges.
Wagenius reportedly sold data stolen from Snowflake cloud storage accounts, including records for 560 million Ticketmaster customers and information from over 150 other companies, and said he’d posted hacked AT&T call logs for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Two other men, John Binns and Connor Moucka, have also been indicted in this case.
Sowmyanarayan Sampath on the 5G race with China and the challenges of standing up to the Trump administration.
Agency chair Brendan Carr criticized Verizon’s “lack of progress” on ending DEI initiatives in a letter telling its executives to contact FCC staff working on its pending Frontier acquisition, according to Bloomberg. That implies the merger’s approval is tied to Carr’s DEI agenda, fellow Commissioner Geoffrey Starks told the outlet in a statement critical of the move.
DEI is also at the center of the FCC’s Comcast probe.
Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the $9.6 billion sale, expected to close in 2026, would see Verizon paying $38.50 a share and absorbing “about $10 billion” of Frontier’s debt. 63 percent of Frontier’s stockholders are for the all-cash transaction, while others are opposed, saying the offer is too low.
Frontier owns more than two million fiber connections across 25 states, including some in Texas, California, and Florida that it bought from Verizon in 2016.
Message Plus was supposed to be shut down by now, but it appears that Verizon’s messaging client is sticking around just a little longer. The new shutdown date is December 9th, so you have just over a month to wrap up all your conversations and head over to Google Messages. I, for one, will not miss uninstalling it from every Android phone I use.
New York City Verizon customers complained about problems on Monday night as they experienced slow or intermittent internet connections reflected in this data from the connectivity trackers at Netblocks.
The number of reports on Downdetector had already been dropping, and Verizon spokesperson Ilya Hemlin confirmed it’s fixed in a statement sent to The Verge:
On Monday evening, some Fios customers in NYC briefly experienced intermittent network issues. The issue was quickly resolved and service is operating normally.
Update: The service is now back online.
Starting October 10th, along with many, many others, I’ll be paying another $5 per month. Verizon has been smoking out grandfathered plans with price hikes, hoping customers will switch to “myPlan,” but possible savings will come at a loss of benefits to the customer.
