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Modern cars are packed with internet-connected widgets, many of them containing Chinese technology. Now, the car industry is scrambling to root out that tech ahead of a looming deadline, a test case for America’s ability to decouple from Chinese supply chains.

New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud, part of an effort to prevent cameras, microphones and GPS tracking in cars from being exploited by foreign adversaries.

The move is “one of the most consequential and complex auto regulations in decades,” according to Hilary Cain, head of policy at trade group the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. “It requires a deep examination of supply chains and aggressive compliance timelines.”

Carmakers will need to attest to the U.S. government that, as of March 17, core elements of their products don’t contain code that was written in China or by a Chinese company. The rule also covers software for advanced autonomous driving and will be extended to connectivity hardware starting in 2029. Connected cars made by Chinese or China-controlled companies are also banned, wherever their software comes from.

Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports:

The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

"Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said.

After dying a painful death at the hand of the iPhone’s revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, the QWERTY smartphone is rising up from the graveyard this year.

Whether it’s nostalgia for a physical keyboard, frustration at iOS’s ever-worsening software keyboard, or just plain boredom with glass slabs, companies are rebooting QWERTY phones this year for some reason.

At CES 2026:

• Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a “second phone” with a QWERTY keypad
• Unihertz also teased a new phone with a physical keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff but with a bizarre square screen on the backside.

[T]wo QWERTY phone announcements in this still very new year suggest there may be some kind of trend. Maybe after 19 years of the iPhone and touchscreens defining the mobile experience, it’s time to go back to the physical keyboard and its more tactile typing.

Like, would a skyscraper-style datacenter be practical? Or is just a matter of big, flat buildings being cheaper?

The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.

In a recent article published in the New York Times, author Casey Michael Henry argues that today's tech industry keeps borrowing dystopian sci-fi aesthetics and ideas -- often the parts that were meant as warnings -- and repackages them as exciting products without recognizing that they were originally cautionary tales to avoid. "The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction," writes Henry. "Yet it seems, at times, bizarrely unaware that many of those notions were meant to be dystopian or satirical -- dismal visions of where our worst and dumbest habits could lead us."

You worry that someone in today's tech world might watch "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs -- and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school. The material on Sora, for instance, can feel oddly similar to the jokes about crass entertainment embedded in dystopian films and postmodern novels. In the movie "Idiocracy," America loved a show called "Ow! My Balls!" in which a man is hit in the testicles in increasingly florid ways. "Robocop" imagined a show about a goggle-eyed pervert with an inane catchphrase. "The Running Man" had a game show in which contestants desperately collected dollar bills and climbed a rope to escape ravenous dogs. That Sora could be prompted to imagine a game show in which Michel Foucault chokeslams Ronald Reagan, or Prince battles an anaconda, doesn't feel new; it feels like a gag from a 1990s writer or a film about social decay.

The echoes aren't all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias -- particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and "high tech, low life" allure. From William Gibson novels to films like "The Matrix," the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech. This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry's boldest visions of the future.

Who will protect the juice?

Copper wire thefts have increased in Los Angeles and other cities, but with thieves looking outside of street lights for cables to cut, drivers expecting to use EV chargers are sometimes caught off-guard.

With a significant number of the cut cables and smashed charging units being harvested for copper wire now, companies, governments and EV advocates are proposing everything from greater enforcement and penalties to cables that cover a vandal with ink—similar to the measures employed against bank robbers. Such a system has also been discussed in the UK, according to a BBC story from April.

The latest must-have accessory is a "stop-scrolling bag" -- a tote packed with analog activities like watercolors and crossword puzzles. We spend hours glued to our screens. "Analog bags," as they're also called, are one way millennials and Gen Zers are reclaiming that time. "I basically just put everything I could grab for instead of my phone into a bag," including knitting, a scrapbook and a Polaroid camera, says Sierra Campbell, the content creator behind the trend.

The 31-year-old keeps one bag at home in Northern California, carrying it from room to room, and another in her car. The trend has quickly spread on social media, part of a bigger shift to unplug. Roughly 1,600 TikTok posts were tagged #AnalogLife during the first nine months of 2025 -- up over 330% from the same period last year, according to TikTok data shared with Axios.

"It speaks to an incredible desperation and desire for experiences that return our attention to us, that fight brain-rotting, that are tactile ... that involve creating over scrolling," says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research at the Global Wellness Institute.

Solved. Thank you @sandbo00@feddit.org . It's an MHF4 connector. Will leave the post up for future people with the same question.

I've been playing around with an Orange Pi Zero 2W the last week. When I finally got the point of putting a case together, I was going to replace the little whip with a U.FL->SMA cable for an external antenna. However, the U.FL connector is too large for this.

This connector is the same form factor as U.FL but about half the size.

Is micro U.FL a thing? My Google-fu is failing me, the acronym stew is thick here, and I'd really like to wrap up this project with a nice external antenna. OrangePi hasn't been helpful - they just call it "Wifi + BT Antenna connector" like that explains it all lol

I hate winter for lots of reasons, but I guess this is the one reason I hate autumn. Sun's low but the leaves haven't dropped yet, so I get lots of shading.

Duck face came to mind yesterday - randomly realized I hadn't seen duckface in the wild for a long time.

Or, alternatively, what are some old fads you wish would make a comeback?

The spirit of the question is social fads. Please try to keep replies to lighthearted things. I'll delete the post if the comments turn into political commentary.