Tootfinder

California regulators have approved the sale of Cox Communications to cable giant Charter Communications
— the final hurdle in a marathon review to clear the $34.5-billion cable consolidation.
With Thursday’s sign-off by the California Public Utilities Commission,
the mammoth merger is expected to close next week.
The deal will make Charter’s Spectrum the dominant broadband internet and cable television service in Southern California,
with millions of customers…

California regulators approve $34.5-billion Charter-Cox merger
More than 6 million customers in California will have Spectrum service.

🗓️ Friday, September 18
⏰ 7PM-11PM
📍 Glass Woods Tavern Bar & Lounge in the Hyatt Regency New Brunswick
📍 2 Albany St, New Brunswick, NJ
🎫 Tickets at the link in our bio!
🚫 18 only event
https://www.instagram.com/p/DdJ6abzRJuB/

packet_delays: Internet packet delays (2002)
A network representing the difference in delay observed by packet probes sent from a computer at Rice University to similar machines at different universities, in c.2002. The edge weight denotes the difference in delay of the packet in milliseconds.
This network has 10 nodes and 9567 edges.
Tags: Technological, Communication, Weighted

Visual-to-Haptic Augmentation in XR: A Wearable Glove for Perceptual Grounding in Multimodal Interaction
Faisal Mohd, Hamdi Elsaddik, Erhan Baturay Onural, Jihong Zhang, Fedwa Laamarti, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10368 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10368 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10368
arXiv:2608.10368v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Extended Reality (XR) systems increasingly deliver high-fidelity visual and auditory experiences, yet tactile perception remains comparatively underutilized as a modality for enriching embodied interaction. This work presents a visual-to-haptic wearable glove and a feature-based visual-to-haptic mapping algorithm that translates spatial and temporal visual features from images and videos into distributed vibrotactile patterns. The proposed method extracts motion, edge, and brightness cues and fuses them into actuator-level intensity maps aligned with a 29-actuator glove arranged in a five-by-seven layout.
The system is implemented through a modular four-layer architecture comprising the XR environment, media content handling, visual-to-haptic processing, and embedded haptic hardware. A within-subject user study (N = 20) compared visual-only interaction with visual-plus-haptic augmentation across texture-based and dynamic video scenarios. Results indicate that tactile augmentation significantly improves perceived realism in dynamic video scenarios and enhances immersion and visual-tactile correspondence across conditions, with stronger and more consistent effects observed for dynamic visual events.
While the current implementation operates in a single-user, offline-synchronized configuration, the findings demonstrate that vision-driven tactile augmentation can function as a perceptual enhancement layer within multimodal XR systems. Such a layer may provide a foundation for future socially enriched XR environments where coherent multisensory grounding supports higher-level interaction and communication.
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Internal note: Frank Shaw is leaving Microsoft after 17 years as chief communications officer, saying it is "time for me to move on and try new things" (Tom Warren/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/993791/microsoft-frank-shaw-leaving-head-of-c…

Microsoft’s head of comms is leaving after almost 20 years
Frank Shaw has been supporting Microsoft’s communications for nearly 30 years.

Dallas Cowboys Urged to Reunite With 3X Pro Bowler in Intriguing Move https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/jadeveon-clowney-urged-reunite-intriguing-move/

Jimmy Kimmel told Wednesday night’s “Live” audience that his Thursday interview with James Talarico,
the Democratic Senate nominee from Texas,
would not air on television, but would instead be posted on YouTube.
The “unusual circumstances” of the interview, Kimmel said,
were prompted by the Federal Communications Commission’s actions under Trump,
which Kimmel said had “threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on…

Jimmy Kimmel to Interview James Talarico ‘Under Unusual Circumstances’
A conversation with the Democratic Senate hopeful from Texas will move off air because of what the late night host called F.C.C. “threats” against his show and network.

The Signal Rail: A Deterministic Motion Grammar for Communicating Conversational Agent State in Terminal Interfaces
Matteo Grella
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10689 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.10689 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.10689
arXiv:2608.10689v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Terminal interfaces to conversational agents report rich internal state (listening, thinking, executing tools, awaiting input, failing) almost entirely through text, while the motion channel beside it, the one peripheral vision monitors without reading, carries a single bit: alive. We present the Signal Rail, a one-row terminal status instrument that gives that channel a grammar. Four ideas govern it: spatial semantics (input, processing, and output zones, with direction as meaning), a motion grammar (one kinetic rule per state, never color alone), determinism (frames as a pure function of explicit inputs, golden-frame testable), and honesty (no invented progress or activity). We contribute a 45-section normative specification and a reference implementation inside a working full-duplex local voice agent driven by real signals.
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internet_as: Internet AS graph (2006)
A symmetrized snapshot of the structure of the Internet at the level of Autonomous Systems (ASs), reconstructed from BGP tables posted by the University of Oregon Route Views Project. This snapshot was created on 22 July 2006.
This network has 22963 nodes and 48436 edges.
Tags: Technological, Communication, Unweighted