Internet companies are readying for a showdown with telecoms and a Republican-controlled government over a policy near and dear to their hearts: net neutrality. Net neutrality basically prevents broadband providers from playing favourites or steering users toward (or away from) particular internet sites. Under rules enacted during the Obama administration, the likes of Comcast and Verizon -- which offer their own video services they'd very much like subscribers to use -- can't slow down Netflix, can't block YouTube, and can't charge Spotify extra to stream faster than Pandora. Broadband companies hate the net neutrality rules, and they have an ally in new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Ajit Pai, who has repeatedly called the regulations a mistake. Pai could launch the process of unwinding the rules as early as Wednesday, according to reports.

Samsung has now admitted that its Galaxy S8's facial recognition technology is not fit for carrying out mobile payments. The feature is said to be not as secure as fingerprint and iris recognition, and it would take time before it could be used in authenticating Samsung Pay transactions. On Tuesday, someone from Samsung told The Investor that the facial scanning technology of the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus is not secure enough for mobile payments. The same source stated that the South Korea giant needs more than four years before the feature could be ready to handle mobile payment transactions. "In order for facial recognition to be solely used for financial transactions, it would take more than four years considering the current camera and deep learning technology levels," the source was quoted as saying.

If there wasn't already a mountain of pressure on Apple to deliver something spectacular with this year's iPhone update, there surely is now. If you haven't noticed, Samsung has released the Galaxy S8 and S8, and they're pretty remarkable. As a former iPhone 7 Plus user, the S8 might very well be the best phone I've ever used, with a stunning screen, speedy processor, and, yes, a gorgeous design. But what makes the S8 so amazing is how unique it is. I got to spend a week with it while writing my review, and I came away stunned.

The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network. Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and run-time speed.

How many virtual assistants can you fit in one smartphone? European network operator Orange is hoping there's room to squeeze in one more. With the right apps, you can already talk to Alexa, Cortana and Google through your smartphone -- and maybe also to Siri or Bixby if you went with one of the big brands. Djingo will be able to answer questions, send text messages, place calls, play music and video from Orange's set-top box, and control smart home devices. It draws on the company's research into linguistics and artificial intelligence, and will even offer financial advice in conjunction with a new banking service Orange is launching, the company said.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), which wrote the original specification for network functions virtualisation (NFV), has set up its experiential network intelligence industry specification group to handle the task. He sees many parallels between the evolution of cars and where networks can get to. "Years ago, cars were painfully manual, but we've made it much more convenient and 14 years ago we started looking at self-driving cars, which is an absolute disruptive change." In order for self-driving networks to become a reality, vendors and providers must fully collaborate, he says. Interestingly, ETSI's AI initiative, which has an initial two-year work programme, is coming from vendors, ETSI director general Luis Jorge Romero told GTB at Mobile World Congress.

Samsung's new Galaxy S8 phone is stunning. But its $100 price hike is hard to swallow. That's how much extra you'll shell out for the S8, which starts shipping Friday for about $750 -- $100 more than the iPhone 7 and last year's Galaxy S7 when it launched. A larger sibling, the S8 Plus, goes for about $850. True, the S8 phones come with several refinements that, totaled up, are indeed worth more than $100.

It's the quiet-but-pressurised noise of Samsung executives holding their breath as they wait to see if the new Galaxy S8 is the success they so badly need it to be. After the Galaxy Note 7 had to be withdrawn last autumn because of safety issues, the S8 really must not fail. I've been using the S8 and its larger sibling, the S8 for a week. So, is it sigh of relief or hard, disappointed exhale for the execs? The look of the Galaxy S8 is a refinement of the Galaxy Note 7 and the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge.

Last year's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge were excellent phones, and so was the Galaxy Note 7... until it started bursting into flames. While some within Samsung were tasked with figuring out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, others were trying to build a phone that would make people move on. The Note 7 won't disappear so easily from our collective memory, but I have to hand it to Samsung: The S8 siblings are impeccably built, thoughtfully designed devices. It's not hard to look at these smartphones as the first steps on a road to redemption, and after a week of testing, I can confidently say these are two of the best smartphones money can buy. I just wish its virtual assistant wasn't so half-baked. Text and photos don't do the S8 ($750) and S8 Plus ($850) justice. From their rounded edges to their precisely formed metal-and-glass bodies, they feel like smaller, sleeker versions of the Galaxy Note 7. That's a hell of a compliment, battery insanity notwithstanding -- the Note 7 was a beautiful device and I'm glad that DNA lives on. The S8 and S8 Plus's rounded Infinity displays -- which are 5.8 and 6.2 inches big, respectively -- only add to the phones' appeal. We'll dig into these curved screens more later, but people seemed to like them enough that it didn't make sense to have non-curved flagships anymore.

USA Today's Ed Baig tries out Samsung's new smartphone before it hits store shelves. Samsung Electronics' Galaxy S8 and S8 smartphones are shown off during a media day in Seoul, South Korea, (Photo: Lee Jin-man, AP) NEW YORK--Samsung's Galaxy S8 and its larger sibling the S8 are strong new smartphones I can highly recommend. The devices, which hit stores Friday (for around $720 on up), aren't perfect. Cool-sounding features like iris and facial recognition were extremely spotty for me. Water and dust resistance are great, but other phones now share these traits.