When an underwater volcanic eruption severed a key internet conduit in 2022, the island nation of Tonga lost most of its connection to the outside world for more than a month.

Thanks to a new subsea cable project Google unveiled on Jan. 17, South Pacific islanders are less likely to be cut off from the global internet in the future.

The two planned fiber-optic lines, dubbed Bulikula and Halaihai by project organizers, will directly link the US territory of Guam with the island nations of Fiji and French Polynesia. According to Google, one of the main organizers, the cables will create a “ring” of core connectivity in the region, setting the stage for even more islands to eventually receive direct internet access.

“Google laying down these basic infrastructure trunks is going to give a lot of opportunity and access to those little islands that can jump onto this,” Guam Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said at an event announcing the project, which Tech Brew covered exclusively in Washington, DC.

Keep reading here.—KG

When you’re building a business or charting your own path in your career, it can be difficult to discern when roadblocks are challenges to push you further...or redirections that are begging you to go down a different path.

In this episode of BOSSY, Tara and Katie break down the most masterful business comebacks, accelerating out of stagnant career slumps, and when it’s time to rebrand “quitting” to “pivoting.” Watch it here.

Texting a friend who lives overseas. Researching travel plans for your next vacation. Joining a Zoom call with an international colleague. It’s easy to take these everyday internet uses for granted when the exchange of information across continents happens so quickly.

But the hidden infrastructure that enables all of this might surprise you: subsea cables that crisscross the ocean’s floor, transporting hundreds of terabytes of data per second. The industry is the “best-kept secret ever” because it’s “fairly invisible,” Nigel Bayliff, senior director of global submarine networks at Google, told Tech Brew.

These underwater pipes don’t look impressive at first glance—some are no bigger than a household garden hose—but they hold the global internet together.

“In some ways, the factories of today’s era are data centers, and fiber-optic subsea cables are the railroads that connect them together,” Brian Quigley, Google’s VP of global network infrastructure, said at a Jan. 17 event announcing a project to run such cables linking Guam with the islands of Fiji and French Polynesia.

Keep reading here.—KG

For peddlers of fake news and online scams alike, 2023 was a banner year.

An analysis from news trustworthiness ratings company NewsGuard claims that the rise of AI has “transformed the misinformation landscape” as tools like large language models allow for bad actors to churn out dodgy media on a larger scale.

But at least one company is betting that AI can also be a solution to this quagmire. Otherweb is a news aggregation feed that seeks to use transformer models to evaluate the credibility and substance of given news articles and generate a “nutrition label” to accompany them. Founder and CEO Alex Fink claims the platform has now garnered 7 million monthly active users.

Fink told Tech Brew that Otherweb was founded on a simple premise: “It seems like the biggest problem facing people is that everybody’s consuming junk all the time,” Fink said. “We need a way to improve information quality in some way.”

Keep reading here.—PK

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

What do we lose when we lose the pizza-delivery driver? The Atlantic published a eulogy for the old-school pizza-delivery driver, lamenting all that was lost when the DoorDashes and Uber Eatses of the world usurped the delivery market. The services have made our lives easier in countless ways, but Michael Graff, the southern bureau chief at Axios, argues they’ve made pizza delivery worse: “Maybe nostalgia has gotten the best of me, but I’d like to think that the pizza we delivered back then was better than it is now.” We can’t help but agree.

In the news: It’s likely not news to anyone here that separating the wheat from the chaff on the internet has gotten challenging lately. For newshounds, it’s a particularly taxing task. Enter the RSS feed reader. The tech, while by no means the hot new thing, certainly has its place in maintaining standards for information literacy. The Verge toshed up a servicey little list of the best RSS reader options.