On Wednesday, sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal said that Sprint and T-Mobile agreed on the “broad terms” of a merger and were nearing a final agreement. Preliminary reports said that Sprint would acquire T-Mobile for $50 billion, or about $40 a share.

Such a huge merger between the third and fourth largest wireless providers in the US would certainly face intense scrutiny from regulatory agencies, and WSJ's sources said that if the deal were to fail to go through, Sprint would pay T-Mobile $1 billion “in cash and other assets.”

Earlier this year, the rumor was that Sprint would pay T-Mobile around $19 billion for a 60 to 70 percent stake in the Deutsche Telekom-backed company. Today, WSJ reported that Deutsche Telekom would only retain a 15 to 20 percent stake in T-Mobile after a deal with Sprint. As Ars wrote in December, if Sprint and T-Mobile join, the two companies would have a combined 53 million postpaid subscribers compared to Verizon's 95 million and AT&T's 72 million.

Apple has taken the wraps off iOS 8, its newest mobile operating system, at its WWDC keynote. There were lots of new features added to iOS, but any observer familiar with Android saw quite a few things that seem... familiar. That's because many of Apple's announced upgrades were things the Android OS has boasted for years.

Typing suggestions

Apple added a little bar of suggestions to the top of the keyboard, which Android had (initially as an option) since the introduction of the on-screen keyboard in Android 1.5. While Android's keyboard just blindly does word pairs, iOS 8 seems to be able to intelligently offer suggestions in response to an "A" or "B" question. In the example, a friend asks about "dinner or a movie." Without typing anything, iOS offers "A movie," "Dinner," and "Not Sure." If this actually works reliably, it's a big step above the Android keyboard. Of course, we're just comparing this to the standard Google Keyboard available through Google Play. That's not the only typing solution on Android, which brings us to...

Third party keyboards

In response to an increasing concern about individuals firing laser pointers at aircraft (aka "laser strikes"), the FBI has expanded its new $10,000 reward program to the entire United States, including Guam and Puerto Rico. Anyone providing the FBI with information that leads to the arrest of someone who perpetrates a laser strike could receive thousands of dollars.

In February 2014, the federal agency began the reward program in FBI field offices where “laser strikes against aircraft are prevalent.” Those cities included Albuquerque, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Juan (Puerto Rico), and the Washington Field Office.

It may seem like a silly thing, but laser strikes against planes, helicopters, and other aerial vehicles have become an increasing epidemic nationwide. Since the FBI began keeping track in 2005, there have been more than 17,000 laser strikes—one-fifth (3,960) in 2013 alone. During the first three months of 2014, the FBI reported an average of 9.5 incidents daily.

If you own a PS3 but somehow still haven't gotten around to checking out 2011's Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception yet, today is the day. The game is currently available as a free 40GB download on PlayStation Network for all North American PS3 owners.

Uncharted 3 was offered gratis to PlayStation Plus members about a year ago, but today's offer seems to be available to anyone in North America with a free PlayStation Network account. The download only includes the single-player portion of the game, but the multiplayer mode has been free-to-play since February 2013, so that's not really a big issue.

The free listing on PSN has yet to be accompanied by the usual official announcement or blog post by Sony, so it's unclear if this is a coordinated pre-E3 promotional price or just a temporary glitch. In any case, this is your opportunity to get in on what we called "the new standard for action gaming" upon its release, so there's really no reason to wait.

The FCC has received tens of thousands of comments on a proposal that would let ISPs charge Web services for Internet "fast lanes," but yesterday the commission's comment site struggled for a good part of the day.

The problem happened after comedian John Oliver spent 13 minutes on his HBO show, "Last Week Tonight," ripping the FCC's proposal apart. He proposed changing the name "network neutrality" to "Preventing cable company f**kery," and finished by calling Internet trolls to action:

I would like to address the Internet commenters out there directly.

Good evening, monsters. This may be the moment you've spent your whole lives training for. You have been out there ferociously commenting on dance videos of adorable 3-year-olds, saying things like, 'every child could dance like this little loser after one week of practice.'

...

This is the moment you were made for, commenters. Like Ralph Macchio, you've been honing your skills, waxing cars, and painting fences. Well guess what, now it's time to do some fucking karate... We need you to get out there and for once in your lives focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction. Seize your moment, my lovely trolls, turn on caps lock, and fly my pretties! Fly! Fly! Fly!

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): Net Neutrality.

With Oliver's trolls having been activated, the FCC's Twitter account said yesterday, "We’ve been experiencing technical difficulties with our comment system due to heavy traffic. We’re working to resolve these issues quickly."

A browser is one of the most resource-intensive things you can run on a computer. Start a multi-tab workload and it's not uncommon to quickly gobble up multiple gigabytes of RAM. To help deal with the Web's ever-growing thirst for system resources, Google is catching up with the Internet Explorers and Safaris of the world by releasing a 64-bit version of Chrome.

The new version was announced on the Chromium blog, along with a list of benefits that the switch to 64-bit brings to the table. Thanks to compiler optimizations and a more advanced instruction set, Google says it is getting big speed boosts. In graphics and multimedia content, the 64-bit version of Chrome is averaging a 25 percent improvement in performance. Security is better, too, thanks to high-entropy address space layout randomization in Windows 8, making memory hacks harder. Google also notes that it has seen "a marked increase in stability for 64-bit Chrome over 32-bit Chrome," particularly in the render process, which crashes half as much on 64-bit builds.

For now, the 64-bit version of Chrome is only available on Windows 7 and 8, and only in the developer and canary (nightly) channels. These are unstable builds that aren't meant to be used by novice users, but anyone looking to try out the cutting edge of Chrome development can try the dev version here or canary here.