McDonalds Offering Free Wi-Fi in 2010

By Dena Cassella Published December 16, 2009

In 2010, it won’t just be the savory smell of McDonald’s French fries drawing people into its 14,000 US locations. McDonald’s announced today its 11,000 restaurants featuring Wi-Fi service at a rate of $2.95 for two hours will stop charging customers for internet access. McDonald’s charged for its AT&T run network for about five years, but this January, Mickey-D’s will be joining the ranks of Barnes & Noble and Borders with free Wi-Fi all the time and with no limitations.

That’s right, in a couple of days you will be able to sit yourself down at a 24 hour McDonald’s, have breakfast, lunch and dinner—with McCafe drinks in between of course—and work on your laptop for as long as you like. We know where college kids will be writing papers in 2010.

Dena Cassella

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Haole built. O'ahu grown

Topics

Computing

Ollama brings free, local text-to-speech to your Mac with natural-sounding AI voices

Ollama's new Phonon integration brings natural-sounding AI voices to your Mac, letting you generate speech locally without relying on cloud services or a subscription.

Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.

Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.

Computing

Researchers develop a new forensic tool that can recover deleted AI chats from your phone’s memory

Pressing delete on your AI chat doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. ORISA can recover deleted conversations from your local AI apps.

Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.

How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?

Computing

Apple’s “Pro and Tell” October 28 event: Everything we expect from touchscreen MacBooks to a new iMac

Prepare for a touchscreen MacBook that costs around $3,000.

Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.

The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).