Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) will keep offering additional mobile data for a while longer to help people deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The carrier is adding another 15GB of LTE data to regular and small business shared data plans, including hotspots, for the entire month of May. You won’t have to do a thing — it’ll be applied automatically.

As before, this is ultimately part of a broader push by US carriers to keep people online while they’re staying at home, whether it’s for work or to catch up on TV shows. The May extension suggests that Verizon doesn’t expect lockdowns to lift quickly, and that it would rather hand out automatic extensions than face an uproar if stay-at-home measures continue significantly longer.

At the same time, AT&T will provide more contact-free delivery options that include curbside pickup (if there’s an AT&T store still open near you) and doorstep delivery with virtual setup if you need help.

This measure is a logical extension of AT&T’s existing efforts, such as lifting caps for landline broadband. While it might not last as long as some might like or offer enough data to completely replace a landline, it’s an acknowledgment that internet access will likely be under significant strain as the coronavirus pandemic continues and more people stay at home.

We’ve asked Apple for comment. The document suggests that you can temporarily work around the issue by switching the Personal Hotspot off and on again, but that’s not much consolation if you know it’ll just happen again.

The language suggests that Apple is working on a fix. However, it’s not certain if iOS 13.4 and its corresponding iPadOS update will take care of the Personal Hotspot problem on March 24th. If not, you may have to sit tight until a proper solution is in place.

These drone sentries should be relatively inexpensive, costing less than some professional drones. It’s more resilient than some warning systems, too. Where river monitoring stations frequently collapse in floods and other natural catastrophes, the drones can fly above the chaos as long as they have a charge.

Unlike many research projects, there’s already a customer. Vietnam’s Disaster Management Authority has picked the drone network to help monitor extreme weather and get in touch with emergency services. Whether or not other countries follow suit is less than certain. The US Interior Department, for instance, recently grounded its Chinese-made drones over security fears. It may take a lot of persuasion (and non-Chinese drones) before you see drones keeping watch over American waterways.